Hytale

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Next year marks Minecraft’s tenth anniversary. After a decade of continual development, not only at Mojang but also in the community of server operators, mod developers and world builders that’s grown up around it, now the kids who got into Minecraft in its early days are in their late teens and 20s. The Minecraft generation has come of age, and in Hytale, we’re seeing it starting to make its own games. Hytale is fundamentally a heightened version of Minecraft. It boasts prettier graphics, more user-friendly features, more dynamic systems and more dramatic action. Players will explore a huge procedurally generated continent of different biomes, find pre-designed dungeons to raid, fight monsters, craft items and cultivate farms.

You might feel a little underwhelmed at the prospect of another Minecraft-like. Countless similar ones have appeared over the past decade, including Portal Knights, Dragon Quest Builders, Boundless and SkySaga. However, few have leaned into every aspect of what Minecraft is. Minecraft isn’t just a procedural world. Or a survival game, an exploration game, a social hangout, an MMORPG, a building tool, an array of multiplayer minigames, a PvP arena, an engineering game, or a platform for modding. It’s all of this, and around it has grown a vast ecosystem of smaller communities, each tapping into a different facet.

As a game being made by a studio which has helped chisel many of those facets, it’s best to understand Hytale as an attempt to live up to and exceed all of what Minecraft is today. Since 2013, Hypixel has run one of