Hytale First Impressions: How a "Dead" Game Became 2026’s First Hit
- Antal Bokor
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
It’s been a crazy rollercoaster for Hytale. This Minecraft-meets-RPG style game was declared dead in June 2025, when Riot Games dissolved the studio. Despite its trailer on YouTube getting 60+ million views, Hytale has been mired by changes in focus during development, and eventually stalled out altogether. Then, in November of last year, original founder Simon Collins-Laflamme bought the rights back from Riot Games to save the project he started.
A few short months later we have the game in our hands. And despite the developers saying that it “isn’t good yet” (a warning they issue before you buy the game), it seems plenty good to me–and the 420,000 people who watched it on Twitch on launch day. For a non-Steam launch, hitting a rumored 2.8 million logins in 24 hours is record-breaking.
If you’re not familiar with it, Hytale is basically Minecraft but with an emphasis on being a role-playing game, with actual dungeons and loot progression, and more care taken to how it feels to interact with the world.
In fact, Hytale started with a group of Minecraft modders called Hypixel, running one of the biggest Minecraft servers in the world (regularly hitting 100,000 concurrent players). But in 2014, Mojang changed their EULA, crashing the server's revenue by 85% overnight. That was the wake-up call they needed to build their own platform.
Hytale began development in secret around 2015, and in 2018 they released a trailer that accumulated 30 million views in less than a month. There was definitely interest in a newer, better Minecraft. But after being acquired by Riot Games in 2020, development stalled when they spent millions trying—and failing—to rewrite the game in C++. In fact, Hytale as it is today is back to a hybrid engine (C# client, Java server), so most of the code is probably more than four years old at this point.
I spent a few hours on launch day getting a feel for Hytale, and I’ve had nothing but a great first impression. Hytale is a gorgeous game, and that’s mostly because of its art direction. I had a few “whoa, that’s a cool vista” moments in Minecraft, but I had at least a dozen yesterday just running around to see as much as I could of the world.
One of the biggest improvements over Minecraft that I experienced in my first few hours is just how much better everything feels, especially combat. Combat and harvesting in Minecraft always felt floaty, like your character isn’t really ever coming into contact with anything. Combat in Hytale is punchy and tactile. It actually feels like you’re making contact, which is a surprisingly huge upgrade to those just used to the air-swish feeling of combat in Minecraft. The weapons I found were also fun and varied with multiple different attacks.
While crafting in Minecraft is mostly done from a single crafting table with recipes from memory, Hytale takes a role-playing game route. Recipes are locked behind progression, with items requiring specialized work stations to create. So even if you know how to make a better weapon from memory, you won’t be able to do it unless you find the recipe for it in the world.
Hytale is definitely an Early Access game–there are entire sections of the game that I found walled off with “work in progress” signs. My computer also chugged in some parts, so there is definitely room for optimization. But everything that was available was compelling and fun.
Hytale launches with two of its three main game modes: Adventure, its marquee RPG mode, isn’t available at launch, but it launches with Exploration mode and Creative mode. Exploration is a survival-focused prototype of the future "Adventure" story mode. Creative mode is just what you think: it lets you build and explore without limitations–or, I should say, much fewer limitations. Exploration is like Survival mode in Minecraft—”build, craft, survive” as you “Explore an Echo of Orbis.”
It seems like Hytale has been worth the wait. It’s definitely making waves on Twitch and bringing in millions of players. The developers say they have secured funding for the next few years of development. And even if the developers say the game “sucks” right now, I definitely recommend checking it out.