I like Hytale. I like how it plays smoother and weightier than Minecraft, while matching the explorative highs of creeping through an infested cave or stumbling upon some ancient, unplundered ruin. I like how it runs on the Steam Deck without trying to. And I like the pace at which it’s being updated: one substantial patch per week, at the current rate.
You could argue, fairly, that regular content injections are vital for an early access game that’s accessible as early as Hytale is. Likeable or not, its sense of purpose is currently driven entirely by the primate-brain desire to ascend through rare mineral tiers and upgrade workbenches, with the promised RPG-style adventure mode a distant prospect at best. I don’t mind waiting, or even playing, in the meantime – the most interesting thing about a game is rarely its state of completion. I just wish the unfinishedness wasn’t proclaimed quite so loudly, by an arsenal of cheerily ironic Work In Progress signs, inside Hytale itself.
Depicting a hardhatted forest goblin, WIP signs can be found wherever Hytale wants to tease a future feature that it hasn’t yet got up and running in the current build. They’re marginally preferable to the usual early access tactic of just slapping “Coming soon” text in the UI, by virtue of them being physical objects you can – with a mod – craft yourself before self-deprecatingly placing one in front of your own handbuilt survivalist hut. Otherwise, they exist to provoke disappointment. Fling open the doors of a chanced-upon sanctuary, or uncover the entrance to a subterranean dungeon, or go pretty much anywhere in the Forgotten Temple hub zone, and you’re met not by adventure but two wooden planks with some paint on them.
This is unpleasant, in a game where exploration and discovery are (if by the absence of more organised questing) its two greatest strengths. I’m only a few hours in and I’ve already tired of the buildup-and-deflation routine of finding a tasty-looking structure that ends up being closed for construction. Such is the letdown imposed by that mouthless WIP imp that my reservoir of goodwill towards Hytale would, surely, have been drained less by that structure never having been there to start with. Is it not better to let a player wander around empty woodland for ten minutes before they start thinking there’s nothing to do there, than to plonk a sign down and remove all doubt?
In fairness, balancing expectation management with development realities is something the makers of early access games have been struggling with for years. To my knowledge, a consensus has never formed on which of these two evils – teasing the unfinished, or leaving things out entirely – is the lesser one. I also accept that what I’m proposing, where planned but incomplete features go unhinted at, is riskier from a business standpoint: early access adopters may abandon a game if its future additions remain unclear, and WIP signs can serve as in-game IOUs, a reassuringly physical record of the promise that more game is on the way. An honest admission, too, that whatever a sign represents isn’t currently ready.
Litter the world with them, though, and they can also act as reminders that the game you really want doesn’t yet exist. Which isn’t a ruinous state of affairs in itself, particularly if what’s already there is enjoyable on its own. Hytale, again, often is. But even that enjoyment involves some suspension of disbelief, some willingness to put aside what-if thoughts and focus entirely on the game’s present condition. That’s a lot harder when it’s repeatedly making apologies, however cutesy, for its missing pieces.