Hytale Feels Like A Neat Minecraft Texture Pack But Not Much More

1 week ago 5

I’m having a lovely time playing the early access release of Hytale. But then of course I am: I love playing Minecraft. So I’m enjoying building a pretty little log cabin, exploring underground caves for precious ores, battling skeletons with a bow and arrows, and travelling far from spawn to visit distant biomes. Because that’s what I do when I play Minecraft. What I’ve yet to figure out is why Hytale exists as anything other than a texture pack for Microsoft’s behemoth.

There are differences. But when I describe them to you, they’re going to sound so minuscule. For instance, Hytale has a much better jump: you can jump two blocks high, and you can mantle up from four blocks below. I love that. That would make a good Minecraft mod. And there’s the slightly improved combat in which enemies actually block and you need to time your attacks. Then again, I can just add the Smart Mobs option to Mojang’s game. And you can see where I’m going when I point out that Hytale is a far prettier game with gorgeous sunrises.

Ten years in the making, and famously cancelled by Riot in the middle of last year before being revived in November, this early access build of Hytale is unquestionably a really good reimagining of Minecraft. But in its current form, as released this week for a minimum of $20, that’s all it is, and I’m left pretty bemused how that can be the case.

To give you an idea of how peculiarly the two games overlap—even beyond the core concept of a procedurally generated world made of cubes in which you dig, chop, mine and shovel to gather materials for crafting tools, construction materials and decorating items—let’s just look at the mobs. The main ones you’ll encounter at first are skeletons and spiders. Big, chunky spiders that are two blocks wide. It didn’t need to be skeletons and spiders, but it is. Are there zombies? Yes there are zombies. But surely not golems? I’m afraid there are golems. There are other mobs in there, with pillagers replaced by goblins and Outlanders, and villagers swapped out in favor of Ewok-like Kweebecs, as well as the most astonishingly overpowered underground-dwelling giant frogs. But then there’s also a place called the Void which I read contains a Void Dragon. Seriously?

The other aspect I can imagine an angry person on Reddit bringing up in response to accusations of cloning is crafting. It’s…it’s a lot worse. While it’s true that Minecraft has a fairly broad array of workbenches, for the most part people are using the basic crafting table and then an anvil and enchantment table. Sure, there’s the cartography table, the loom, the stonecutter, but these aren’t exactly core to the game. In Hytale, within the first couple of hours, I had needed to build a Workbench, Furniture Workbench, Blacksmith’s Anvil, Tanning Rack, Armorer’s Workbench, Builder’s Workbench, Furnace, and Campfire. I had to upgrade my main workbench to be able to then build the Chef’s Stove and Salvager’s Workbench, but still haven’t crafted the Alchemist’s Workbench and Arcanist’s Workbench because I don’t have enough gold or thorium. Each is enormous, meaning I’ve twice had to add sizable new wings to my cabin just to fit them all in the same location. It’s bonkers!

Legitimately great is that if you have chests directly next to workbenches, it’ll recognize their contents when showing what can be constructed. (Less great is the need for a small auditorium to fit all the benches in, and so of course not being able to have them all adjacent to the necessary chests.) This is a huge improvement, and I really appreciate it.

But the more I try to allow Hytale to be its own game in its own right, the more it fights back against that. When you pick up items from the ground, which bob up and down floating in the air, they emit a little “pop” sound, exactly like in Minecraft. Put two one-tile chests next to each other and they’ll ping into one double-width chest. Let alone that you already know what every block type is likely to be, given its visual similarity to the source. And the thing is, it’s necessary! This game both looks and feels so much like Minecraft that any time it does behave differently, it feels wrong. Hytale is such an unabashed clone that it’s backed itself into a corner of needing to do everything the same way Minecraft does. From the nine-box inventory along the bottom of the screen with a space for a shield to the left to how chest inventories appear, it’s just the same designs. It feels like playing the same game, in the same way, with the same goals.

This is supposed to change, when Hytale adds its Adventure Mode, which will offer RPG-like storylines and quests to solve, and that sounds great! It’s something I always longed for in the earliest days of Minecraft and that still only exist today through mods, and usually ones that eschew a lot of the core nature of Minecraft to do so. There are hints of this in place, like the Forgotten Temple which will teleport you to a peaceful hub-like area, almost entirely consisting of buildings with “Under Construction” signs over their doors, and a statue which catalogs every mob type you’ve encountered so far. It’s a cute idea, and unlocks more crafting options when you ding specified numbers.

Adventure Mode should add in “Alterverses” and bespoke quests and all that good stuff that will make Hytale distinct from the game it’s so wantonly copied. You know, if it happens. Clearly none of us knows what happened over the last five years at Riot, and whether the Hypixel team had developed huge sections of this before Riot pulled the plug, forcing the developers to revert back four-and-a-half years for this early access version. Or perhaps even then the game was so much like a Minecraft texture pack that Riot couldn’t see a way to release it.

As I said at the start of this, I’m having a lovely time! There are a whole bunch of balancing issues, but that’s entirely expected at this point. (Those toads, man, with the tongues that grab you. And iron is wildly too rare just now.) But I’m not having as lovely a time as I do when I join my son on his Minecraft Realm, or goof around on DonutSMP, because, you know, it’s the OG. Minecraft has had 17 years to make itself buttery smooth, balanced to complete perfection, and at the same time old enough to engender nostalgia and comfortable familiarity. Hytale is an awful lot prettier (albeit still in pixelly blocks), but right now it’s in no important way better. I mean, the jumping and mantling is great! But, you know, it needs to offer an awful lot more than that. I’m still left just wondering why? Why fight so, so hard to make the same game that already exists?

I’ll happily keep playing it for a little bit, see what the biomes I’ve yet to reach have to offer (the one where everything’s on fire is pretty fun), but I fear that in its current state I won’t be the only one quickly drifting away.

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