After more than 7 years of development with nothing to show for it, Riot cancels the Minecraft-inspired sandbox RPG Hytale and closes the studio making it
After more than 7 years of development with nothing to show for it, Riot cancels the Minecraft-inspired sandbox RPG Hytale and closes the studio making it
Riot acquired Hypixel Studios in 2020, but its anticipated sandbox RPG never materialized.
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I think my first map was very unlucky, it was granite for tens of thousands blocks from my base. I dont think I ever found any sedimentary rock until I found a tiny limestone island (that was litterally the name of the biome iirc)... I get they are attempting to model real world, which is cool, I do like that aspect. The problem is the geographic biomes are insanely large. I think if the geographic biomes were the scale of minecraft biomes would make the game way more enjoyable to play without giving up too much of realism. There has to be a balance of realism to gameplay. I dont think theres many people in the real world that wants to walk to greece to find marble and then to the isle of portland to find limestone and carry it back to moscow.
The biomes being much closer to realistically scaled is... kinda again part of the core design ethos.
Vintage Story is an uncompromising wilderness survival sandbox game inspired by eldritch horror themes
Like... if you have a fundamentally realistic geology model of how the lithosphere actually works... yeah, you can only scale it down so much before stuff just breaks. If you move things close together, the deposit sizes will scale down, the tiny pockets where really rare things appear in real life ... well they vanish entirely.
Could they scale it a bit differently?
Maybe? But it would probably be an ungodly mess of work.
You are probably right, there are not many people that want to actually traverse a closer to realistic distance to get access to a whole slew of useful resources...
But some people do. This is the vision of the dev team, and as I think you already mentioned, this is far from the complete vision.
Its the weird and out there niche games that give you the truly unique experiences. If everybody aims for the middle, everything is normie appealing generic boring samey stuff, and innovation just stops happening.
Like... Death Stranding got a lot of hate for just being a walking simulator... and well whaddya know, actually, a lot of people like a walking simulator when it is complex enough to present challenging scenarios with multiple solutions / approaches / strategies.
I am not trying to fanboy Vintage Story, I am not saying its sublime perfection.
I am saying that it has a consistent, unique vision, that is actually executed shockingly competently (in the sense of executing that vision), and anytime I find any game like that, basically no matter what it even is, even if I don't personally like that game, I will keep advocating for that team and its vision.
There's more to making a video game than making something with mass market appeal.
Some people are more interested in realizing their vision.
Like its a personal work of art, not an advertisement for itself.
I dont think "uncompromising" means that they want to force brutal realism onto players.
Vintage Story offers multiple playstyles and a huge amount of customization options when you create a new game world. You have the power to choose a creative experience, a peaceful world, balanced survival, hardcore wilderness survival or quite literally anything inbetween.
Sounds like the devs want to give players the ability to play the game however they want to play. So i think its perfectly fine to give my criticism. Im not saying what they have created is bad, i am just sharing what i think could make the game better for me and others. Honestly, vintage story provides a lot of what I wanted minecraft to become. But it just needs something to reduce the tediousness of gathering resources. Perhaps even something as simple as an airship that travels faster than you on the ground so distances aren't big of an issue.
Well, I guess I'm coming at this from more of a dev point of view.
What you are asking for, in terms of greater flexibility with the worldgen parameters...
I strongly suspect implementing what you've asked for would be immensely difficult, given how I suspect the game is actually architected, designed... I think the world gen is a highly complex foundation for everything else, and reworking it to allow for the kinds of flexibility you are asking for... I strongly suspect this would basically amount to redesigning almost all of the game.
Which is why I tries to give sort of workaround type solutions, that would not require said total rework.
But I could be wrong!
And I don't mean to be saying your criticism is not valid, at least in a more broad, what is the actual player experience kind of way.
You bring up a system for faster travel, to reduce the tediousness of gathering spatially distant resources.
Airship? I don't think that would make much sense given the realism focus on technological development. Lighter than air... ships... that can life much more than a pebble or small candle... require hydrogen, or helium... which require ... well, mass production, advanced glass making, and at least the alchemy-transitioning-into-chemistry tech levels of the 1600-1800s.
But... perhaps the lovecraftian horror angle could provide some kind of essentially magical version of this, or an analogue?
Or... mountable animals, like horses, are on the roadmap.
Horses are quite grounded in reality... and also quite helpful at giddyupgofastnow.
Also grounded in reality: Sailing ships, paddled watercraft, or even ships drawn by a beast of burden alongside a riverside.
In much of human history, rivers acted as highways, especially for large amounts of cargo... much faster to go by water than drag the same things the whole way by cart or sled.
Then as we got better at sailing... well dang, now you can zoom around a coast line something like 5 to 10x faster than you can walk or march, even with decent roads.
Also also... there are NPCs you can trade with, though currently, they are quite rare.
Maybe the dev(s?) could at somepoint work on implementing a more comprehensive system whereby they would, to some extent, already have some kind of civilization or nomadic or pastoral societies, and you could interact with their economic systems instead of entirely building your own... and have that as a more easily toggleable or modifiable layer on top of the rest of the game, as another gameplay preset.
For propulsion, a small steam engine can work. And it doesnt need much power, so even an earlier crude engine would suffice. And if you have a boiler for the steam engine, you can use it's heat to heat air for a balloon. Now in reality a steam airship would require a very large boiler and balloon, and certainly would not be able to carry much fuel to go far. But it's atleast within plausiblity to allow bending to allow for gameplay. Just like you can ride elk... sure you could but in reality they'd make for a terrible mount. But its a cool thing for gameplay.
Hot air balloons do exist... but, to the best of my knowledge, the ones that do not use hydrogen or helium at all... well, they require you to have some kind of very, very energy dense fuel, some kind of refined oil... which requires you to have an industrial civilization that can refine that oil...
...as well as advanced metal working that can shape and form metals/alloys at very high temperatures, quite precisely, which also basically requires an industrialized civilization.
You need the strong alloy in your hot air balloon's burner, to be able to handle heating air hot enough that it can lift something of human weight without melting.
(Much of mankind's development in metalurgy basically comes down to figuring out how to make and safely contain hotter and hotter fires, to be able to refine and work stronger and stronger metals)
Also... hot air balloons basically just get blown around by the wind.
A thermal airship, that can actually be directed, steered and propelled... requires an internal combustion motor.
That is why I did not suggest these things as workable at the scale of being able to transport a human.
As for teleporters and strict realism...
Yep, this is what you'd call either hard fantasy, or magical realism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_fantasy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_realism
Basically, the idea is that you have a very gritty and realistic world, that is also punctuated by, starkly contrasts with, a very real magic system or supernatural class of entities... which does follow rules, but these rules are exceptionally complex and opaque to all but a very small few, and usually even those small few have an understanding that is incomplete and flawed, knowing only a rough approximation of just a portion of an astoundingly more complex reality.
Just because magic exists does not mean that your entire setting acts as if it is well understood and commonplace, or that the magic in the world makes every grueling task trivial.