This is the first time we have gotten actual uncut gameplay of Hytale, and it looks great.

Some things I noticed

  • Each weapon type has a special skill that gets charged when dealing damage
  • Trees break instantly when breaking its trunk
  • You can hold a torch in your hand to light the area around you while moving
  • You can climb up blocks and roll when landing from a high place to avoid fall damage
  • There’s a detailed map you can open at any time
  • The last few minutes tease mod development tools. You can edit assets, models, worldgen, create prefabs, spawn NPCs, etc from a dedicated menu in the game
  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    8 hours ago

    So happy to see the game is not dead.

    Combat and movement look fun and satisfying, graphics look amazing. So many moody areas, from gritty snowscape to colorful caves. Mojang could learn a thing or five from this trailer.

    I do hope there will be more breadth of gameplay especially on the creative side so those promising exploration mechanics do not feel stale after a few hours of running around and blasting skeletons. That’s one thing mojang does get right, if anything they have too much breadth and not enough depth.

    Not sure about the ease of movement when scaling multiple blocks. Figuring it how to get from point A to point B with the limited movement options is a core part of most Minecraft gameplay loops, especially when caving and/or fighting. Seems they made up for it with good fighting mechanics, but they will have to make up for it in the other gameplay loops as well.

    Either way I wish them the best and hope they light a fucking fire underneath mojang’s ass.

    EDIT:

    This is the original legacy engine from the 2018 trailer, running on a four-year-old build as we push Hytale forward again.

    Now hold the fuck up. What do you mean this is the 2018 engine? What the fuck have they been doing the past 7 years? Did they rewrite a whole new engine for no good reason? It looks fucking beautiful and seems to run great! I’m sure they had their reasons, and I don’t think we can draw accurate conclusions by speculating, but the insider perspective on the development cycle must be absolutely wild.

    EDIT2: Okay their blog post explains quite a bit more. Seems to paint a picture that Riot wanted the engine to be cross-platform (makes sense for consoles) and they could not make it work with a full rewrite away from their otherwise functional Java/C# engine. Kind of a crazy play on Riot’s part to make Java/C# devs and former minecraft modders write a modern game engine from scratch in C++ if that’s the case. Probably a tough lesson to learn for everyone involved. If only they could learn from an incredibly popular voxel-based building/aventure game that went through the exact same engine rewrite away from a GC VM language and faced similar struggles.

    As a PC player, great news that they’re sticking to .NET and Java. It will make modding much easier.