Poking around Hytale’s unfinished sandbox is the first time I’ve felt hope for a voxel RPG since Cube World broke my heart (twice)

Alas, poor Cube World.

Your future felt so bright twice (thrice?) upon a time, when you popped out of the blue with so many brazen promises and then fizzled out in mere weeks. The reality of playing Cube World in 2019 was pretty dismal, but the underlying concept has always crackled with promise—a voxel-based, procedurally generated RPG styled as much after The Legend of Zelda as Minecraft.

It almost had a lot going for it. Its blocky world, though you couldn't break it apart and rebuild it as in Minecraft, aimed to feel more like a lived-in place than the average voxel game. It was an infinitely huge, procedurally generated class-based adventure with wandering NPCs, towns, factions, and a unique crafting system where you could upgrade your weapons block by block.

The problem was, aside from cutesy vibes and obvious potential, it had basically nothing beneath the surface when it finally released after eight years in limbo. Those NPCs had little to say, exploration was terminally boring, and the world was shaped by largely godawful "procedurally generated lore."

Cube World’s promises of infinite adventure were all well and good, but I'd have been happier with a lot less. I just wanted a fantasy with the blocky worldgen that makes exploring Minecraft so fun combined with the structure and satisfying swordplay I had become accustomed to in RPGs. Cave diving in Minecraft was fun, but it felt slight because I never got the sense that its world was an actual place where anyone lived. Whenever I found a monster, I just mindlessly wiggled a sword at it as it bounced away. I should have picked up from its title that its priorities were elsewhere.

There have been games that hit similar nerves to what I’m looking for. Both Dragon Quest Builders games are fantastic mashups of Minecraft and the JRPG, and V Rising, while not voxel-based, delivers on the combination of action RPG and a base-building core. But those games are primarily honed in on the survival-craft’s meat and potatoes: upgrading tools, farming resources, and building better houses and settlements.

Hytale isn't different in that regard, but it reminds me of Cube World more than most games. For one, it also had a drawn-out and hellish development cycle where all seemed lost at one point (though it was developed by a full team and not two people). It also finally released after years of promises that seemed too good to be true, and its pitch is to pair Minecraft-esque voxel worldgen with crunchier combat and an honest-to-God adventure mode, though that last bit isn't implemented yet. It’s not the infinite, procedurally generated cubic RPG I’ve been hoping for, but it’s a foundation for something close.

That brings me to the biggest difference between Cube World and Hytale: Hytale is fun already.

Taller tales

Hytale is more Minecraft than RPG in its current state, but it already does some of what I hoped Cube World would, so many years ago. Even in sandbox mode, it's easy enough to get a whiff of its dungeon crawling and exploration—melting foes with swords and staves is satisfying thanks to (mostly) slick animations and impactful ultimate abilities, dungeons are stuffed with loot and unique monsters, and developer Hypixel Studios is patching in stuff like dinosaurs and necromancy faster than I can keep track of.

What's here is good enough to start, and it feels like there's a future ahead—two things Cube World never successfully delivered on.

Maybe its NPCs don't say much just yet, and maybe its ruins come furnished with yellow signs labeled "WIP," but its dungeons are exciting to poke around, its enemies fun to carve up, and its vistas gorgeous to gawk at. Where the horizon in Cube World promises an adventure you'll never find, the horizon in Hytale already conceals portals to faraway temples, magical grimoires, giant yetis, and so on. That CEO Simon Collins-Laflamme is on X teasing Path of Exile-inspired talent trees has me intrigued to see more, even though that’s quite the lofty ambition.

Thinking about what the adventure mode could bring to this promising sandbox is tantalizing, and the foundation feels better-suited to a dungeon crawl than Minecraft—a game I mostly enjoy as a creative building sandbox—ever has. In that way, it reminds me a bit of 2011-era Terraria back when that game only had a handful of bosses to its name. Damning with faint praise? Maybe, but Terraria has grown into something I never could have imagined a decade and a half ago, and Hytale is already growing at a pace that makes it irresistible to watch.

You might be thinking I've gone and done the thing that got me burned with Cube World all over again. I'm getting excited about a game for its potential, not solely on what's in front of me. But even if the adventure mode releases and completely lacks the RPG meat and story-rich spelunking I long for, there's a silver bullet in Hytale's chamber I hope can bridge the gap: modding.

Hytale is superlatively mod-friendly. It's a game built by modders and for modders, so much so that we've already got Doom and a 2D side-scroller in it. We already have Hytale running in Hytale, and Minecraft x Hytale crossplay through means I don't fully understand. There are nearly 4,000 mods on CurseForge as I write this—a preposterous number given how new the game is—and among those is already a legendary weapons mod and a mod that adds RPG-style leveling and stats.

I know what people are capable of in Minecraft given some time to cook, and there's already seemingly tech under the hood to support quests, events, and instanced worlds, so I have a feeling I will see Hytale come into its own, one way or another.

Though unfinished, the game has hooked me back into a genre I reckoned was probably a short-lived fad over a decade ago as a woefully mistaken teenager. Whether Hytale sticks the landing or not, it's the most exciting time I can ever remember for open-world survival crafting games: there's Vintage Story for the sim sickos, Abiotic Factor for an atmospheric, Half-Life-inspired spin, Grounded 2 if you don't feel arachnophobic enough, and yes, Hytale if you're like me and just want a stylish, voxel-based world that feels fresh and unknown again.