Cube World: Voxel Based Indie ARPG

[Metro]

Just another ten years until release!

 

[LESS T_T]

It's... coming?

 

[deama]

Wow, suprise? I thought this thing was dead back when I played the EA in... 2014??

 

[fabrulana]

Wow, suprise? I thought this thing was dead back when I played the EA in... 2014??

Yeah, thought so as well. I bought the alpha played a bit and then totally forgot about it. So will check it out again when I get my steam key.

 

[Infinitron]

https://wollay.blogspot.com/2019/09/dear-cube-world-community-i-think-this.html

Dear Cube World Community,

I think this is the right place for this. This is where it all started, where my little passion project came to life and became something much bigger.

Here is my explanation why everything took me so long, why there were no updates and so on...

When I released Cube World back in 2013 on our homepage, I was enthusiastic to finally share my game with you. It was a dream come true for me, I wanted to be a game developer since I was a kid.

As some of you might remember, we got DDoS'ed as soon as we opened the shop. It might sound silly, but this event traumatized me and kind of broke something inside me. I never told anyone about it, and I don't want to go into the details, but I'm dealing with anxiety and depression ever since. Social media didn't improve it, as you might imagine. I'm still not sure if it's a good idea to tell the world about it, but I wanted to give the fans an explanation.

There were several points in the past years where I considered releasing an update, but every time I was afraid it wasn't good enough. I'm also a bit pefectionist and it made me rework everything from scratch several times. The version I'm planning to release is basically Cube World 2.0. There are still many things I'd like to add in the future, but I think the version is already fun.

I hope some of you will enjoy the upcoming release. I'm currently working on the new homepage and still want to add some lore-related things to the game before the release.

Wollay

 

[Metro]

AAAAAAOW MAAAAAAAI FUKKIN GAWD!!!!!!!!!! ITZZZZZZZZ CUMMING!!!

 

[Roguey]

Looks pretty hipster. I can dig it.

Really?

I also wouldn't play any old platformer without the use of save states because fuck hour long muscle-memory tests, I only put up with that shit because I was bored.

Jeez, calm down, okay.

 

[Ranarama]

I wonder if the guy realised that he just needs to fake enough gameplay to get Epic interested to make some quick dollars?

 

[LESS T_T]

September 30th (Beta for all alpha owners at September 23rd):

 

[Metro]

Great game or greatest game?

 

[ItsChon]

This is actually incline. Too bad none of my friends play games.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

This is actually incline. Too bad none of my friends play games.

I have no friends, so I have no problems.

 

[Bara]

Like I've only touched it 50 minutes so I could be wrong but apparently experience is completely gone. Same with the skill tree?

From what I heard you do have levels but to raise it you have to collect gear and artifacts that act as permanent buffs. I didn't get to confirm that first artifact quest I was on I couldn't reach as the stair case was blocked off due to procedural generation.

Also supposedly every time you cross a region your gear gets downgraded when you reach adjacent regions. Also your travel unlocks like glider and boat have to be re-unlocked every region.

Only positive from my initial impressions is music is catchy. But eh maybe it could be fun for a mindless loop and treating every zone transition as a new adventure but I really have my doubts.

 

[Lord Commissar Alexer]

Uff, region lock.
Yeah, no thanks.

 

[HeyCheckOutHowHardICanPee]

Every piece of loot is just the same four stats with no other effects.
Every artifact is just a passive boost to non-combat stats.
No levels, no skilltrees, no new classes, no new skills.
Everything promised in the twitter updates is, to say the least, not present.

Quite frankly and possibly the most boring game I've played in my lifetime, especially considering half of the times you'll walk into a new region, you're forced to start from scratch or explode everything in 1 shot with your weapon+ and fall asleep from boredom.
90% of your gametime will consist of walking unless you're a mage who can teleport to a cliff and glide off of it.
Once you've played trough one region, you've played trough everything the game has to offer.

If you've unironically waited 6 years for this, I actually suggest that you blank it out entirely.

 

[LESS T_T]

Out now:



About 30 minutes from release, over 32K concurrent players already.

 

[Curratum]

This looks like a very poor man's Minecraft with lite rpg mechanics tacked on.

 

[Metro]

Dev destroyed his own game by gutting everything in alpha during the abbreviated two week beta period. He also changed character progression to some moronically limited, clear a zone, lose all your items, and get +1 to movement speed format. Bundle fodder.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/cube-worlds-infinite-fantasy-landscape-is-infinitely-boring/

Cube World's infinite fantasy landscape is infinitely boring
After years in limbo, Cube World is too shallow and repetitive for its promise of endless adventure

I didn't expect much from Cube World, but it still bums me out. The product of a two-person development studio, Cube World was announced during the peak of the Minecraft craze way back in 2011, promising to bring structure and quests and fantasy adventure in its own infinite voxel-based world. But Minecraft has since added all manner of quests and story and unexpected features, a game with the backing of Microsoft's bottomless pockets and resources as opposed to the smarts and finite energy of two people. Cube World never really stood a chance, but at least the map UI is nice.

Cube World gets right to it, dumping my lovingly crafted dwarf warrior into a small village with zero pageantry. I'm in a world made of cubes, as the title suggests. Besides a lack of tutorials explaining crafting, combat basics, and any goal whatsoever, there's not much mystery or allure to Cube World's cube world. The premise, from what I can gather, is basic fantasy bullshit. There are different races of NPCs wandering about all over—ogres, elves, dwarves, humans, frog people, and so on—running into mobs, chilling by campfires, or stuck in corners, feet treading the air like they just don't care.

They have some things to say, namely about various artifacts strewn about my starting region. Every third NPC chastises me because I haven't found the Magical Book of Crafting yet. Others mention named landmarks and drop a little pin on my map. That's all the context I have, the kind of breadcrumb trail figure-it-out-yourself ethos I treasure in a game like Dark Souls, where unraveling the detailed, atmospheric environment is enough of a reward to incentivize picking a direction and wandering aimlessly.

In Cube World, it's just a world of cubes. Cubes in all directions, some in the shape of trees, some as rocks, some as wild herds of Scottish Terriers, the rare stone pedestal with two sentences of disjointed "procedurally generated lore" written on it.

I test the intrigue of the cube world by picking a direction and walking to see what I stumble into. I stumble into lemon beetles and apple-shaped things with legs and bats that walk rather than fly. Crows choose to walk too, but they're chill. Each unfriendly mob punches me to death, my flailing club and dodgerolls doing little to chip away at their health or get out of the way.

Enemies love to give chase and will do it for quite some time. I took a herd of rock monsters back to town and let the locals take care of them. A few Scottish Terriers died in the fray. Sorry.

I pick some new directions and wander again, but not before taking a closer look at the map this time. I zoom in on a massive volcano and it grows, providing a detailed isometric perspective of the area. It's easy to get a sense of the surrounding topography and the potential obstacles between me and my goal.

For a minute, I get a whiff of exhilaration, imagining what Cube World could be. Forever wandering an infinite landscape, carefully navigating dangerous terrain and choosing destinations purely based from the menacing silhouettes they cut on the lovely map tool—like a Breath of the Wild saucepan reduction. But navigation isn't a challenge, just a time tax. It's easy to skirt around high level mobs and snap up the nearby goods, be it an artifact, crafting materials, or, most often, some more extremely bad procedurally generated lore.

My first major discovery is a bit anticlimactic. I find a magical lute behind an empty stone house that 'opens certain doors'. A Zelda-adjacent tune plays when I pick it up, as if the discovery is worthy of ceremony. In a few hours of wandering and getting kicked in the ass by walking bats, I've yet to find a use for it. I keep walking and walking. Night falls and I can't see anything. I don't know how to craft a torch and I'd rather not teleport all the way back to the village just to poke around oblique crafting menus to figure out what components I need that I don't have and don't know how to get. New armor and weapons are probably the key, but a few hours in I've only accumulated a handful of the materials required to make a single piece of gear. It's slow going.

The promise of eventually taming a mount or paying for an eagle ride to some unknown corner of the map would be enticing if I knew there was anything worth finding out there. And maybe there is, but a quick zoom out on the map has me locked in on a no. Cube World doesn't appear to end, the map an infinite scroll of videogame biomes, each region its own pocket of progression—yeah, apparently progress is region-specific. Make it to a new zone and your gear gets downscaled to the level of a new player, like an endless string of lonely MMO starting zones. It's a band-aid for a dearth of stuff to do once fully geared up.

Cube World would have been a novelty at its time of announcement. But now, it's just a boring sequence of low-level questing with some extremely simple crafting systems. Nothing is explained, the world is infinite, the quests endless, and all without clear reason.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Procedurally generated decline.