After being in development for over 10 years, Hytale, a sandbox game from the Hypixel Studios team with support from Riot, has officially been cancelled. Hypixel Studios' CEO, Noxy, announced the cancellation on X on June 23, with the official Hytale forums following suit.
It was well known a decade ago in the Minecraft community. Truthfully there’s been very few updates for the last few years so this did seem sort of inevitable. It’s sad though since Minecraft doesn’t have a proper competitor right now (something that isn’t just a Unity asset flip). The promise of true modding support alone was enough to get me excited for it
Even my local supermarket has like ‘258 vendors and affiliates’ as their cookie listing.
Can you imagine shopping in person there, and the entire supermarket packed to the gills with dudes in trenchcoats and magnifying glasses, taking a peak at the exact product that I might consider buying? That’s what they’re doing. Fuck all that bullshit.
It is such a superior experience compared to Minecraft.
How so? It certainly cant compete in the mods category, can it? As far as I recall Minetest had multiple "Minecraft clones" each differing in completion and differing in support for further mods. Has that improved?
Time is the only thing that will be a minecraft killer.
40 years ago, Super mario bros was the most impressive most popular game ever. Now, today, it still exists, but would you even BEGIN to play Super Mario Wonder in the same catagory of pop culture influence as Super Mario Bros 3?
There will come a day when minecrafts users become too old to care. But it won't be because another game does it better.
Improvements don't kill a culture. Apathy kills culture. Minecraft is less of a game and more of an entry in pop culture.
I tried Minetest a while ago and was never really able to get into it. The new player experience was rough, a lot of decision paralysis. The texture style can vary between mods and servers. It didn’t feel very cohesive.
I don’t know if that has changed since I last played, but to me it didn’t feel like a minecraft killer then.
From what I can tell, Hytale was supposed to be a bit like Terreria in 3D, as well as a platform for minigames. The gameplay and graphics from the trailers looked really good.
I’m sure it would have been a Minecraft killer for some. (Ex. players who primarily play for the minigames like bedwars)
Much as I'm sure it's a quality entertaining game, with games as popular as Minecraft... the only thing that can kill it is collapsing under its own weight.
That would be a long list but here is something that everyone can notice in the first minute.
It loads and you are actively playing in a world before Minecraft even finishes its loading screen (I have seen Minecraft get stuck on a sync with Microsoft screen for 30 minutes with no option to skip the sync or do anything else to actually start game play).
Honestly the cancellation was years overdue. I‘m almost surprised it took them this long but then again it‘s not surprising they couldn‘t even get around doing that.
There's been a rumor floating around that it never existed as a game anyways and that the footage they do have is faked. It's definitely a bit out there, but with the way they've acted about it, I kinda believe it.
The problem with making a Minecraft game is that people who like Minecraft will be upset that it’s not like Minecraft and people who don’t like Minecraft will be upset that it’s like Minecraft. Both groups will be excited about it until it’s released.
I'm disappointed, but not surprised... I have followed since the first announcement and gave up hope around 2020. Every dev update was "we made 1 step forward and 5 back" with no real substance to show for it.
Assuming the trailers are real gameplay though, it looks like they could have and should have released an alpha years ago. Not sure how they thought it wouldn't work as Minecraft released in pre-alpha and it worked out in the end. A shame we'll probably never see the code or even a compiled build from all these people's work.