Back in June, Riot Games cancelled Hytale, a sandbox crafting game in the vein of Minecraft, and announced that developer Hypixel would be shuttered. But rather than ending the story of Hytale, that move ended up being just one more chapter in the game’s decade-long development cycle. Nearly five months after Hytale’s cancellation, Hypixel co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme announced that he’d purchased the rights to the game, and soon revealed a first look in a 16-minute gameplay video.
"I promised players videos, screenshots and blog posts," Collins-Laflamme writes in the video’s YouTube description. "One day after the acquisition, I’m keeping that promise. Now that you’ve seen the first gameplay footage in a long time, I’m heading back to work on the early access launch.” You can see that footage below.
Collins-Laflamme emphasizes that the game is far from complete — he calls it “raw and broken.” The trailer is running on an older version of the game engine and was recorded in a single morning. Despite those caveats, it’s not as if Hytale looks particularly rough for a game that hasn’t even entered early access yet. Hytale essentially looks like a more combat-focused version of Minecraft, having grown out of the original Hypixel Minecraft server, which hosted minigames within Mojang’s survival crafter.
Combat is the trailer’s clear focus, with some breaks for peaceful exploration along the way. The footage shows off locations ranging from open fields to dark, misty forests, with the player hunting all kinds of monstrous enemies. While the resemblance to Minecraft is clear, Hytale’s combat is significantly faster and more complex, with the player swapping between different weapon types with distinct movement styles. The footage also switches between first and third-person throughout.
Near the end of the video, we get a look at Hytale’s creation tools. Along with exploring the world in its adventure mode, Hytale players can create new assets or add existing ones to customize their experience. Originally, the plan was for Hytale to launch with the sorts of minigames that made the Hypixel server a success, but Collins-Laflamme says that will no longer be the case. Instead, he promises support for mods, custom servers, and player-made content like minigames, with more coming in official updates later.
Hytale’s more combat-focused take on Minecraft was finally shown off in early footage.
Given just how new the revival of Hytale is, there are still a lot of details left to be filled in. The big question, of course, is when it will come out. The game has been in development since 2015, long enough that it’s reasonable to wonder if launch day will ever really arrive. While a release date has yet to be set, the revival announcement says a date will be revealed “in the coming days.” That’s still more vague than players who’ve been waiting a decade probably want, and it only marks when Hytale will enter early access, but it’s still the most promising word on when the game will actually be playable that there’s ever been.
In the meantime, the newly reformed Hypixel still has a lot of work to do. More than 30 developers from the shuttered Riot Games iteration of the studio have been rehired, and Collins-Laflamme says he’s looking to bring even more of the team back. From here, Hypixel’s plan is to get the early access version out as soon as possible, emphasize mod support to get players making their own content, and work from there to bring the game to its 1.0 launch. It’s been a long time since work first started on Hytale, and oddly enough, the biggest progress toward its release seems to have come as a result of its cancellation. Even if it’s still not in the state its creator wants it, one of the most elusive indie games of the decade will finally be playable soon.
