What you need to know
- Minecraft Legends is a unique action-strategy game from Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive.
- The game had a mixed reception, but has slowly been improving since its release.
- Now, the game is finally getting its first, properly major update with dozens of huge changes.
- The highlight of this genuinely substantial update is, of course, the ability to pet all the animals in the game.
Minecraft Legends has lived a complicated life since its release earlier this year, with a mixed reception both from players and critics. Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive have been steadily rolling out fixes, quality-of-life improvements, and changes based on community feedback, but significant changes have been nowhere to be seen. On Wednesday, that's finally changing.
Minecraft Legends Title Update 1 is the game's first properly major update with a number of massive changes and improvements, and it's now rolling out to players across all platforms. Despite its sizeable changelog, the update is only about 742MB in size (at least on Xbox Series X). There's a lot to cover in this Minecraft Legends release, so let's get started.
- You can now pet the animals. The most important change is at the top, obviously. Now, you can pet all the adorable animals roaming the Overworld in Minecraft Legends, and every single one will have a unique reaction to your affections.
- Major PvP improvements. Minecraft Legends' competitive multiplayer is improving once again with better communication. Now, there are more world map markers, and players can communicate when placing structures and get feedback from their team. Additionally, lobbies will now also feature preferred roles, so that players can communicate what they'd rather do in the match (such as build, defend, attack, etc.).
- Major campaign improvements. The Minecraft Legends campaign is also getting plenty of love, with a massively streamlined prologue (approximately half the length) with far better communication, tutorials, UI and HUD elements, and more. It'll also be more action-packed.
- Custom Campaign and Custom Versus modes. Players can now test an experimental feature that allows them to create custom campaigns or versus maps, with options to tweak map size, resource density, player stats and upgrades, the Piglins, and much more. More options will be added in the future as this feature continues to be improved. With this, players will be able to enjoy Minecraft Legends however they want.
- A new Lost Legends. The Crucible is coming to Minecraft Legends, featuring nine progressively difficult rooms filled with powerful Piglins that players will be tasked with clearing in one go (and in under 30 minutes). An exclusive player skin is up for grabs for those who manage to succeed in this challenge.
- Other improvements. There's a lot more packed into this update, so let's summarize a lot of it:
- A new "Auto Lure" feature ensures that freshly spawned mobs automatically follow the player
- Structures now display health bars in the Banner View and during specific combat scenarios
- Improvements to creeper behavior and mob pathfinding
- Improvements to UI and HUD elements, resource visibility, Banner View, and more
This follows another recent Minecraft Legends update that also improved mob pathfinding, on top of improving the speed at which players find PvP matches, allowing players to damage Piglin structures with their sword, increased speed to various player actions in the campaign, and added goals and objectives in the campaign. All-in-all, Minecraft Legends has evolved a lot in a short period of time, and is now all-around more accessible and with a deeper gameplay loop to entice players to return.
In my Minecraft Legends review, I loved the game despite its flaws, and I stand behind that. Still, it's awesome to see the game improve so much, and it's certainly in a far better place than it was when it released. Hopefully, Mojang Studios and Blackbird Interactive will continue to iterate upon the game and add new content, so that Minecraft Legends continues to be one of the best Xbox games alongside its big sibling, the Minecraft we all know and love.
