I admit I did a double-take last night when Wolfram von Funck aka Wollay’s Twitter account whirred to life after nearly four years of silence with a new Cube World announcement, and not just because we randomly mentioned it on the podcast earlier this month.
Readers will almost certainly recall that Picroma’s Cube World was a Minecraft-esque in-development multiplayer title with plans for an MMO whose paid alpha stole everyone’s heart way back in 2013. It’s hard to overstate how bizarrely popular this thing became almost overnight, but we also must point out that it was quickly swallowed by development hell and a DDOS attack that drove the creator offline. Wollay would pop up occasionally (he did it in 2015, 2016, and 2017) with updates, and back in 2019, he finally put the game into a closed beta on Steam called Cube World 2.0. At some point, it must have left beta because now it’s a $19.99 game with no caveats at all – except for the negative steam reviews declaring it abandoned.
Well, Wollay is back again now, according to his tweet and dev blog, and he’s working on a new game in the Cube World universe, but it’s not the original Cube World: It’s called Cube World Omega, and it features a new engine based on Vulkan with environmental effects, algorithmically generated procedural models for players and NPCs and gear, and a GUI revamp. “I’m also planning to bring back experience, leveling and skill trees for this version,” he says.
And that’s it, apart from a batch of new screenshots and a video showing off the game’s new environments and physics. There’s no release window and no way to test or buy early or anything, which is honestly probably for the best under the circumstances.
