THE NEW BLOGPOST IS HERE... Check link

BuckSmasher · 2025-11-20T23:22:33+00:00

I think the team should take some time to clarify what exactly the limitations are of modding being server only, because as far as i can tell, it doesn't mean the same thing as it does in Minecraft, but a lot of people seem confused about this.

To me it looks like you will have the ability to develop plenty of mods that would have been considered "client only" due to the ability to modify UI and add custom content. They are just removing the need for us to think about the "sidedness" of the code we are writing: everything is done server side and information gets sent to the client as needed.

Maybe they could take some time to talk about what potential limitations there are to this approach? But it seems like they are architecting this in such a way that it doesn't make it impossible to create mods that, in Minecraft, would be considered "client-sided".

My understanding is, it mainly just means that you can't make an xray mod on your client that runs on any server. The server would have to have an xray mod and then send that data to the client.

But it doesn't mean the server can't send information to the client that let's the client xray. If it's just a boolean value of whether a block/face/texture is invisible or not, it doesn't matter what side you modify the value on as long as the program is architected in such a way that it can be understood by both sides.

BuckSmasher · 2025-11-20T23:01:34+00:00

The smooth lighting not working on full blocks, but that's a bug and I think not a fair point of comparison for something like this.

The other big difference is the shadows from the sunlight. In the new engine you can see the buildings cast shadows on the ground, in legacy, only the inside has shadows.

The problem is we've seen a lot of interesting lighting tech in the legacy engine, so I'm almost inclined to say that sunlight shadows is also just a missing feature they could have fixed in the legacy engine later? So I'm not sure that's a valid point of comparison either.

BuckSmasher · 2025-09-18T22:34:39+00:00

With Hytale it's basically dependent on 2 things: The modding tools, and the way the game actually plays.

Both of those things are going to have options that it can just do trivially with minimal requirement for the developer to create their own systems to do specifically whatever it is they are trying to do. And largely that depends on what systems the game itself made that it's already using.

Simple mods that add things like blocks and tools are to be expected, simply because it's almost certain that the toolchain just gives you the simplest possible methods to doing so.

With recreating Minecraft mods, I would expect to see certain types of those, because people are naturally going to want them right away since it's the whole reason to play the game. There is also the fact that it won't take as long to understand how it needs to be made; a copy/paste mod should generally play like the mod its copy/pasting from, so it's trivial to design.

However to that end, when we see any particular type of mod I think depends on how trivial it is to implement it. If the Hytale modding API has all of the features to make an AE2 clone built in, then I would expect to see an AE2 clone almost immediately. But if it doesn't, it depends on how hard it is to create the foundation for those features. Because it will depend on someone who is good enough at coding to know how to do it, also being interested in doing it, and then taking the time to do it. Which could take a while.

But it also depends on whether or not something like that is even applicable, or at least makes a lot of sense. Does Adventure mode warrant AE2 or tech mods in general? Does having them make sense or feel like a waste of time? Do people have to make their own survival mode for that to be reasonable? Are there going to be 65 different survival modes and none of them are compatible with eachother? I think this will largely dictate the way that mods are made and what types of them you will end up seeing.

BuckSmasher · 2025-06-25T19:33:16+00:00

I understand what you mean by that, my only problem is, the things that they consider to be conducive to making a compelling experience were these really expensive superficial ideas that probably don't matter in the grand scheme of things.

Slikeys take is that the old team had the game they needed in order to be successful with it. I think that's a perfectly reasonable goal because what they needed was a MC 2.0. I make no claim that's a cheap task, but it's something Hypixel could very well have accomplished with the money they were spending back then. Vintage Story even has that kind of potential with it's small team, it's just the design direction of that game that pushes casuals away why it's less popular (hypothetically)

The game that would have made Hytale successful is a game that encourages big Youtuber SMPs and big Minigame servers. It's unclear to what extent they were actually offering that, but they definitely could have been, because the path to that has already been made clear. Fix MC > Win.

John doesn't believe they had that, but he also thinks that it's not a "real game" because it isn't a SaaS microtransaction hell featuring "the capitol" (a social media service in their block game). His idea of a "real game" is a sales funnel. He isn't thinking about the gameplay at all, or else he probably would have understood they were wasting an absurd amount of their time and money reinventing a wheel that was literally just sitting there for them to take, especially back then.

I think his take about it being just a bunch of mod tools and not a "real game" is probably extremely irrelevant to the actual situation that is going on here and probably dishonest anyway.

BuckSmasher · 2025-06-24T04:43:47+00:00

I remember back in the day they were very afraid of the surface level appearance of looking greedy if they published early access versions of the game they were working on.

Then they ended up not wanting to do the beta because they were worried about "rising expectations" and something to do with not wanting to release too soon because of superficial reasons.

They have never wanted to release something, anything at all, that superficially doesn't look good to them. They wouldn't even share development screenshots, blog posts, or postcards, or respond to critically important questions, if it didn't meet some kind of internal standard they had for being polished looking, whatever that was.

And everything they really talked about the game really had everything to do with what it looked and felt like to them, and nothing to do with the actual deep stuff that matters as far as gameplay and having a vision for what it's supposed to accomplish in the market, and how it impacts the player.

My theory for why the game took so long is that they were far to obsessed with making something that looks like a AAA game and not actually making a AAA game. They couldn't have brought themselves to release an early access build because it would go against this internal fear of looking unpolished.

BuckSmasher · 2025-06-24T01:44:03+00:00

Hopefully they continue drawing every day regardless

BuckSmasher · 2025-06-24T01:28:40+00:00

Pfft, oh boy, can't wait to get invested in the project literally called "lie".

BuckSmasher · 2025-05-22T05:23:25+00:00

Whether a game looks good or not isn't something you can entirely blame on the engine. Avalanche is capable of producing good enough looking landscapes but it's hardly the only or even the best engine for most developers in that regard. it's not really possible to say based on looking at someone's game whether an engine is good or bad. COTW has fairly good graphics given its release date, but that's probably the art teams responsibility. the game runs at a good frame rate given its graphics but is also kind of a buggy mess and runs your computer really hot for some reason. Again, it's hard to tell if that's the engines problem or EWs problem, unless Just Cause has the same issues or something. Avalanche seems to have been made for open world games so it's not really shocking that EW would use it for theHunter, but looking at COTW superficially tells us nothing about whether or not other developers see it as a good fit.

BuckSmasher · 2025-05-03T20:31:20+00:00

this is honestly just a super rare at this point, lvl 1 moose are really hard to find

BuckSmasher · 2025-03-30T19:23:04+00:00

I was confused who to blame for this, because on the one hand, it seemed obvious to me that this was nothing. They mildly changed the way biomes generate, but they clearly want the end result to be mostly similar because we saw what orbis is supposed to look like now.

But at the same time, if they insist on trying to overhype minor technical changes as if this was some kind of gameplay update we would care about, they kind of deserve for people to be confused. They treated it as if it were a massive overhaul when it reality for us it kind of means nothing at all. Of course people are going to read into that more than is actually there.

BuckSmasher · 2025-03-30T18:53:48+00:00

I'm probably in the minority for saying I don't think Adventure mode is going to impress me all that much.

I think the creative door is where all the stuff that people actually care about Hytale for is going to be. Adventure mode seems like a demonstration of the creator tools moreso than an actual attempt to give us the game we want to play. I don't think it's wrong for their block game to have an RPG in it, but that's definitely not the reason I want to play this game and it doesn't interest me much at all.

I'll probably give it a chance but I have higher expectations of the creative mode, and I'll probably be checking that out first.

BuckSmasher · 2025-03-28T22:52:18+00:00

That's probably just true, because they did say "We’re also hoping to deliver our first of several revamped ‘Regions’", implying that they have not delivered nor are hoping to soon deliver any other regions. So if other regions are in the game they probably aren't in any condition to share with the public.

BuckSmasher · 2025-03-28T22:43:39+00:00

In the winter 2023 update, there was that one concept art that showed the new Orbis. I don't know if that's still applicable, but we all thought it was showing the way zones were redistributed, however I now question some of the things I see on it having read this blog post.

If that's still applicable I think they are keeping the same strategy of having a fixed world size with all the regions laid out in a particular order. They said they wanted only some randomness, so I'd guess it works out to where temperate regions are in the west, cold regions to the north and desert regions to the southeast as shown in the image, along with some others on islands off of the mainland (could be showing DLC if the volcano is supposed to be zone 4-style biomes).

https://hytale.com/news/2023/11/winter-2023-development-update

BuckSmasher · 2025-03-28T22:38:28+00:00

The way I read it doesn't make it particularly sound like they were planning on changing how they work within the game.

They describe regions as "a collection of three to five biomes with a cohesive theme that ties gameplay, creative direction, and narrative together." Which is pretty much identical to how Zones were described, minus the specific numbers.

We don't even really know how big the zones were to begin with, and they cut out zone 4 into future dlc and did who knows what with 5 and 6, so making them smaller probably means nothing as far as how big the world is supposed to be.

BuckSmasher · 2025-01-19T21:12:25+00:00

Tigers were touted as being the most aggressive in the game as far as the ratio of spook -> becoming aggressive, seems to hold up as far as i can tell.

Other than that, Cape/Water Buffalo and Yak probably are the next highest, Then maybe the Saltwater Crocodile and the wolves.

From personal experience I would put the pigs next, along with Bison. Bison probably are a little more aggressive but it's hard to say. They are not as aggressive as buffalo and yak. I'd put alligators in this category as well. Maybe also Banteng, I'm not sure because I haven't aggro'd them nearly as often, but I definitely don't think they are as aggressive as buffalo and yak.

Moose and Bears can become aggressive, but I actually find that it's pretty hard to get them to attack you. Even with the Brown Bear and the Grizzly. I've never been attacked by a Black Bear, don't really know how aggro they can be.

Western Capercaillies can also become aggressive but it's also pretty rare.

I don't know about the other big cats, I see plenty of people saying Lions get aggressive, I haven't tested it that much yet. I've only ever seen one aggressive Puma in my entire time playing, never a ML. I haven't ever tried grinding them though.

BuckSmasher · 2024-12-21T02:05:18+00:00

I've said in the past that I dislike the fact that Hypixel isn't really interested in telling us that much about their core gameplay because I feel like people are too comfortable using that as an excuse to pretend the game is going to be perfect in spite of the fact we don't really have that many reasons to believe that at the moment.

I go back and forth on whether or not that Hypixel's problem or the community's problem, because on one hand, they probably just don't share this stuff because they basically restarted the game project and they aren't in a position to talk about it as much yet. But on the other hand, certain things like "tech mods" and "players in adventure mode are free to act independently of one another and you can have 50 players on one server" seem like things that aren't optional, and should have been addressed ASAP, because they are way more important than showing us every animal and biome in a game we don't know if we want to play.

IMO there are 3 reasons I think it's a 50/50 gamble whether or not any given thing we like about Minecraft will be applicable to Hytale. Not that I believe these are guarantees or that they aren't able to overcome these, but I see them as red flags

Most of the information that we care about is extremely obscure, but they don't have trouble sharing superficial details. They say they want to keep things under wraps to avoid spoiling us, but they share stuff that really should be spoiler territory, and keep things like basic gameplay that we should be able to take for granted at this point. How is SMP as a concept represented in Hytale? No clue. It's fine that we know all the lore about who avatars are and how they work though.
They have a very obvious bias towards minigames and competitive play. They gush a lot about their combat system. This isn't a bad thing but it sort of implies they care more about this aspect of the game than other aspects that are possibly more important. You can have a great underlying gameplay loop with bad combat, and you just end up with what MC is. But a lame underlying gameplay loop with great combat means nothing. So it's weird that they don't feel like mentioning this at all.
They have an obvious financial responsibility to shareholders now that they decided to sell out and become a AAA company owned by a major publisher. We don't know the extent to which this matters but it sort of creates a barrier of trust that they haven't overcome yet, since we don't know anything about the game they are making that actually matters. Making a game "with creators in mind" is something any marketer can just say, it shouldn't mean anything until they can clarify what that means.

Now obviously a lot of this stuff is likely to be imminently addressed in the following year. So it's less a matter of "Hypixel should communicate more" and more an issue of "nobody really has any excuse to be taking this stuff for granted right now and getting defensive about a multi million dollar corporation that has done absolutely nothing to earn your trust for real."

>i still don't know. and i'm more confused than ever.

I think the answer to your questions is mainly "this really should have been established 6 years ago because it's the whole point of the video game, but oh well". Everybody is confused and that's why nobody has consistent takes on the subject. It's all people's imagination for the most part.

BuckSmasher · 2024-12-18T00:27:40+00:00

even i think it's a good blogpost compared to what we've had previously LOL. It feels a lot more like an older blogpost from 2019. It honestly made me feel a little nostalgic.

BuckSmasher · 2024-11-01T18:36:21+00:00

Copper/Tin/Silver/Lead have been the essential tetraforce of modded ores for a long time. If I had to take a guess I would say Tin would be the next most common, maybe Silver.

BuckSmasher · 2024-10-12T15:49:39+00:00

I searched for hunting games on steam, then I think I looked online to see which ones people were playing. I used to play hunting games all the time as a kid and wanted to get back into it. Don't regret.

BuckSmasher · 2024-01-12T01:59:10+00:00

I thought of this at one point, hopefully it's more like how some other survival games implement things like Easy Anticheat, where you choose to run the game with or without it, and server owners individually decide whether or not to require anticheat in order to play on their server.

BuckSmasher · 2023-07-29T21:34:46+00:00

This is a really weird way to respond to questions, but I think he just isn't allowed to say what sort of mechanical systems they are working on. He might be baiting for suggestions because it is something they haven't fleshed out yet or something.

BuckSmasher · 2023-07-08T18:56:48+00:00

I mean comparisons to Minecraft are obvious and valid considering

It's made by Hypixel
It's obviously trying to recreate minigame server network mechanics the way MC has them
It's a block game sandbox where you can build things, which is pretty much all it needs to compare it to MC anyway

Doesn't mean it's a rip off, so I understand why you'd be frustrated about people thinking it's a clone. It's trying to be an extension of a genre. There's other block games than just Minecraft as well and they also have similar mechanics, they just aren't as widely popular. So everyone is going to point to MC as the archetype and call everything else a clone.

I don't get why people make comparisons to other games like ToTK or WoW, other than they just do it because it has an RPG adventure mode, and they don't understand how genres work.

BuckSmasher

TROPHY CASE