((I have condensed your posts.))
To Thedamngod and Fawkes:
Going to be a little blunt here. Your sources are misinformed, and (there's no other way to put it) quite wrong. I realize that's a rather bold claim to make, especially in the face of a very angry Reddit, so I'll explain in detail.
First off - let's get the "Beta" thing out of the way. This is not a beta. This is a cycle of patching bugs prior to release. No major changes will be made. This is, essentially, the release version (with some bugs and exploits that are getting fixed). You could call it, essentially, "the release". That's what I'm going to call it here.
With that out of the way, let's continue.
There are three primary mistakes Wollay made.
- Poor communication. All of this could have been avoided if there had been better communication.
- Genre shift. This in itself is not an unusual part of game development in the journey from Alpha to release, so we'll put that aside, but it made it very bad that:
- He gave the game initially to people who (for the largest part) were children at the time of the Alpha, and who were subsequently blinded by their nostalgia goggles. Most of them had also been keeping an eye on cubeworld to some degree and were excited, hyped-up fanboys that expected "Cube World 2.0" to be "Like the Alpha, but better!" And this links back to #1, with the poor communication. To be clear, I'm not saying anything bad about these individuals. Everyone views things with nostalgia goggles from time to time - it's just part of being human. I am saying, though, that it didn't help the initial release of it much.
And that's it. I don't believe he made any major mistakes anywhere else. The game itself is rock solid. It just has a very different intent than people thought it did originally.
Reddit still echoing in your ears? I'll continue.
The Alpha version is objectively bad. If I posted that on the subreddit I'd be downvoted to hell and back, but it's absolutely true. The Alpha was a serious grind with no real goal. You could grind for hours and hours with little change. Progression was shallow (gains were often .2% or less when you found "new" items), and 80% of the game was simply travelling from place to place without fighting a thing. People talk about how fun it was to "explore" - there was no exploration involved. It was simply walking in a single, long, straight path because
the world was so frickin' big. Another 10% of the game came purely from boss fights which you were probably too weak for but needed the gear drops from because you were tired of that .2% increase, and were (by that point) more than willing to spend an hour in a (very bland) boss fight with potentially nothing to show for it (seeing as gear was class-locked and bosses only dropped one gear item).
This is very shoddy game design, but here's the catch: The whole game was
just fun enough that people would play it - for maybe 20-30 hours for most of them. It would get better when you played with friends, but people accepted that you would have to start a new character if you wanted to play with anyone else, because otherwise you would vastly overpower your teammates.
With that out of the way, let's move on.
A fundamental principle of good game design is: Know exactly what you want, re-examine everything at every step of the way, and make sure every part of it aligns and meshes cleanly with your core vision.
Wollay has done exactly that. And what is his core vision?
Solid co-op play for people with mismatched schedules. Don't believe me? I'll persuade you. This has been Wollay and his wife Pixxie's passion project for the past eight years. They have played, most likely, many thousands of hours together. They wanted a game where they could:
- sit down and play for a couple hours, even if one or the other of them had busy schedules, and still have a strong sense of progression over that time
- not have to worry about mismatched levels if one of them wanted to start a new character
- still have fun after playing for eight years
The alpha provides none of this at all. If you sit down for a couple hours with Cube World 1.0, you may run out of time before you manage to kill the boss that it took you an hour and a half to get to. The game itself was a very tedious grind, and eight years of Cube World 1.0? Nobody managed even six. And as to the mismatched levels, that was a real problem, seeing as people often got their levels out of order over the course of a game and would have to intentionally re-balance by one of them doing nothing while the other one did some hardcore grinding to level back up.
When viewed through this lens, everything makes sense.
- Gear is still class-locked. The idea and intent behind this is, I believe, to help make sure that splitting loot is a lot easier. If you have one of each class in your party of four, and an ogre drops an item for the mage, then the mage gets it. Great for happy co-op.
- XP is a silly, overused system that provides a very artificial and meaningless sense of progression. It is a number that gradually goes up. If you can honestly look me in the eye and tell me you like watching numbers climb, then there's no hope for you. I'll sit you in front of a stopwatch timer so you can watch the number go up, and I'll continue talking to everyone else here.
- Skill trees are silly as well in this context, seeing as (in the Alpha) you spent the first 20 hours of the game just trying to unlock all your basic skills. That means for at least five hours, you have no ability to traverse the map at any speed (no horseback riding, climbing, hang-gliding or boating) and the only attack you have is your primary weapon. That's some pretty poor variation. That's some really hardcore grind. Removing the skill trees and putting everything available either at the start of the game or unlockable through exploration in the world simply makes the game more fun.
- Killing mobs does not give XP, no, but as mentioned, XP is a silly system. Mobs still drop gold coins - the currency in the game - and as those are fairly hard to come by early on (and you need them simply to sleep at an inn) that's very useful still. However, this means you cannot level purely through killing mobs - which, I think, is something Wollay wanted to avoid in the first place. It's a grind. He doesn't like grind. For that matter, neither do I.
- Equipment being region-locked: It's not actually entirely region locked. Most gear is just "gear" but sometimes you find "gear+" which means you can use that gear in neighboring regions. Sometimes, more rarely, you find "gear++" which means you can use it anywhere. It does mean, though, that if you decide to join up with a friend, you can both start in a new region without having to abandon your character and their pet. That, I think, is Wollay's goal with it, and honestly it's a brilliant way to handle it.
- The game not caring where you spawn: True, but the patch this morning fixed that.
- Hang-gliders, boats, and riding being region-locked: Only sort of. By the time you finish a region, you have enough coins to use the "flight master" - a dude that lives in every village and will let you fly on his eagle anywhere you want to go. All you need to do at that point is go to the flight master, fly directly to a village in another region (100 gold coins), and then talk to some of the people in the village. They will very quickly tell you where the region's boat, hang-glider, and riding equipment is located. Then you just take another flight (another 100 gold) to one of the items, and you're set. At the start of the game, this is an impossible expense, but by the time you finish the first region, it's no trouble at all.
- Being punished for exploration: As to that guy's claim, I'd like to point out that it has taken most people six to ten solid hours of exploring their first region just to 100% it - and that's with fast traveling around. There's plenty to explore. The game isn't punishing you for exploring at all - rather, it's trying to ensure you stay in the same general area as your teammates, for the sake of co-op. Remember I said everything was about co-op? It totally is.
People are, gradually, starting to realize all this. The subreddit has already ceased hostility, and now they're seeing posts like this, which was on the front page for the subreddit yesterday with 1264 points, 96% upvoted:
Me @ Wollay after actually playing this game a bit more
They'll come around. Some will still prefer the alpha, and that's fine. The alpha is an entirely different game, and a somewhat different genre. Maybe that's bad, but I personally believe it's actually a good thing: It's led to the production of a much more fun, much more cohesive game. And that's invaluable.
...If you like co-op games. Habitual single players are a bit less lucky.
tl;dr: The game has a very clear and focused vision that it very much lives up to. Unfortunately, single player had a very low priority in how the game evolved.