Who here recalls Hytale? We first started reporting on this one back in 2018 and have seen it pop up on the wider radar a couple of times, namely when its developer was acquired by Riot Games and it elected to reel back regular update posts so it could showcase more progress. It’s been long enough that we’ve wondered Whatever Happened To this sandbox spinoff of a Minecraft server, so let’s look through its news feed, shall we?
Development update posts did indeed scale back from monthly ones to semi-seasonal ones, starting with the summer of 2021; those posts recounted revamps to combat, movement additions like mantling, new and revamped regions, advanced building tools, and an engine upgrade. In fact the engine upgrade appears to be the most time-consuming portion of recent development, but the devs continue to herald progress on that front.
All of this is to say that Hytale is not close to finished yet: The earlier referenced summer blog noted that the devs have “several more years of work” to complete before release, but also proclaimed that the team would be “mindful of the dangers of ‘scope creep’, and [is] working to ensure that [developer Hypixel Studios] proceed with a strong sense of what ‘done’ means.” The devs also expressed a desire to launch in 2023 at the time, but obviously that hasn’t happened.
In terms of what’s next for this year, the last dev blog from this past December points out continued efforts to port over prior work to the new engine, followed by vague plans to begin playtesting its competitive and creative gameplay pillars in the second half of 2025.
