The HYTOPIA Closed Beta has been delayed for the foreseeable future due to “game performance inconsistency between computers of different hardware.”
Great things take time, a lot of time. So it isn’t all that surprising that there has been a delay, as games especially are notorious for being delayed time and time again (hello GTA 6, Ashes of Creation, Starfield, Riot MMO).
One of the main issues of this “delay” is that it was yet another instance of poor communication from the team to the community. ArkDev relayed a few weeks ago that the Closed Beta release “internal target date” was delayed from April 7th to April 21st. While this wasn’t great to hear, it was something for the community to expect and get excited about.
The issue was the community took this as a concrete release date and ran with it for weeks without any team member interference to manage expectations as the April 21st was simply an “internal target” set by the team.
New Team, Who Dis?
In very alarming news, the team announced that in January that the former client team, consisting of highly-experienced and expert-level Minecraft developers, including Miles, were let go and ushered in a new client team.
This new client team is more specialized in Rust development and has “15+ years of game engine development experience, ex-senior/staff roblox, expert vulkan graphics api developers, senior eng from one of the biggest Rust built games to date – Starbound, and more.”
The Great Refactoring
The primary function of bringing in the new client team was a complete refactoring of the codebase.
Refactoring is a crucial process in the software development lifecycle that allows you to maintain and enhance the quality of the code. By refactoring your code, you can improve its readability, reduce complexity, and make it easier to understand and maintain.
The initial client team was hired for their expertise in Minecraft development, and the plan was to get them familiar with Rust. The pool of expert Minecraft and Rust developers was so small that the team thought that this was the best course to take.
However, this became an issue when Minecraft domain expertise was less integral than utilizing best Rust practices and maintainability. This is where Rust expertise was needed and thus, a whole restructuring of the team itself.
This restructuring process was not something absolutely necessary at the time, as the team could have ran with it and pushed a Beta release. However, the team is laser-focused on developing a top-notch product, and saw these current issues of maintainability as potentially damaging in the future – so they decided to nip it in the bud.
Weekly Dev-Logs Returning
With the most recent announcement covering the delay of the Closed Beta, Temptranquil announced that next week they will be starting a weekly dev-log written by the internal team for the community to be able to track the client progress.
In addition to progress being made on the game client, Temptranquil also said that surrounding systems are also seeing amazing progress including that we “can likely expect a marketplace, inventory, cosmetic system, and more in the release following this one (we’re thinking mid-2024, but no solidified dates yet).”
Avatars and Gray Boys Servers
Pew pew is returning. Upon the release of the Closed Beta, the Avatars and Gray Boys servers will be the two featured experiences.
Avatars Server
The HYTOPIA Avatars server is described as a “elimination-style free for all arena with guns” (think unreal tournament)”.
Here’s a small teaser video of the Avatars server posted on the EntityBuilds X account:
This seems like it will be a fun FPS-style game similar to what the old Gray Boys Arena experience from the NFT Worlds days. We can expect different weapons and armor items, as well as utilizing our own unique Avatars.
After a year of pretty much radio-silence on Avatars, staking was released on April 15th, and the announcement of the Avatars server shortly thereafter. This is great news and The13Ninjas seems very committed to providing additional utilities and value to the Avatars in the future.
Gray Boys “Mothership” Server
The Gray Boys server is described as a “factions with futuristic weapons” style game. Expect a shooter-style game where you can team up, wage wars, form alliances and more.
Gray Boys was the first PFP collection by the NFT Worlds team, and has fallen on some dark times in the recent years with lack of development and seemingly ostracized from the main projects. This has changed recently as the Gray Boys discord merged with the HYTOPIA Discord, and the DAO continues to add more Worlds and Node keys to their holdings as they work towards a $TOPIA “lottery-style staking model”.
Greatness Awaits
While it’s hard to ignore the obvious that the HYTOPIA team has struggled with communications in the past, this is something they are aware of and actively working on as they are full-steam on building the best product they can.
“Hard-dates” will no longer be passively tossed around, and in the future no release dates will be announced without certainty.
Delays suck, for the community and the team alike. Unforeseen issues will always happen as game development is incredibly complex, even without adding the additional complexities of blockchain integration.
But one thing remains true, this team is not looking to release a subpar product. All of these delays are important to improving the core product to a point to where it can be released in the most polished and working version possible – along with other core features.
And this is when the marketing shall commence.
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