Hytale honcho says early access will be $20 because 'charging more didn’t feel right': He doesn't think the game is good yet, but 'my team and I will push hard to make it good, then great'

Hytale is saved, yes, but there's still a long way to go. The ambitious Minecraft-inspired sandbox RPG was canceled by Riot after developers "couldn’t bring Hytale to life in a way that truly delivered on its promise," , and its new goal is to deliver "the original vision for Hytale," from before it turned into a sprawling seven-year project. Hypixel founder Simon Collins-Laflamme said in a post on X that original vision comes with a relatively humble price tag: $20, or "as aggressively low as possible."

As Laflamme notes in his post, the game effectively lost four years of development as the build the new team is working with is quite old. But the restart is also an opportunity to cultivate good will for a project that's mostly languished in the public eye for the better part of a decade: "Charging more didn’t feel right. I don’t think the game is good yet. My team and I will push hard to make it good, then great. The vision is clear and progress is fast."

Really fast, in fact. The new team released 16 minutes of new footage a single day after reclaiming the old build from Riot, and despite some hand-wringing about it being "raw and broken" it seems quite good for a game that had every right to look pretty busted, given the messy context leading up to its impending release.

Granted, there will be the increasingly standard suite of special editions for those who want to show a little extra support, but $20 is still a pretty agreeable price point; it's about as much as Vintage Story, the other snazzy Minecraft-like turning heads these days. As for when early access will begin, a recent blog post from the dev team states it's "coming in the next few days."

I'm just happy to see the game might actually release one of these days. Hytale isn't the first voxel-based RPG to win me over with a tantalizing concept, and let me tell you, that story doesn't always end well.