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.
The irony of these projects is that they only seem to appeal to people who don’t really like Minecraft, or used to like older versions but not recent ones. They have zero traction among active Minecraft players.
I’ve tried most of them and honestly they don’t hold a candle to the original - not that they are bad games, but rather they entirely miss the point of modern Minecraft and why it is so appealling to so many people. Although (some vocal fraction of) the community likes to nitpick every single detail of every single update, it is an incredibly well designed game.
Curious what the point of modern Minecraft is, and what part is appealing to modern people. I pop on sometimes purely because friends are playing, and it can be fun, and somehow I don’t think this is what you mean. Well, people do play for fun, but you are probably thinking of a more specific thing that makes it fun.
I think what makes the game great is that it contains a number of game mechanics, which are all interlocked and play nice together. That gives it enormous versatility. You can be a nomad explorer, or a builder who stays at base and never sees a hostile mob. You can be a redstone engineer, or a farmer accumulating insane amounts of resources. You can create map art and barter with other map artists on the server. You can hunt bases and either grief them or contact their owners and get to know their history. You can play mini games on commercial servers or code your own mods and play PvA (player vs admin) on anarchy servers.
You can find the exact combo and dosage that fits your playstyle, then switch gears a couple months later and turn the game on its head. I don’t know of many games with that kind of variety.
it’s about the pixel-art and the cubes, am i right ?
Minecraft has many issues unrelated to the game’s visuals, some of which have only received somewhat unsuccessful band-aid fixes (notably, enchanting+repairing mechanics)
What would you want to see different?
On the spot, I’d say a fix for anvil mechanics.
Remove the XP cost increment upon repairing items, so that Mending is not an end-game necessity anymore.
Personally I’d say we could use an extra row in the inventory, but I can see why someone would think that’s too radical.
Yeah i see your point, it can get frustrating at first. Personally i don’t hate it, getting to keep your tools forever is an endgame perk and as such, it needs a bit of organization and knowledge. You’ll have to have at least some basic villager breeding (for a Mending librarian), and some basic farms (auto-furnace for XP generation & storage, or just some mob farm).
That’s kind of why i think the game is well designed. To get endgame perks you need to interact with different game mechanics at least on a surface level, it’s great for discoverability and inspiration.
Thing is, at some point you get the endgame infinite-weapon perk by aggressively working against developer intent; the zombification exploit is an exploit (unless they fixed it? idk I haven’t played since before the update with the warden), setting up a farm with the desired villagers is an absolute chore AND Mojang made it worse by limiting Mending to swamp villagers (again, idk if that is still true).
By having a repair XP cost increment, you basically make endgame-enchanted items impossible to repair at all, and they’re so tedious to create in the first place that you can’t just forget about having mending.
You can live without them, but then you’re either speedrunning the game, playing creative mode with less perks, or never using powerful gear because of the “I’ll just keep it for when I need it” phenomenon.
So, enchanted items are an afterthought to a niche of players, and an annoyance to the majority.
Don’t get me wrong: my problem with the current(?) system is not with resource farms themselved, it’s with the gear progression being based on tedium and anti-tedium exploits.
Just thinking about the fact that I’d have to spend way more time enchanting my stuff than using it, makes me not want to get back to it.