Hytale, up until this point, has been one of gaming's biggest messes. Announced back in 2018, Hytale looked like it was about to waltz in and start tidily eating Mojang's lunch. Riot even saw promise in the studio, acquiring it in 2020. Seven years later, scope creep and an apparently ill-advised engine rewrite caused Riot to call curtains on the whole thing.
Hypixel's co-founder at the time wrote: "Our technical ambitions grew more complex, and even after a major reboot of the game engine, the team found that Hytale still wasn’t as far along as it needed to be."
You might think that "original vision" would take some considerable time to cobble together, but it turns out, er, no. There's enough meat on this bone for a 16-minute gameplay video to just… be released. As the description states, "No bells or whistles. Just the game as it is. Raw and broken, but still beautiful."
And if we're being honest, I think "raw and broken" is a little harsh. What I'm looking at here feels like a completely serviceable, competent-seeming survival RPG with some honestly quite pretty world generation. Combat looks fluid and involved, if a little floaty at times, but on the whole I'm almost not sure what the melodrama was about.
I'll take Laflamme's word for it that Hytale is rough around the edges, but—and this may well have been the problem—plenty of games, particularly those in this genre, release with humble scopes and build from there once they've got support. I'm a bit of an early access cynic, and even I'm surprised Riot didn't give it a whirl with what I can see here.
Laflamme did this, in his own words, to break Hytale's long streak of low communication: "I promised players videos, screenshots and blog posts. 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. The team will share more clips and screenshots as we go.
"It mattered to me to release raw footage today so we break the curse once and for all."
Based on this footage, and Laflamme's seemingly ironclad conviction, we're likely to get news on Hytale's early access period soon. For real, this time.
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