Join the Development of Opentale – A Spiritual Successor to Hytale

Am I getting this correctly (I just watched the trailer): HyTale is a fully destructible sandbox + MMO / RPG / Adventure + social game + it has lots of modding etc?

And am I getting this correctly: OpenTale is essentially HyTale but by volunteers?

I don't think that scope is possible or even desirable. Why do you need to build a tower to heaven, an everything-game?

1. Fundamentally, minecraft-like sandbox worlds will NEVER be suitable for adventures / RPGs. A world that is fully destructible can't have any form of meaningful or plausible inhabitants. In a world that does not inherently impose a society on you, you will not have a society. Without perceived society, you have no stakes in the adventure. If you can just fundamentally and arbitrarily reshape the landscape, there is just no way for the game to assign meaning to any place, because it would have to extract player intent from the ever-changing shape of the terrain. Simply technically impossible. So it could not place a society in that world to make the adventure come to life. Additionally, an endless minecraft-like world has no meaningful places, each location is entirely interchangeable with every other location, except for its specific appearance, but they still all fundamentally look the same and have the same properties, gameplay/mechanics-wise. So pick and choose either genre, but not both, and you may have a chance at succeeding.
2. Social games are not the same kind of thing as a collective adventure world. I can hardly imagine how both would mesh well and even if you synthesised it, how it would actually be fun to enjoyers of either genre. Giving VR Chat an MMORPG mode would not improve the social experience nor make it a good MMORPG. Social games like that need everyone constrained in a small location and let them role play freely, where the role playing is that you interact with each other and come up with social situations to act out. These are highly casual. But in an (MMO)RPG, the role playing means you play the role of a character in an adventure, which implies long-lasting commitment to see the story through. Long-lasting relationships, etc. So it also tries to mesh a casual genre with no long-term commitment, with a genre that requires long-term commitment of everyone to form an immersing, long-term experience. Additionally, (MMO)RPGs sadly devolved into being fundamentally about maxing out your own character, and cooperation is just an economic numbers game for the sake of more resources and more levels or items. These are fundamentally selfish, and therefore also directly oppose the social game thing. Granted, it's not impossible to make an (MMO)RPG that's not like that, and actually pulls of the initial dream of a collective adventure world, but nobody has done it so far, that I know of.
3. Modding also doesn't fit the “shared adventure world” goal, because it splits it into many individual servers with different settings. It maybe does fit the social game genre well, though. I don't have enough insight into that genre, though.

I see fundamental philosophical problems that make the vision described in the trailor impossible. Unless you have solutions to those problems, I don't think you will get anywhere. What is the target group, and what does the game offer to that target group (and I don't mean features or mechanics)?

Is it for people who seek to go on an immersive collective adventure in a fantasy world? To build a sense of community and kinship in a shared struggle? Is it to just hang out and have casual fun with strangers in a virtual amusement park? Is it to simply pass time with pals in a game? Is it to be a sandbox for building big structures?

What fundamental itch does it aim to scratch? If it doesn't have one, it will stay a vague everything-game and pull off nothing specific well. A vision without a clear focus and clear and tangible requirements / expectations will just turn into a confused busywork kind of situation, where everyone works in separate directions, towards some aspect that he imagines would make the game better.

These are all fundamental problems I found with the project within minutes of watching the trailer. If you do not have a creative lead that gives a clear and constrained vision (feature-wise) and clearly identifiable goals and requirements (player experience-wise), you will never succeed. And even then, if you had such a vision and clear aim that you want to accomplish, you still need the people working on it to submit to that. Is your team even sharing the same goal and understanding of this vague and broad project vision? Volunteer-driven projects can never succeed if there isn't a clear and shared vision. Most collaborative volunteer projects fail over lacking social cohesion or commitment / long-term incentives, and also over differing visions by the participants.

@RmbRT Thank you for the response, this is a very insightful and well-thought-out message. I'm HyDefy, the founder of Opentale.

We are striving to make the team as organized as possible and to provide clear direction, but we're also open to suggestions and restructuring in these early stages. Right now, we are trying to get as many contributors as possible (dedicated or otherwise) and hope anyone with interest will at least reach out and ask questions. While we recognize that a large open-source endeavor isn't for everyone, allow me to briefly explain more about Opentale.

• We are not Hytale.

We aren't working against the clock to keep the lights on, and we don't need a successful launch. Unlike Hytale, Opentale is going to release messy, it's going to get immediate feedback, and it's going to allow anyone who is passionate about the project to propose changes and to then help in making them. Opentale simply aims to take a passionate community and turn it into a passion-project.

• Why is there a passionate community?

What Hytale got right wasn't introducing RPG elements or fancy combat. It was hiring a portion of the Minecraft community and fixing/ tuning every little thing that players actually care about. To a normal viewer, it looks like another Minecraft clone with RPG elements slapped on and a faithful texture pack; however, to an avid Minecraft fan, it is the most exciting game teaser of all time.

We at Opentale don't aim to create arbitrary quests or become an MMORPG. Our current goal is to deliver a sandbox game with great art, great gameplay, and great QOL that can be built on and branched off of by anyone forever.

That sounds much more reasonable, yeah. I got really disenchanted with minecraft when I came back to it after a few years. It really isn't a fun game on its own, and only really fun when you sit there with a bunch of pals in teamspeak or something and play alongside each other. Because without the other players livening up the world, the world of minecraft is entirely dead. It's an near-infinite expanse of terrain, and resources. And even the villages don't really hold any meaning, if you can find any, lol. It's just you and an endless grind for resources and for exploration. Even on hard mode without respawns etc., it only gets so exciting for a while. Then it just turns into a chore and you wonder when your run finally ends. I personally would have liked if minecraft had something like a society that you're subject to, in the confines of which you have to navigate your actions, but that is inherently incompatible with how deep the sandbox nature of it goes. Maybe if the world was smaller, and traversing places was harder, so that going out is dangerous and you can't cover much ground quickly, in other words, if the world was grittier, and you were somewhat bound to the place you are at, and have to struggle constantly to even make ends meet, I think then it would be much more interesting, and even every-day survival would be an actual adventure. And then a village would be an important place to defend, because it has fields and crops and all that. And the villagers could be something other than merchants that rip you off with ridiculous prices. etc.

P.S.: This discussion may be of interest to you guys. It goes quite a bit into the depth of trying to find the soul of game genres, and at the linked part, trying to find out what makes a game's world great. Later on it devolves into terrain generation stuff which is probaly not that relevant to a minecraft-like game. Or maybe it is, idk.

@OpenTale I am an artist and composer and can provide a custom score in any style.

Check out some samples here. https://warburtonband.com/sync-portfolio

Id be happy to open a discussion about how I can help your project!
Don't hesitate to send me an email at warburtontheband1@gmail.com

Hi! I'm a fairly new dev but got a decent skill set under my belt and know where to go when I don't know something. What engine are you using? I predominantly use Godot, would we be making a custom engine like Hytale did or using something like Unity?

@quarkyy Hi we are working with Bevy/Rust.

Hey bros of Opentale, my name is Brendon G., and I'm a friend from Brazil. I used to work as an illustrator, and I've always loved the idea behind Hytale. I’m not looking for a job, you don’t need to pay me. But if you have a Discord or any kind of community where you're organizing the project, and if you’re doing something like “volunteer task boards,” I’d be really happy to join and contribute. I can’t stay fully connected to any project right now (since I already have a job and a family), but every now and then I get some free time, which I usually spend drawing, writing, or working on small game projects. So if you’re in need of illustrations and are open to volunteers, I’d love to help. All I need is a place to follow the process and see what art tasks are needed at the moment — then, whenever I have a window of time, I can paint something for you to use as you wish. Again, I’m not asking for money. Just having my name listed under "collaborators" or in the special thanks would be more than enough for me. Let’s make something awesome together!

Here are some of my artworks:
https://brendong.artstation.com/albums/9936449

Hello. My name's William. I was quite sad to hear about the cancellation of Hytale so I'm happy to hear a open source project is being created, with high chances of staying alive even if it's slow going. I'm a developer, not too much real world experience, spent some time as a web developer for SVU in Virginia, but my main focus is with Unity Engine/C# and Javascript. I also know some python. I've spent the last four years playing around in Unity off and on, working on various hobby projects, so I'm fairly comfortable with game development. I'd love if I could help out this project in any way possible, as it's quite hard to make a game myself, but helping this happen for real would be great.

My github is https://github.com/dualonn if you want to see some of my projects, most of the unity ones I never uploaded though.

I have no experience in rust or bevy but I'm willing to learn.

Rust sounds extremely painful, especially when you try to tightly control what the CPU does, and how memory is laid out. I have to occasionally work in rust at my job and it is killing me. It's like a padded cell in the asylum, plus the straightjacket. And while they say it's all “0-cost abstraction”, what they mean is ”if the optimiser takes care of it properly, the redundant security checks get removed". But the optimiser quickly gives up on even quite simple functions. And to you write code that compiles quickly and optimises well, you have to use a lot of unsafe statements, at which point you might as well not use rust to begin with. And Rust also is extremely resistant to code refactorings and architectural changes / prototyping, due to the excessively strict borrow checker. Here is a piece of advice from people who actually used rust for real game development for years: LogLog Games — Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years. I highly recommend that you reconsider that choice. Other languages are easier to work with, easier to prototype in, compile quicker, and make it easier to write fast code in.

@Dualonn We are using Bevy/Rust, but you'd be more than welcome to come take a look at what's been happening so far! I have background in c++, java, c#, and python personally, but the team has agreed on Rust for the time being.

@RmbRT Rust/Bevy is the best route we have found to using a Vulkan backend, and we believe this will help to future-proof the project for many years to come.

Since we are using Bevy, it is unlikely that we will be quite as low-level as carefully controlling what happens where inside of the computer, rather we are primarily making higher-level decisions like file formats, in addition to optimizations like greedy meshing and LOD.

@undefined Hello, I am Jacob and I am a prospective composer/sfx sound designer. When Hytale was canceled, I was wondering if a project like that would ever get made as many people were disappointed by it. Your project does sound interesting and I would be happy to help you create immersive worlds by using music and sound effects. I have experience on teams and have won music jams and traditional game jams. My discord nickname is ThatGermanyGuy337 and my email is jacobb10010@gmail.com if you would like to contact me.

@fakejake569@gmail.com Sounds great! We have some amazing programmers, artists, and composers already, but we still need to get SFX started for our initial release.