Keep Your Eye On Hytale

I don’t know if I would consider this a not-review or just an impressions article, but either way my partner has been wanting to play Hytale since the game went into Early Access. For those not in the know, Hytale is a Minecraft-like that is far better because the game is more about exploration and adventuring than Minecraft is. There’s a lot of reasons it’s better that I’ll talk about in this article but first a word about my own time with Minecraft.

I played Minecraft in creative mode as I have never been a big fan of the survival mechanics of it, eventually my friends made a Minecraft server world that I joined and built a massive house on the side of a cliff. Yet I still didn’t engage with much of the game that I had little interest in. All I wanted to do was build and occasionally dig through some caves. To be honest that’s all I really thought there was to do. I never went to the Nether because I hated the combat in the game and didn’t want to have to deal with that. I never fought the Ender Dragon for the same reason. The game for me was just building and occasionally exploring.

So that’s the mindset I entered Hytale with, a mindset of frustration with Minecraft and how annoying the gameplay was so I only decided to enjoy the most basic of basic stuff. I was very apprehensive of playing it, thinking that it was going to be just as meh as Minecraft was when I wasn’t in creative mode. Instead I found a game that gets rid of some of the annoyance of Minecraft while introducing a ton of really cool things! Which means today I’m giving my initial impressions of Hytale after playing it for about 10 hours with my partner and friends.

What I used to only engage with

As I stated above I only used to build and do some mild exploring in Minecraft, so how is that in Hytale? Well building is definitely better. I think my biggest frustration with Minecraft building is just how damn basic it is. But in Hytale? Well, you have multiple different crafting benches for different things. Building wise you have the builders bench and the furniture bench that will allow you to craft whatever you have the materials for. Unlike Minecraft where you have to build the item in the grid of squares, Hytale just shows you what you can make and gives you a craft button. It makes crafting so much simpler.

More so, with the Builder bench you just slot in a material (like cobblestone or types of wood) and it’ll show you all of the things you can build from those items. There’s the standard things you can craft with like, doors, fancier versions of the block, and stairs. There’s also fences, or walls if you’re using stone, ladders, and most importantly, 4 different types of roofs. There are the 2 block shallow roof, a 1 block roof that’s a pretty average incline, and a 1 block roof that is steep as fuck and goes up 2 blocks, and then just a 1 block flat roof. That right there is what has made me incredibly happy as a primary builder in this type of game. I can finally, finally, make a buidling that looks normal without having to finagle a roof using different blocks like in Minecraft. Plus each looks slightly different when you use different materials. It’s just all around awesome to be able to build roofs.

Also, almost all the crafting benches are uprgradeable to be able to build more things, which is pretty cool and provides more options for the massive amounts of materials you are likely going to gather during your adventuring.

But what about exploring? Well I think that’s best addressed with this next section...

Improvements and getting rid of the fluff

There’s a lot of improvements that the game has made over Minecraft but in the realm of exploring two come to mind. First of all, the combat. Now in Minecraft (at least the last time I played it years ago) all you did was just...attack. Swing your sword and you’re done. No combos, nothing interesting visually, no different weapons. The most basic of basic. Hytale improves on that by introducing multiple weapons and each one has a different combo of attacks. For instance, I use dual daggers because they’re quick and I can move around easy with them. The attack for that is you stab down with one, then the other. Not bad but it’s also incredibly smooth. Then if you hold the attack button you can charge up a heavy attack which, for the knives, let’s you jump forward at the enemy stabbing down at them in one smooth motion while doing far more damage (and it makes an X if you miss). This is absolutely essential to get because stringing together basic attacks and the heavy attacks will also charge up your ultimate, which is also different for each weapon. For the daggers my ult was doing a fancy dual swipe around me with both daggers dealing tons of damage. Basically, the games combat isn’t boring and tedious like Minecraft, it’s fun and engaging. I also haven’t even reached the ability to cast spells yet so I don’t know how that’ll work in the future, but I do know it’s a thing because I went to a big run down tower/library thing last night and found 2 Void Grimoires which allow you to cast green fireballs like the spellcaster enemies do.

Also, speaking of, the combat makes exploring much more fun. With the big tower thing my group attacked last night it was run down with a ton of skeletons in it and also had a ton of books littered about (books that you could hit once with something and then be able to pick them up to be able to decorate your place if you want it to look like your characters read a lot). It was a tight place for combat but was really fun to deal with, once my friend gave me food since I got there first and almost died attacking a ton of enemies by myself. The world is filled with these types of things, big towers and buildings, goblin camps, a bunch of stuff that provides you with stuff to do throughout the map besides just wander around.

Then you have to take into account that in Minecraft there were two big problems with exploring. The first was that if you explored without any food and you were still plenty good at combat and didn’t get hit your hunger would go down and eventually you had to deal with that. The second was that if you happened to die you would drop everything and have to find your way back to where you were. So if you were a far far away from your spawn then you would have to deal with a ton of walking, if you end up even going in the right direction. Well these problems are non-existent in Hytale. Food is only used for healing now as there is no hunger mechanic (thank fucking god, I hate that type of mechanic) and in the world creation settings you can set the game to not drop anything when you die (you can also have it drop everything or only some). Even better, if you did die where you were doing something that you want to resume you can now just open the map and boom, you’ll see your death marker where you died. Of course you can also see that marker on the compass at the top of the screen but I wanted to bring up how you have an actual map in the UI instead of the shitty map in base Minecraft.

That map is also incredibly helpful because you can also see any other people that you’re playing with on it so if they’re somewhere you want to go you can look them up on the map, find them, see that they’re currently on an island with a ton of lava, then you can close the map, look at your compass for their marker, and just start heading directly there. Of course you don’t need the map to be able to know the direction they are, the compass shows you where your bed is, where your friends are, and where your deaths have been (death markers can be deleted whenever you want as well) as long as they’re in the circle of area that the map covers or you turn on the option to always see your friends. It’s a great experience to just know where you need to go without the possibility of getting lost in the wilderness and having to make a quick shelter to survive. Just all around much more fun.

A quick tangent before I move on as well, customization is far more indepth here. Your character can be customized to have different hair styles and colors, different skin colors, glasses, fangs, different ears, tons of different clothes including gloves and shoes, and even capes. That character is then taken between whatever worlds you play in so you don’t have to customize for each world. In the main menu you customize then load into either your world or the one you play with your friends. Speaking of, joining your friends is rather easy, you just have a code that you share with them and then they can join. Simple as that. It does change each time you load up the game but still. It’s very easy especially compared to Minecraft.

The Bad

I haven't played enough to get a ton of bad experiences but there is something that has been rather...annoying. It actually has nothing to do with the gameplay and everything to do with the connection. See, Hytale uses Peer to Peer for server connections. This is not an inherent problem, tons of games do that, but for some reason Hytale struggles when it comes to connecting to people...sometimes. For instance, when playing with my partner with either of us hosting the world, the one who wasn't hosting was constantly getting disconnected for no seeming reason. We had played other games with Peer to Peer networking before and had zero issues, in fact this was the first time we had ever had issues like this with a game. But then when our friend was the host and we connected to her world we had less issues. There were still moments where it seemed like the connection was having issues but overall it was better.

Now, I hear you say, doesn't that mean it's the fault of one of our computers? Normally I would say yes but when other games work and this one doesn't? Yeah that's not the computers fault that's the game. Thankfully there was a hotfix patch recently that seems to have at least kept us from constantly disconnecting but we still get symbols that pop up in the upper left corner, one that is a standard connection bar graph and another that looks like a voice wave line (no idea what that symbol means) that you can see in my combat video in the last section or my screenshot above. It's confusing and if you're wanting to play Hytale with some friends be ready for possible disconnections in this early stage of development. Hopefully it continues to get improved with each patch.

The Conclusion

Despite being in early access there's actually a lot currently in Hytale. Some of the things I haven't engaged with yet are farming, anything to do with animals, unlocking Memories (only just did that last night and I still don't really understand it), exploring into caves, fighting more difficult enemies, and even just going around the map more than just what is directly around me. The developers intend on introducing a lot more things (including things that presumably will come like baby animals aging up into adult animals), which you can tell because in the fancy Forgotten Temple area that you get to through a portal near your original spawn there are some really fancy buildings that each have an under construction sign at their entrance. The game is definitely just starting out but there is far more here than there was in Minecraft at the start and what is here is just far more interesting than what I have ever played in Minecraft. Plus there are mods and if you dont' know how much I love mods then go ahead and read about it here.

Basically, if you’ve enjoyed Minecraft in the past, I’d keep your eye on Hytale. It’s got a ton going for it, it’ll be getting further updates as time goes on and, best of all, it’s just a lot more fun to play. The biggest downside is honestly, for me, that it’s not on Steam. Steam is a great platform and it would be helpful not just for me to capture screenshots and footage but also because I could play it on my Legion Go or my partner could play it on their Steam Deck. My hope is that they eventually make the jump to Steam so that it’s not just a PC only game that has its own client, but who knows.

I have really enjoyed what I’ve played in Hytale, I’ve loved how improved it feels versus Minecraft. I can’t wait to keep playing it and seeing how it grows and develops as it is still in Early Access and, if you like Minecraft, I implore you to play Hytale eventually. I almost guarantee you will enjoy it.

Meow,

Cat