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To start this off, I have put countless hours into Minecraft. It is probably one of the few games where I can just keep playing for hours, then days and months without it getting boring. Well, that is not fully true, after all, the base game does not offer much gameplay when we talk about pure content. Any experienced player can get through all of the stages of Minecraft in like two to four hours. That is why I always saw it as a foundation rather than a game. But the more I think about it now, the more sure I am, that Minecraft is an Idea.
The Idea of a sandbox, with cubes that make up the whole world, thus simplifying the process of building and terraforming to a point, where you can create anything you want, with minimal tools. So in the beginning, Minecraft was the foundation. But it never improved.
The tech of Minecraft is incredibly simple. Yet after so many years and that amount of success, we are still stuck with a game running on Java, a maximum vertical build height of 255 and a pretty poor view distance of a default 16 chunks, 16x16 low-quality textures and the most basic animations you could ever imagine. Additionally, the lighting was minimal. All in all, Minecraft was simple to make and so easy to improve on, as many modders and artists have shown, but we never saw any step from the devs towards making it look less like a thing that was created in a few days.
So when I just saw the first frame of the Hytale trailer, it already felt refreshing.
A giant mountain in the background, probably more than a hundred blocks high, gorgeous looking with the viewport at a campfire at a small river. Next, to the mountain there is another, smaller one, with a medieval-looking bridge connecting them.
There are swarms of birds flying around, giving the world a living feeling.
Overall the art style is just incredible. The kept it to the roots of Minecraft, with the base world consisting of blocks, but extended on it, and made use of non-block shapes that still perfectly fit the style. Textures look just gorgeous, with a cartoonish style, but kept to pixel art, with the resolution likely being scaled up to 32x32 or 64x64 per block side. The ground textures blend into each other, and there is plenty of foliage, flowers, moss, mushrooms, and just... life. You immediately notice that the characters got proper animations, that look, in one word, just fitting. The skybox also now features clouds, and the sun is not a yellow square, but benefits from the bloom that is in place. It just looks brighter than any Minecraft landscape, and overall just alive.
With the music bumping up to a sunrise style beat, we get to see a fox chasing a rabbit in the woods, both kept to the blocky cartoon style of the game but just beautifully executed with everything just pitch perfect down to the animations.
There is where we also get to see how nice the camera tools seem to be, featuring not only simple movements but also smoothing and rotating the view, possibly even following a target.
With the scene changing we then get to see a small farm, the background blurred out a little bit, a peak on a windmill.
We get to see animations in the faces of people, featuring eye movements and eye blinking, and also what seems like properly animated interaction with tools and blocks.
A small chicken farm, and a dog sleeping on a piece of wood, then waking up and looking into the camera.
It just feels alive.
The blocks are shaking when you hit them. I the cave, there are mushrooms growing on the top and the sides of a rock. there are random rock pieces on the ground.
Just a lot of variety, breaking up in the loneliness that Minecraft usually generates.
You actually get to see the sword that you are making on the anvil, and the player even takes it off it after he finishes.
With the music starting to prepare for the main part, we get to see another four quick shots of differently lighted environments, a bluely lit forest with glowing mushrooms and leaves, and what looks like fireflies in the air, a swamp house with dense floating islands above it, showcasing fake volumetrics in the background that look beautiful, then a small creature sitting on a plank at a river at daylight, with some more in the trees like Ewoks, and finally an Ice landscape with polar bears swimming a partially frozen river.
As the music gets more adventurous, we get to see a huge canyon, then a sandy area with giant bee-like insects, surrounded by a swarm of smaller bees and a player preparing his bow to attack, then another scene where we get a closer look at sword combat.
A scene with multiple players building, evolving from a simple house to a fully fledged castle.
There are just countless scenes with this feeling of something familiar, but this time set in a beautifully created world that is alive.
This game is, what I always wanted Minecraft to be. What everyone wanted it to be. And what it should have been, but still after nine years of development and over 150 Million copies sold it is just a little bit more than what some people have done as a one-week code challenge.
So please, Hypixel, the hopes are there, you got me hyped for this game, so please don't screw this up. You have, what we have been waiting for since the first alpha of Minecraft released. I don't care, if you charge 10, 20 or 100 bucks for this game, I put thousands of hours into Minecraft and spend 50 bucks on games I barely played. Just make it available to us as soon as possible. Just don't go onto the free to play road. Seriously, let the community do its thing and don't interfere with them, I don't mind microtransactions on the public or official servers, but when it comes to custom servers, I want it to just be me and the game, so please respect that and other than that you are free to do anything you want.
Thank you guys for making this game, I really hope it plays out for you. You have some really talented artists and creative Ideas. I really look forward to getting my hands on this game.
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