Last month, LEGO announced the city-building game LEGO: Cities of Wonder, where players assemble colorful bricks into metropolises from a top-down perspective. Faced with this gameplay that fits LEGO bricks so well, PC Gamer author Lauren Morton raised another question: Why hasn't Minecraft released a city-building spin-off yet?
Morton believes that Minecraft itself already has many foundations suitable for city-building gameplay. The vanilla game features templated structures like villages, temples, and fortresses, and villagers can be assigned different professions; players have long been passionate about building, and cities could serve as a larger-scale construction goal.
The existence of related mods also shows that some players are indeed interested in this type of gameplay. Morton also mentioned that the earliest generation of Minecraft players has now grown up, and slower-paced, strategy-focused games might meet the needs of this player base.
However, this seemingly logical direction has yet to become an official product. Morton speculates that Mojang may have created prototypes internally, but the results were not ideal; it might still be in the planning stages, but they haven't found a partner studio yet. These are just possibilities raised by the author, and Mojang has not announced any such project.
Minecraft has previously attempted other types of spin-offs, including the action-adventure game Minecraft Dungeons and the real-time action strategy game Minecraft Legends. Morton believes that the actual performance of these two titles was inconsistent, which may also lead to more considerations for new cross-genre attempts. Currently, the Minecraft city-building spin-off remains at the conceptual stage.