I don't want to sound negative, but I am going to sound negative.

That gameplay demo was really boring, other than incredibly laborious battles, all that happened was a few trees getting chopped down.

Not trying to be negative, but it kinda just looked like Minecraft with a high res texture pack. Is there any thing substantially different?

So happy to see the game is not dead.

Combat and movement look fun and satisfying, graphics look amazing. So many moody areas, from gritty snowscape to colorful caves. Mojang could learn a thing or five from this trailer.

I do hope there will be more breadth of gameplay especially on the creative side so those promising exploration mechanics do not feel stale after a few hours of running around and blasting skeletons. That's one thing mojang does get right, if anything they have too much breadth and not enough depth.

Not sure about the ease of movement when scaling multiple blocks. Figuring it how to get from point A to point B with the limited movement options is a core part of most Minecraft gameplay loops, especially when caving and/or fighting. Seems they made up for it with good fighting mechanics, but they will have to make up for it in the other gameplay loops as well.

Either way I wish them the best and hope they light a fucking fire underneath mojang's ass.

EDIT:

This is the original legacy engine from the 2018 trailer, running on a four-year-old build as we push Hytale forward again.

Now hold the fuck up. What do you mean this is the 2018 engine? What the fuck have they been doing the past 7 years? Did they rewrite a whole new engine for no good reason? It looks fucking beautiful and seems to run great! I'm sure they had their reasons, and I don't think we can draw accurate conclusions by speculating, but the insider perspective on the development cycle must be absolutely wild.

EDIT2: Okay their blog post explains quite a bit more. Seems to paint a picture that Riot wanted the engine to be cross-platform (makes sense for consoles) and they could not make it work with a full rewrite away from their otherwise functional Java/C# engine. Kind of a crazy play on Riot's part to make Java/C# devs and former minecraft modders write a modern game engine from scratch in C++ if that's the case. Probably a tough lesson to learn for everyone involved. If only they could learn from an incredibly popular voxel-based building/aventure game that went through the exact same engine rewrite away from a GC VM language and faced similar struggles.

As a PC player, great news that they're sticking to .NET and Java. It will make modding much easier.

Just play Vintage story at this point. The development of this has been such a dumpster fire in terms of how the project has been handled from a top level from the very beginning that I don‘t have any hopes it will release in a decent state under its new old owner.

I do like the combat and atmosphere but that's about all the videos showed and I can't be impressed by that. Only combat and atmosphere is not a reason to play a game. There needs to be a purpose and I didn't see that.

For example in Vintage story survival is the purpose to play the game. You need to go out and find food or you're going to starve. You need to build farms because the vicinity of your base will eventually run out of easy to access food sources and you'll starve. You need to build storage pots because your food can spoil and go to waste. You need to build a cellar because you need to store food for the winter. In Vintage story you go exploring because you have a reason to explore. There is always something to do and getting to the point where you actually have nothing to improve is like hundreds of hours away.

That is what was kinda missing from Minecraft. Once you're past surviving the reasons to explore drastically drop off. And based on this video it seems like Hytale will run into the same issue as Minecraft. You end up with a nice looking world and interesting combat but with very little reason to go explore or fight.

Wasn't that game cancelled?

Happy about this. Been checking it every few months since it was announced, and the cancellation felt really shitty. It seems like it will be playable by the end of the year!