Hytale
Hypixel’s first original game shows the Minecraft generation has come of age
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 Minecraft’s biggest servers, creating free-to-play multiplayer minigames such as BedWars, SkyWars and Mega Walls, which have amassed the company 14.1 million accounts. In 2016 it recorded 64,533 concurrent players, which would comfortably put the network within the top ten most played games on Steam. It’s been fully independent throughout, its popularity allowing it to grow a team of full-time developers, hiring most from Minecraft’s community, to some 40 members.
But until now, Hypixel has existed in a bubble. Its achievements are more or less invisible to the wider industry and it’s entirely reliant on Minecraft, a fact that’s concerned founder Simon Collins-Laflamme and COO
Aaron Donaghey since 2014, when Mojang began to enforce its EULA. Until that point, the official line was that no thirdparty was allowed to make money from Minecraft, but Mojang had never acted on it and an entire server industry grew up in its shadow, much of which was based on selling items that gave play advantages. The new EULA finally legally allowed servers to make money, but never
from selling advantages, and it turned the industry upside down. Hypixel had to scramble to change all its games so they only sold cosmetic items, and for several months its income was seriously dented. “It was a big, giant reminder that you don’t own what you’re doing here. It’s just a mod,” says Donaghey.
It was time to think about making their own thing. “That choice came out of a feeling of self-preservation,” says Sean McCafferty, a designer who’d worked in the mainstream industry before joining the team to help professionalise the ways it designed levels. “We don’t own Minecraft. We have no clout in the decisions that are made around the game. It’s been really good to us, and we get on well with both Microsoft and Mojang, but we were painfully aware that we weren’t the masters of our own destinies.”
At the time, Collins-Laflamme was thinking about how he could relieve some of the pressure of running so many minigames and create opportunities to make more. “The EULA had a good side, which was that we became a legitimate business. I felt comfortable to hire people, because before we knew we could be breaking rules.” So the team grew from seven people to 30 in six months. Work began on Hytale the following year, even as Hypixel’s
Minecraft operations continued to grow.
It wasn’t inevitable that Hytale would be a block game. The team explored many other concepts, but it returned to what it knew, partly because it’s what Hypixel’s community wants. “We had to do right by them,” Donaghey says. “It made sense for us. We knew that space, we’d spent tens of thousands of hours creating games and expertise. We saw a lot of games coming to the block genre and a lot of the time their teams had backgrounds in the traditional industry, and I think they only looked at what Minecraft is on the surface.”
To take one facet of Minecraft’s creative community, machinima, Hytale will ship with built-in camera controls so players can
immediately get into making films. Recognising the vital role that YouTube has played in Minecraft – and Hypixel’s – history, players will be able to watch videos together from within the game. For builders, who create vast voxel tableaux using mod tools, Hytale will ship with a large-scale block editor. For those who want to tweak every aspect of
Hytale’s appearance, there will be a browser- based collaborative 3D modelling and animation tool which will update the game in realtime. For those who want to tweak the way the game works, every property of every block is editable and a scripting system can execute code. “Blocks should be malleable,” Donaghey says. All of this will be shareable with other players, and it will ship with updated versions of Hypixel’s existing minigames, including BedWars, Build Battle and Mega Walls. Hypixel’s deep involvement with its community has led to a new relationship. Riot Games, along with big-name angels including World Of Warcraft lead designer Rob Pardo and Quake pro Dennis ‘Thresh’ Fong, has led a fresh round of investment in Hypixel. Donaghey says that Riot has a deep affinity with Hypixel’s community-first approach. “I think they feel a spiritual connection to us. You think of the story of Dota, which existed on WarCraft III, owned by Blizzard, and Dota became League Of
Legends. You can draw the exact same parallel with Hypixel being on Minecraft, and now we’re making Hytale.”
Donaghey’s very aware that, although Hypixel’s work so far has been “just a mod”,
PUBG and Counter-Strike got started in the same way. Hytale could prove the block genre still has potential. Not that Hypixel was looking for investment. “Riot asked if we needed help, but we were standoffish,” he says. “We wanted to be independent.” Hypixel has carved a deal that retains its independence while taking the real benefit of working with Riot: advice on management, production, and being a grown-up company.
Still, Minecraft casts a long shadow over Hypixel’s future, not least because its server will continue as long as there’s a community for it. But can Hytale take Minecraft players’ interest? Certainly, Microsoft’s recent pronouncement that it has no plans for a sequel came as a relief. “It’s a good thing for us,” says Collins-Laflamme. “If they announced
Minecraft 2, it could be a worry.” That leaves space for Hypixel to build into and improve upon, from Minecraft’s still-clunky combat to the still-arcane technicalities of modding.
At the same time, building so many interlocking tools and systems is demanding indeed. “Bringing it all together is a lot more complicated than making simple systems,” Collins-Laflamme says. “We’ve gained a lot of respect for Mojang. We’ve learned how hard it is to make a block game with so many features and complexities.” That’s the mark of coming of age: realising the achievements of your forebears, and building on them.
“We were painfully aware that we weren’t the masters of our own destinies”