“When people have looked at Minecraft and tried to understand what it is, they’ve looked at Minecraft as this game,” says Aaron “Noxy” Donaghey. “And Minecraft isn’t just a game. Minecraft is a collection of different communities that have all done amazing things with it.”
Donaghey knows this better than most. He’s the content lead on the newly announced Hytale, and Hytale is being made by Hypixel, the company behind a massive set of Minecraft servers of the same name. They’re holders of several Guinness world records including “most popular independent server for a videogame” and “most popular Minecraft server network”. They’ve seen first-hand what players have done with Minecraft.
Jan 30, 2019 Published on Jan 29, 2019 After recreating Hytale in Minecraft for the first time, I received many suggestions in order to improve it. In this video, I incorporate some of those suggestions, along.
Plenty of other developers have had the idea of making a game like Minecraft but with a few tweaks, and many have failed. But it’s their experience that gives Hytale’s creators a chance of succeeding where others haven’t.
Hytale is being built to serve different kinds of player. There will be an adventure mode that’s basically an RPG complete with progression, story, and drop-in co-op. There will be minigames designed to handle large groups of players (many of them building on minigames already popular on the Hypixel servers). And there will be tools to let people make whatever they want, whether that’s the inevitable recreations of beloved fantasy settings or machinima or whatever else players dream up.
Hypixel know Minecraft well because they’ve stuck with it for a long time. They began as a mod collective before realising there was an audience for something more.
“Back then when the ‘let’s play’ stuff was kicking off, Minecraft YouTubers were a big thing and there was a huge demand for adventure maps,” says Simon Collins-Laflamme, Hypixel’s co-founder. “So we were focusing a lot on adventure maps with redstone mechanisms. We did a lot of boss fights and stuff and at some point we realised the players knew how to install the maps but they didn’t know how to find their friends.”
Making their own server to help connect players was the obvious next step, and it paid off. They knew people wanted spaces to congregate, but didn’t realise they’d arrive 4,000 at a time.
“If you looked at Steam back then we would have been top 20,” Simon says. “That’s when we realised, ‘Oh shit, this could be a big thing.’ So we started to work on the Hypixel Minecraft server a lot more.”
The next thing they focused on were minigames, intended as 30-minute PVP experiences players could mess about with while they were waiting for their friends. Modes like The Walls, in which teams have 15 minutes of preparation to craft weapons and construct fortresses before the barriers between them come down and battle commences. Or Bed Wars, in which players try to destroy each others’ beds in order to stop them from respawning, or UHC (Ultra Hardcore), which was basically a prototype battle royale right down to the 100 players and shrinking map. To Hypixel’s surprise, the minigames became more popular than the actual Minecraft servers.
“Around that period Minecraft itself started to hit its golden age in terms of the sheer number on Java Edition,” says Aaron, “it was just a huge amount, and then around the peak in 2015, 2016, we ended up with 65k concurrent players. Which was very much enough to be notable.”
The other thing that had occurred by this point was the EULA fiasco. To simplify it horrendously, Mojang threatened to enforce the terms of their licence to prevent the sale of gameplay-affecting items on Minecraft servers, players and server operators were upset, and Notch got so frustrated he tweeted to ask if anyone wanted to buy his share in Mojang. Microsoft were reading.
“Some of it wasn’t necessarily in line with what we would do,” Donaghey says of Mojang’s actions. “And obviously we’re very cosmetics-focused, we’re 100% cosmetics-focused, but it was definitely a huge reminder for us that, yes, you have this big community but you still exist within someone else’s playing field, right? And we wanted to build our own playing field.”
![Hytale minecraft server Hytale minecraft server](/uploads/1/2/5/2/125244097/674826434.jpg)
The other motivation to go their own way came from Turbo Kart Racer. A minigame that essentially recreated Mario Kart in Minecraft, Turbo Kart Racer struggled because it wasn’t possible to move the camera back far enough that players could consistently see when they were being hit. They’d spin out of control without knowing why, and assume it was a bug. With their own game, in their own engine, making something like Turbo Kart Racer won’t be a problem.
“Hytale gives us an opportunity to do games like that, that are more technically ambitious,” Donaghey says. “We can deliver those sort of experiences now because we have control of the camera, we have control of how the PVP works, we have control of all of those things.”
You can see that in the trailer where there’s a brief glimpse of a twin-stick shooter minigame with a top-down camera. There’s also a moment where someone creates their own movie in-game, moving a camera along rails. But it’s not camera placement that makes me think Hytale looks fun. It’s the moment the troll lifts up a lump of turf and yeets it at a hero on a horse, and the bit where a party of adventurers take on skeletons in a ruin with a combination of archery, spellcasting, and a swift shield to the bonce.
That’s adventure mode, which is basically D&D played with Minecraft – Donaghey even namechecks Neverwinter Nights as an influence – which is really all I want. I don’t imagine it’ll be for everyone, but no part of Hytale will. That’s the point.
When asked why the Hypixel servers were so popular, Simon calls it “the Disneyland effect”, and Donaghey explains.
“We actually looked a lot at Disneyland and how the park exists. If you think about the server at the minute there’s a main lobby, and then there’s these different branches of a tree. It’s not just the actual minigame experience itself that makes it popular, it’s hanging out and being with your friends.”
They’re aiming to do the same thing with Hytale. It’s not just Minecraft 2 they’re making, but the next hangout space. Just like Fortnite, which as this article explains is as much a place for teenagers to spend time together as it is a game, the aim is for Hytale to be different things for different people. If you’ve ever known the pain of all your game friends getting obsessed with one thing when you don’t care for it, you’ll understand the appeal of a space where you can be together as a group but also bounce between different modes of play as the mood takes you.
That’s something Hytale offers that other Minecraftbuts have tended to lack – with the exception of Roblox, which is quietly one of the most popular games in the world. The other thing is the built-in audience who are waiting to see what Hypixel do next. Those players don’t have to worry about their current online hangout space going away, however.
“We’re not gonna close our Minecraft server,” Donaghey says. “That Minecraft server still has a fully active team on there, the team size hasn’t even changed. Hytale’s been in development for two years alongside Minecraft. There’s not going to be any perceptible change on the Minecraft side of things.”
The money their Minecraft server has raised is what’s made Hytale possible, but there’s another source of funding as well, one they only finalised 15 minutes before our conversation: an investment deal with Riot and several ‘angel investors’. They went through with it so that, as Donaghey puts it, “we wouldn’t have to one day rely on crowdfunding, which is unreliable, or we wouldn’t have to do a preorder.”
Right now Hypixel have the money to make a game without having to rush (they haven’t announced a release date yet), and an audience waiting for it. It’s an enviable position for an independent game studio to be in.
Minecraft and Roblox have big targets painted on their backs, and Hytale is an arrow pointed at them. Hypixel Studios is unveiling Hytale, a new game that delivers a sandbox world and a blocky 8-bit art style.
The game comes from the creators of Hypixel, the world’s largest mod server. Hypixel Studios is building the game, with funding support from Riot Games and an advisory group of industry veterans.
The team behind the Hypixel server network, the world’s largest independent game server, has today announced the formation of Hypixel Studios, which is making the game.
Above: Hytale is a new open world adventure game.
“Founding Hypixel Studios is a huge step forward for our team, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Riot Games and our advisory group of investors,” said Simon Collins-Laflamme, cofounder of Hypixel Studios, in a statement. “We feel very lucky to have built relationships that not only fund the development of Hytale, but provide us with insight and advice that will be instrumental in making Hytale as good as it possibly can be.”
Hypixel Studios has been established in order to pursue the team’s goal of transitioning from a community mod team into a game development house. It has also announced its first project, Hytale, a sandbox role-playing game, a minigames platform, and a set of accessible tools that enable users to customize and create across all aspects of the game.
Development of Hytale began in 2015 and was initially supported by the success of the Hypixel mod server. Besides Riot Games, advisers and investors include:
Above: Hytale has a wide variety of activities do in a sandbox world.Anthony Borquez, university professor and video game entrepreneur
- Dennis Fong, entrepreneur and pro gamer “Thresh,” (He is investing personally, not as CEO of Plays.tv).
- Rob Pardo, veteran game designer at Bonfire Studios and former designer of World of Warcraft.
- Peter Levin, interactive media entrepreneur and investor. (He is investing personally, not in his role as an executive at Lionsgate).
- Jeff Lo, serial investor.
- Min Kim, game industry veteran and cofounder of Bonfire Studios.
“Since meeting the Hypixel team in 2016, we’ve been blown away by their support for their community, vision for the future of sandbox gaming, and belief in individual contributors working toward a common goal,” said Dylan Jadeja, president of Riot Games, in a statement. “Their ambition and commitment to quality gives us a ton of confidence, and from everything we’ve seen of Hytale, we haven’t been let down. Supporting Hypixel is also an opportunity to support a game that will reach players at multiple stages in their gaming journeys, across age groups, genres, and play styles. We can’t wait to dive into the world of Hytale.”
Above: Hytale will feature community servers and mini games.
Hypixel Studios has more than 40 developers around the world, all working on its first project.
“My fellow investors and I are always looking to find next generation game studios and IP that continue to push video game genres forward. We’re fascinated by amazing games that are grown from modding communities and we believe that Hypixel Studios are building something special that will contribute to the growing and evolving video game industry,” said Anthony Borquez, on behalf of the advisory group, in a statement.
The game features an open-world adventure mode featuring combat, crafting and construction for both solo players and groups. It also has a wide variety of online mini games including the power for players to create and share their own. And it has an accessible suite of tools that spans block-based construction, in-game scripting and movie-making, and the Hytale Model Maker — a browser-based modeling and animation toolkit.
The Hypixel server was established in April 2013 by Simon Collins-Laflamme and Philippe Touchette. It is the holder of four Guinness World Records including ‘most popular independent server for a videogame’ (with 64,533 concurrent players) and ‘most unique players logged into a Minecraft server’ (with 14.1 million players).