Hytale is off to a strong start in early access, securing two more years of development time in preorders, becoming Twitch’s most-watched game on launch day, and responding quickly to community requests.
It’s also received a few big updates in its first couple weeks: last week’s patch added fun stuff like underground dinosaurs, and a second update this week added a grimoire that allows players to become necromancers.
Pump the brakes a bit, though: over on Reddit, the new necromancy system wasn’t well-received, and many Hytale players took the update as a sign that Hytale’s magic and mana system, which is not in the game yet, may be cause for concern. The backlash was loud enough that Hypixel CEO Simon Collins-Laflamme hopped onto Twitter to calm everyone down.
“Just want to add a note, the grimoire is NOT the magic system at all,” Collins-Laflamme posted.
“Seeing reddit go full panic mode thinking this is what we have in mind for magic is kinda insane, this is just a random drop fun item, it will evolve over time,” he said.
I haven’t tried out the necromancy system myself yet, but from what I’ve gathered, players first have to gather physical components by killing skeletons, and defeat a skelly boss which may or may not drop a grimoire. Then they need to place five piles of bones to summon their undead army, which will last for five minutes.
The issue seems to be that the grimoire itself is consumed upon use—which means you’ll need to source another by defeating another boss if you want to raise more undead.
Summoning can be a really enjoyable playstyle, but having the object that summons your minions being consumed on a single use (along with spending the bones as the physical component) feels like a pretty high price instead of, perhaps, a cooldown period like you might see with a summoning staff or spell.
Collins-Laflamme pointed out that this system is just a starting point, not emblematic of how magic will work in the final product.
“We are just introducing fun random items to add variety to the game. The staves, totems and grimoires are all ass by design, we will regroup them all into a proper system later on, but for now you get to play around with it, mod it, etc,” he said.
He also added that “we are doing this to unlock modders and also give players a sense of what we can do with the game in the future. ‘Hey look we can support summoning, now imagine what else we can do!'”
As for why the system feels underpowered—the summoned skeletons don’t last long, and while they attack player enemies, they don’t draw aggro, meaning they’re not useful for crowd control—Collins-Laflamme said “The grimoire has many possible exploits so it’s quite restrictive for now. Same with totems and other magic items. All temporarily bad to avoid some weird meta.”
In other words, early access be early access-ing. At the same time, early access is also the time for player feedback, and it sounds like Hypixel got quite a lot on this new feature.
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