Hytale Early Access — The Good, The Bad, & The Elephant in the Room
I can't say I've been actively keeping an eye on Hytale, but it was still a project I at least followed on social media for a while. I remember seeing the announcement trailer so many years ago and getting super excited. I mean, a Minecraft-like RPG?? That sounded like one of the coolest things to me. When Simon Collins announced that he reacquired the rights to Hytale and was going to release it after Riot Games shut the project down, I got excited. This couldn't have just been a money move if he received however much money from selling the game to Riot and then bought the game back. This sounded to me like an actual effort project.
When I first pre-purchased the game, I had to actively remind myself that this game, despite having been announced seven years ago, was only starting an open beta of sorts and was no where near a complete game. I first played Minecraft during its beta as a kid, so it wasn't something I was unfamiliar with. But the game and its reputation still bought itself some expectations going in.
Were those expectations met? Were they fair? Those are questions that vart depending on who you ask, but I think they warrant a discussion on their own.
This isn't a full review by the normal stretch of the word. While I do have things I like and dislike about the game, the game is almost certainly going to change relatively soon as more people experience the game, some features get tweaked, and features are added as time goes by. This is just me documenting what I liked about the game and what I hope happens with the game in the future.
Table of Contents
My Context
I didn't prepurchase Hytale the exact day pre-purchases opened, but I did buy my copy within the week. I ended up electing to buy the Cursebreaker edition of the game. I normally wouldn't want to spend seventy dollars USD on a game and its expansions up front, especially in an open beta, but Simon making a point to repurchase the rights to the game convinced me it was a project he was going to continue working on.
Does that make this review bias? Something something sunk cost fallacy? I'd argue no, but I'm certain people will argue I'm "salty and want to justify it" or something. Call it whatever you want. I've spent more money on projects I've disliked, and I've spent less money on projects I openly liked. I'm willing to outright say if I do not like a game or if a game is poorly designed, and a game being "bad" or "poorly designed" doesn't mean you can't like playing it.
When I was installing the installer, I was under the impression that this game would lean closer to RPG mechanics and started to mentally create a character. There may be more of a focus in skills in the future, and there's certainly a small level of magic that I didn't make it to (more on that in a bit), but currently I did not experience much of that in this build. Oh, well. Here's my avatar, let's call them a Rukinations mascot for the time being. He's named Arlo because he needed a name. I intended for him to be a druid, and learned-but-did-not-unlock-in-time that you can unlock animal shapeshifting powers. I know literally nothing about pre-established Hytale lore so maybe he was from an elven tribe and left because of his Cursebreaker Tier-priced cursed arm.
Side note, if you haven't you should watch Princess Mononoke, back to the first impression.
I could make up nonsense about his backstory but I really did think there would be more story at this point. I'm not faulting the game here at all for that, it's just something in my mind. Simon, if you want to hire a writer to write lore for this game, feel free to message me.
He might have some points in rogue too because he dual wields daggers and is really good at making mad dash towards targets to take them out. He also might have been a farmboy because that was the only work station I put major upgrades into before my world got corrupted.
Before I forget, yes, my world unfortunately got corrupted, hense me alluding to a few features I did not get to experience. This wasn't the game's fault, the outlet my computer was plugged into had a power surge while the world was loaded and the game got corrupted in the process. There was an autosave feature, but when I opened the game back up, I was about a minute behind where the surge took place and the world was suddenly rewritten with:
- About 25% farlands chunks from Minecraft, randomly dispersed;
- About 25% normal chunks; and
- About 50% invisible chunks that existed but would not actually show anymore. I could see monsters through these invisible blocks but could not reach them no matter what I did.
I don't know how the game itself runs for obvious reasons but I suspect there's a file somewhere that handles the actual world generation that wasn't protected by autosave and that's what got corrupted. Oh, well, I'll live. I didn't make much progress, I was only now starting to learn to ropes behind the work stations and all that and didn't even build a proper house yet. I'll live.
Would have started on a new world then but I needed a break after making sure everything with the computer was fine; have you seen computer prices lately?
The Good
The first "Good" I have to start with is simple: Have you ever seen those posts online saying "If you could completely erase your memory about one piece of media and re-experience it for the first time, what would it be?" My answer was most certainly not Minecraft, but this felt like I was a kid in elementary school playing Minecraft for the first time again. I'm happy that people get to experience a new game as it comes out again and see the game change and find its shape in the world. I like modern Minecraft, but modern Minecraft feels like they're adding features to a game that already exists (because that's exactly what's happening); waiting for each update in Minecraft Beta was a completely different experience. I got to experience that sense of awe and wonder again opening up Hytale for the first time, and I'm happy for the people who get to experience that now but couldn't for one reason or another during Minecraft's beta phase.
Another "Good" I want to start off with on a technical level is that this game natively supports my ultrawide monitor. Not every game does that, and sometimes games that do support it just stretch the game out and distort it. Playing this game on an ultrawide monitor does have its issues that using a normal monitor wouldn't, such as often missing little tooltips in the corner whenever you pick up an item, but that's fine by me. If I ever get tired of it, I can always take the game out of fullscreen and play it at a more conventional aspect ratio.
(Actual side note, though: the game doesn't have a Borderless Window mode to emulate fullscreen without the headaches. I haven't noticed any issues Alt+Tabbing, but I can't speak for everyone there.)
The game is also more complete than I honestly expected. Maybe this is because I came in with the experience of a beta game that was barely a game when it came out (I first played Minecraft Beta 1.3), but the world felt alive. There were friendly NPCs rarely spaced throughout the world, there were structures that were easy to find and loot. I don't know how many of these there are but there was at least one boss or mini-boss I got to fight (a giant skeleton thing underneath a mausoleum). I wonder if the game is going to in the future turn into a "hunt down structures, fight through hordes inside the dungeon, then fight the boss at the end" type of game? It certainly feels that way, and Arlo certainly loved just dashing and slashing through skeletons as he went.
Best of all (I personally didn't use any of these but I know they're out there), there is already a massive community and modding scene in this game. Normally it's not a good sign to expect to need to mod a game to make it fun (looking at you, Bethesda), but in Hytale, it feels like the community is coming together to make this game into something big, not just luck-ing into it like a different cube-ular sandbox title did. If mods are your type of thing then you're going to love it.
I opened YouTube to play background noise while writing this and one of those "Here are mods you NEED to install" videos popped up in my feed. This game came out yesterday.
The Bad
Naturally, people are going to immediately talk about how this game is buggy. I get it. Games cost money, some people spent seventy USD on this game (myself included) so it should be a working game. This game is certainly buggy, I will not pretend otherwise. It's in early access for a reason.
Something that irked me when playing the game is that some of the enemies are scaled frustratingly in difficulty. In particular, there's one monster underground that I actively avoided whenever I could purely because it gave me headaches when I tried to fight it. The monster is basically a giant lava toad thing. Have you ever seen a toad jut out its tongue to catch prey? Imagine that, but its tongue actually throws you around the lava filled room. I only fell into lava once thanks to this, thankfully (and I had a water bucket on me), but the move is pretty disorienting because you're just suddenly in a new nearby spot and need to actively look around to find where you are before figuring out your next plan. Hopefully you had time to do that before the lava toad thing attacks you again. This could very well boil down to "get good, noob" logic, but I saw a lot of people complaining about this on Twitter as well. Hopefully this enemy gets tweaked soon.
The grind for materials is also a pain, at least at first. Hytale funnels the player's crafting through workstations. There's a special area for crafting armor, crafting weapons, crafting building blocks, smelting ores and glass, cooking, etc. Most of these workstations can be upgraded by acquiring a number of items in tiers related to whatever that workstation is, most notably the smelting, armory, and weaponry stations requiring smelted ores to upgrade. The tier and upgrading system makes complete sense, but I had trouble actually getting the items for each item. It wasn't clear to me where each of the ores could be found, and some of them I could only find in loot chests even though they have ore blocks in the game according to Creative Mode. Iron and Copper were extremely easy to find, but I found a total of one Gold vein (and immediately lost it because it was next to one of those spoiler-tagged spawns above) and the rest of the ores I found were exclusively in those loot chests. It was stressful.
If I had to pick one thing I disliked above everything else, it would most certainly be the enemy balancing. I never died to mini-bosses or bosses. I only died to accidentally stumbling into a horde of skeletons I didn't know where there or to that spoiler-tagged monster that I simply existed nearby underground and couldn't get away from. When I was younger and first played Minecraft, I was afraid to mine underground because I didn't like combat; now, as an adult first playing Hytale, I was frustrated to mine underground because I could not find the thing I needed and there was always a chance a random lava toad would render hours of hunting for it moot.
The Elephant in the Room
Hytale will never get away from a certain indie game. I've mentioned it how many times in this first impression? I don't think it's possible for Hytale to get away from Minecraft's reputation; Hytale was started by the people who ran or run (I'm not sure which tense) one of the biggest Minecraft servers, Hypixel. The game looks like Minecraft with a really pretty resource pack, shader pack, and a handful of mods from a fantasy modpack. I remember, back when this game was first announced seven years ago, people saying that this game would be the Minecraft killer. This game is always going to exist alongside Minecraft.
So... is it the Minecraft killer?
Well... why can't it exist alongside Minecraft?
There are definitely going to be some similarities between the two, and you might play them both for the same reason. But for me, the two games cover two different needs in games. Minecraft is currently a good sandbox building game that happens to have some survival combat elements and big battles. Hytale feels like it is going to be significantly more combat oriented and just happens to also be a good sandbox building game (though not as advanced as the twenty-years-old-and-still-updating Minecraft). I'm still going to play this game and go back to my Hardcore Minecraft world when I want to play around.
The question won't be which game will I prefer over the other. The real question will be which experience do I want at that moment.
Too Long, Didn't Read
I like Hytale. It's fun so far, especially for a game starting its early access period. It's essentially the first version of an open beta phase. If you know you want the game and are looking up if you think the game will be something you enjoy, I recommend buying the game at the base twenty dollar tier and experiencing it yourself. If you're not already sure you want to play the game and are hoping someone will sway your mind, look up playthroughs online. Hytale reportedly hit 420,000 viewers on Twitch on Day One, so there's probably someone playing it now you can experience the game vicariously through before you make your decision.
I'm looking forward to what comes from this game. With any luck, this game will become a lot more nuanced of a combat simulator (it feels like its current weapons system is hinting at that nuance) and it becomes a great game for competitive competitions. If that's your type of thing, then enjoy your time experiencing an alterworld or whatever they call it.