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Someone Check Hell Freezes Because 2010s Voxel RPG Block World Is Back
Is this real life? Twelve years ago, in a very different PC gaming landscape where voxels were just becoming a popular genre, a separate indie project called Cube World caused quite a stir. Similar to Minecraft, but more RPG-oriented, development videos posted to YouTube attract tens or even hundreds of thousands of views. It went silent for five years until 2014, when it made slow but steady progress. When it suddenly returns and releases, well, Cube World turns out to be… pretty bad.
That anticlimax seemed to seal the end of the Cube World story, but here we are back to the early 2000s.Blockworld is back, with a new trailer and a new website, developer Wolfram von Funck briefly described its return. It seems to be in the spirit that Cube World has always been, emphasizing the use of procedural generation to create variety.
“The biggest change I’m working on is the programming model,” von Funck said. “All creatures in the world, including players, NPCs, pets, are now procedurally generated, so basically every creature is unique. No part of the character is modeled by hand, not hair, face, or hands — everything is algorithmically generated.”
This new version of the game, which he calls Cube World Omega, is built on a new Vulkan graphics engine. The name sounds a little bragging on the surface, but it’s actually a reference to Cube World’s alpha, which is a bit of a pain for people who followed the game years ago. Before his five-year sabbatical, von Funck released an alpha version of Cube World with some RPG basics in play, including character progression and skill trees. When it returned, the release version surprisingly stripped those features. It is no longer the role-playing game that people have long followed and dreamed of playing.
It seems that von Funck did not completely abandon the original idea. “I chose the project name Cube World Omega as a reference to Cube World Alpha because I wanted to develop it in the spirit of that version, but with a new engine and new features,” he said.
What really makes my head spin is that this new post doesn’t mention a release date or how much work has been done. It’s vague but hopeful, like 2011’s Cube World from long ago. But this time around, Dragon Quest Builders 2 is out there, and it’s kind of the full package Cube World has always wanted.