Minecrafty fantasy sandbox Hytale will finally launch into early access today, a few months after being rescued from cancellation by Hypixel server co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme. In development for over a decade, it’s a bid to “redefine the block-game genre” that features procedurally generated biomes and RPG-style dungeon delving. Unlike the earliest instalments of Minecraft, it will also ship with some pretty fleshed-out lore.
In a post on the official site, the dev’s lore meister “Joe” has shared a few thoughts on the game’s flexible ideas about canon. Naturally, a lot of the chat invites comparison with other games with mighty codices, from The Witcher to Dragon Age. I’m indifferent to much of Hytale, I confess – I have exhausted my lifetime’s supply of enthusiasm for blocks, and in any case, I prefer the drearier tone of Vintage Story – but on this count, I’m quite intrigued.
Joe begins by noting that Hytale had a lot of concept art, earlier in development, much of which has been dropped over the years in the course of narrative redrafts and other changes of direction, including the discarding of entire factions. However, “since the re-acquisition, many of these changes have been rolled back or re-incorporated in different ways”. This is partly because the developers “have made the conscious decision to return to an earlier draft – one that’s far more compatible with the engine we’re shipping and the vision we have for the game as a whole.”
In general, the chaos of past year has obliged a hard-headed approach to the narrative convolutions. Certain bits of lore have been shelved, some of them for good, while other materials are being revived. Take various initially “divisive” redesigns for the insectoid, desert-dwelling Scaraks – “with the timeline we’re shipping on and the fact that the new designs aren’t usable in-game, we can’t exactly throw out the old ones anymore,” Joe writes. The devs are working on a method of “bringing both into the lore and making them work”.
In general, the new draft of the narrative retains “the major aspects of the lore the community has come to love over the years,” Joe goes on. “Characters such as Gaia and Varyn are still very much a part of our canon, and Tessa and Kyros are coming back as well”. The devs also intend “to revisit the concept of Alterverses”, these being parallel planets or dimensions – the main one is Orbis, which looks a lot like Earth.
In general, Hytale’s developers want “to maintain a consistent and coherent narrative while also allowing experimentation. Joe argues that “lore should not be a strict set of rules that everyone on the team is required to follow when designing content”, but “a set of guardrails to ensure we don’t get too far off track”.
Hytale has certain fixed “canon foundations”, and the forthcoming Adventure mode will impose more of a narrative. But as regards the initially released Exploration mode, they’re leaving it pretty open. The game will encourage a degree of player “archaeology” that “gives us the flexibility to tell stories from different perspectives, many of which may not share the same understanding of Orbis and its nature”. As you might expect, these clashing perspectives may be faction-based.
As for when Adventure Mode might arrive, Joe cautions that there are currently “no systems in place to support such an endeavour, and there has never been a version of the game that had anything close to a narrative implemented. Even the details of the story itself have never truly been finalized.” So it’ll be up to you dig up the roots, for the moment. There is “a narrative of sorts” in Exploration Mode, tethered to a change in the world generation – Joe ends this section by dropping hints about something called Cursebreaker.
While a lot of the language here is too fluffy and promotional to get your teeth into, I think Hytale’s evolving lore could be fun to analyse. The early days of Minecraft were a series of improvisations and occasional mishaps discussed on IRC, with minimal suspicion of the massive financial success that would follow – according to Notch, the game’s now globe-straddling Creeper mascot began life as a botched attempt at making a pig.
Nowadays, Minecraft is an absurdly bulky narrative universe, albeit a whimsical one that is rather less supportive of pedantic overreactions than, say, Star Trek. Hytale is sort of trying to follow the same trajectory, surfing the chaos wrought by last year’s almost-cancellation, but with the more explicit hope of becoming a behemoth, and I think that puts the backstory writing under interesting stress. What do you reckon?
If you’re sold on Hytale, here’s how and when to buy and download it. The game won’t release on Steam for the moment, because Hypixel are worried about negative reviews from people unfamiliar with the choppy development history.
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