Hytale, once touted as the Minecraft killer, is ceasing development
Just a moment...
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.
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Well it never was a Minecraft killer and was never really going to be either.
Luanti (formerly Minetest) is the Minecraft killer
It is such a superior experience compared to Minecraft.
It is such a superior experience compared to Minecraft.
How so? It certainly cant compete in the mods category, can it? As far as I recall Minetest had multiple "Minecraft clones" each differing in completion and differing in support for further mods. Has that improved?
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.
Minecraft
Well designed
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.
Remove the XP cost increment upon repairing items, so that Mending is not an end-game necessity anymore
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.
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
Not sure what you mean ? Villager curing is a legit mechanic, and it's not absolutely required. Personally i never bother, as emeralds are so easy to farm they're basically infinite. I see what you mean about building villager "trading halls", though, i used to hate it too. But it's not really required either i guess. You can just pop into a village, convert 3 or 4 villagers to librarians with the trades you want : mending, unbreaking, efficiency & protection will get you most of the way even if it's not maxed-out gear you'll already see the difference. For more marginal enchants you can explore the End and combine equipment you looted from there.
It's what i like in that mechanic, there's various paths to acquire good equipment, a minimal setup will take minimal effort but if you geek out you can make yourself a god-tier kit that will stay with you forever.
Anecdotally I used to roll with a crew that had a bunch of PvPers who'd lose equipment all the time, so we had this huge kit-farming district in our base that was really fun to design and build. The system is pretty in-depth and i wouldn't call it badly designed (even though it might not be to everybody's taste).
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 can but it doesn’t need to. The out of the box experience is better and the mods can do more fundamental changes to the gameplay experience.
Hence superior
Never heard of either of these projects.
Time is the only thing that will be a minecraft killer.
40 years ago, Super mario bros was the most impressive most popular game ever. Now, today, it still exists, but would you even BEGIN to play Super Mario Wonder in the same catagory of pop culture influence as Super Mario Bros 3?
There will come a day when minecrafts users become too old to care. But it won't be because another game does it better.
Improvements don't kill a culture. Apathy kills culture. Minecraft is less of a game and more of an entry in pop culture.
I tried Minetest a while ago and was never really able to get into it. The new player experience was rough, a lot of decision paralysis. The texture style can vary between mods and servers. It didn’t feel very cohesive. I don’t know if that has changed since I last played, but to me it didn’t feel like a minecraft killer then.
From what I can tell, Hytale was supposed to be a bit like Terreria in 3D, as well as a platform for minigames. The gameplay and graphics from the trailers looked really good. I’m sure it would have been a Minecraft killer for some. (Ex. players who primarily play for the minigames like bedwars)
Vintagestory is my Minecraft killer, but it’s also got very different item/tech progression, so probably not perfect for many (former) Minecraft fans.
Is there a good overview of the progression somewhere? I vaguely remember buying it a while ago, but couldn't really get into it.
If you know Terrafirmacraft it’s roughly that. Basically to even get to a point where you’re chopping down trees, there’s a few hours of gameplay trying to replicate fairly realistic early human technological progression. But it has a shockingly good late game with quests and dungeons and bosses. Due to the slower nature of the tech progression, and you being a relatively fragile creature in a shockingly cruel world, the game feels like it’s always going somewhere. There is always something you can be doing to prep in some way.
It uses a lot of diagetic UIs and in world crafting which I love. Modding it is as easy as clicking the install button on the mod webpage and it launches the game and prompts the install. I do suggest using some mods, even on a first play through, because a lot of them are just things that make sense, and often get worked into the full game over time.
A couple more game changing mods I’d suggest are rivers, wind, sailboats, and canoes. Basically anything that makes water a slightly more viable form of transport once you’ve got a bit of tech. The game has more or less accurate geology, so materials will only spawn in specific rock types, and those rock types only occur in specific areas due to tectonic plate interactions. This means you’ll often go on loooonnngg expeditions to find a particular material, and I find water transport to be a very balanced tool with rivers because you cannot sail or paddle up stream, but downstream is very fast. You can use this to your advantage in some ways, while still forcing you to portage your gear at other times.
Anyway, I love this game. Check out the comm for it! !vintagestory@lemmy.ca
Is this a game where I could reasonably discover how to progress by myself, as an average adult human with no special knowledge of history or technological progression? Or will I need to resort to a wiki? I'm cool with either but curious
There is a very well done in game journal, that is essentially the wiki. It includes crafting recipes, as well as more free form, expository writing on general gameplay and progression. Most mods also do a good job of including their own journal pages and info as well. Though there’s some things that take struggling on before the info provided fully clicks. There is a prospecting system for example to help you locate ores since they are rarer with bigger deposits. I struggled with it for a while, but eventually you develop this sort of intrinsic sense of how to use the info the tools provide. There’s a very satisfying progression in most of the game systems from floundering at first, then understanding the numbers behind it, then internalizing the optimization and it becoming instinct. Very much matching the layperson to apprentice to specialist progression. I’ll finally add that the game does have sort of RPG style classes that encourage people to play multiplayers and specialize into a particular job. There’s is a commoner class that doesn’t have any drawbacks, but also doesn’t have the bonuses the other classes get which is okay for single player, but to give a small spoiler,
Don’t be afraid to abandon a save after a few in game days and take what you learned into a new one. Or check out the difficulty settings/sliders, there’s lots of ways to tune your experience. If you don’t get your feet under you it can be grueling to try to recover.
Thanks for the recommendation! I'm specifically looking for a text guide that outlines the tech progression - doesn't have to be in-depth, just a rough "first get this kind of thing, then this one".
These kinds of games tend to be a bit opaque for me, having such a guide would allow me to read up on things when I can't progress myself. Do you happen to know one?
There are videos on youtube that sum up main progression from stone to steel.
There are also other topics to learn, like prospecting for ore, leather making (for backpacks), animals handling, bee keeping (if you want lanterns), windmill building (to automate iron processing and as prerequisite for steel), and many more.
Survival hanbook (H key by default) have a lot of info and guides on game mechanics. Otherwise, google videos on certain topics.
It is fun to pass all these milestones and see how your small village grows.
P.S. As for storage, keep food and unprocessed animal hides in storage containers made from clay in cool cellar, bulk resurces (stone, ore nuggets, wood blocks) in crates and everything else in double chests that you can make as soon as you get access to copper (for nails and strips).
Some things like firewood, peat, bricks can be stockpiled right on the floor. Also you can lean tools to the wall or put them on tool racks for convenience. This also adds to an atmosphere of medieval building.
Much as I'm sure it's a quality entertaining game, with games as popular as Minecraft... the only thing that can kill it is collapsing under its own weight.
How is it superior? Is it approachable for kids around 7yo?
Nope
That would be a long list but here is something that everyone can notice in the first minute.
It loads and you are actively playing in a world before Minecraft even finishes its loading screen (I have seen Minecraft get stuck on a sync with Microsoft screen for 30 minutes with no option to skip the sync or do anything else to actually start game play).
Clicked on this thread purely to see if someone would bring up Minetest/Luanti. Glad to hear it seems to be going well.
The Luanti community generally does not see it as a "Minecraft killer" and doesn't want it to be that. But it's a cool project for sure.