Cube World - Schrödinger's game - Games

https://i.imgur.com/HwnXlEb.png Cube World is an open-world RPG by Picroma for Windows. Developed by Wolfram von Funck and his wife Sarah von Funck, it started development in June 2011 - with an early alpha being released on July 2, 2013. The player explores a randomly-generated voxel-based world in which they find randomly generated dungeons, underground caverns, castles etc. as well as different biomes such as deserts or oceans. In the early alpha, the player would traverse landscapes via. gliders and other mobility options, choose a class, and then fulfill quests which could be found in towns scattered around the world which would, for example, have clearing a dungeon somewhere in the map as the objective. A Crafting system in which the player crafts potions, weapons, etc. also acts as help for the many burdens the player has to face during the game. The game also features an online Multiplayer mode in which players can host servers to explore the landscapes together. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e1/Cube_World_Gameplay_1.jpg The game has, ever since it's early alpha, not received any updates and is quite infamous for it, given many players anticipated it. Starting June 2015, it even became unavailable to purchase. A large amount of speculation circles the internet, and the lack of proper communication from the developer only fueled it. These days, the developer essentially communicates via Twitter and sometimes over Emails, in which he reveals newly developed parts of the game ranging from showcasing a new system, NPC, or simply a new song of the soundtrack. https://twitter.com/wol_lay/status/1089221671427416065 (Recently tweeted post of wol_lay, showcasing the new Gnome NPC.) A full view of the developers social media accounts can be viewed here. The game has gained a cult following for it's fun mechanics, unique world-exploration and general charm. Nowadays the fans gather in the game's discord - discussing and playing the game to this date, after 5~ years, looking out and waiting for the next signs of the game's developer, Wollay, and maybe eventually an Update. The game appears to be a pure passion project, and it's clear that development appears to be continuing. With just as many optimistic people hoping for this year to be the year in which the game finally releases, as others saying that the game will forever be in development hell, never to be released due to the accused incompetence of the developer, Cube World has secured itself a hole in the hearts of many players, unknowing if ever to be filled again.+ Official Website

Oh yea, this game.

Kudos to him for still working on the game. Doesn't change the fact that I feel like a chump for buying in on the Alpha way back in 2013.

Oh hey, that one game where the developer released an alpha then couldn't be assed to bother updating it thus shooting his own community in the foot long before it ever had a chance of establishing itself as a good community for a game that should have been great. Everyone that I know who was interested in the game, including the one who first introduced me to it, has completely written it off as vaporware at this point. And considering the last update to the alpha was like half a fucking decade ago I don't really blame them. Wol_lay may be a good programmer but he's complete trash when it comes to actually dealing with his community properly.

until he actually releases another update, it's a scam. there's no excuse for this. wollay crushed my hopes and dreams years ago when i realized the game wasn't getting another update for potentially years

The thing which sparked my interest in making a thread was the recent fairly large chain of Tweets he made. Just looking and reading about the new features makes me hyped, depressed, jealous, angry - I don't think I have felt this... grab-bag of emotions as far as any other game goes. I don't think you can write it off as a "scam". Hell I'd personally go as far and say that if the alpha was the entire game, it's well worth the price it had which I think was like 20-30 bucks? It's clear that the game is a passion project. I just think the dev is probably overwhelmed, anxious, maybe simply not capable of dealing with the crowd.

yeah tbh it didn't help he probably wanted a lowkey release. The yogscast posted that video and he was FLOODED with people asking about the game to the point where the site crashed extremely often. I managed to buy the game when it first came out before it went down, i should play it sometime.

I was this close to buying the game when the alpha came out, but my dad advised me to wait and see. Given the current state of the game, that was a great call on his end.

this isn't the first time he came back to twitter and posted a bunch of stuff, and then left again. look at his tweet history. he posted a whopping 6 times in the entire year of 2017. there is absolutely nothing worth getting hyped over. ive been on this miserable train since before the game even had an alpha. you cannot excuse anything he has done. as soon as he charged money for it, he has opened himself up to being heavily criticized on how everything has been handled. taking a ton of people's money, disappearing for months, not informing us or giving us any ETA's on when the next actual update will be. dude has had SIX years to get his shit together. if an update actually comes you won't see me complaining, but there is absolutely no logical reason to be "hyped" until something has actually been confirmed.

I've followed the game for a long time, trust me I know that. I just know that eventually, there will be an update, and it'll be neato. The question isn't if for me, it's when. And yeah, there aren't any excuses. I'm just trying to wrap my mind around *why* he acts like he does, and I somehow doubt its of any malicious intent.

Hopefully some time before the heat death of the universe, which seems like a fairly optimistic time frame at this point. Malicious intent or not, it still doesn't excuse his actions. Good intentions mean fairly little in the big picture.

I've felt scammed ever since I got suckered into buying during the brief alpha. If it gets released eventually then great, but fuck if Wolfram and Sarah handled things like absolute ass.

I followed the game for quite a while before release and I would've been more than happy to wait if he would've communicated better about the development, but instead he totally disappeared. I appreciate that he wanted it to be a passion project, and that he was overwhelmed by the community response, but there's no good reason that he should post two sentences and a screenshot worth of information a year. There was about enough content to be worth what I paid, despite it being a near featureless skeleton of a game, which says a lot about its quality. But jeez, what a disappointment to see such enormous potential go totally unfulfilled. Why did he even bother releasing it?

"never updates, communicates via twitter and emails" so like a worse minecraft clone from the pre microsoft days?

Minecraft and Cubeworld couldnt be more different.

Well yeah, one game actually receives updates.

It sounds an awful lot like the notch days of minecraft development when he'd spend 18 months adding 1 feature that modders had already done in 2 weeks, like pistons.

No, not again. Don't play with me this way.

i still remember someone on here that ran a server for this and would get pissy as fuck and ban people from it who admitted to pirating the game. glad i did, saved myself money and falling for this sham. dude really needs to realize he needed to release updates every now and then, not horde them for YEARS and have complete radio silence for a year or two on twitter every now and then. terrible way to run a game/development.

Had to get white listed I believe, too, since people were doing something to cause it to crash, or something to that effect. It was so long ago and didn't last too long, so I don't really remember

jesus, don't even bother with the cubeworld discord there's a whole group of people supporting what wollay did with the game "stop complaining ur being entitled" "it was just 15 dollars bro i make that in an hour"

Just remember that Wollay never wanted to release the game as an alpha. He did so, fullly disclosing how little it would be updated, at the behest of fans. Hype ran away with it and way too many people jumped on what was a very early alpha of his game. That's how I remember launch going. Who knows if he was lying about not wanting to release it. He could've been. But I personally think this is just a game he wants to take his time on, and probably hugely regrets releasing an alpha build.

I still have my paypal receipt, and fully expect to get my full game When It's Done.

The issue there is that he has yet to so much as even acknowledge any issues at all with how things were handled. The continuous completely ignoring the elephant in the room really doesn't inspire any faith in him. He needs to actually get off his ass and finally address the update situation.

I mean the store page literally said 'we are planning to release updates regularly' https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/222257/ba33c05e-f176-48f1-91c0-9e204800f177/image.png I bought it when the hype began based on the fact that it said this on the store page and it had loads of planned features so I always felt a little burned by it because it was never clearly communicated that the 'regular updates' were not coming, and knowing nothing about him or the game beforehand/not looking at social media or anything the store page is the only thing to go by.

Well it came down to the absolute explosion this game had. What if the dev expected a quieter release, with a small community, but then got hit by the absolute truck of success? Doesn't excuse him, as others mentioned - just a thought.

Yeah sure but I mean it says right there on the page that you were able to buy it on that they were planning on doing regular updates and has a list of planned features. I'm not sure what the game being super successful has to do with the store page saying regular updates are planned? If he knew he wasn't going to be doing regular updates then its an outright lie and if he wasnt fully committed to doing regular updates he shouldn't have put it in writing on the store where people will like me read it and go 'oh hey, the game is fairly barebones but the devs are going to update it so lets get it'. I don't think its any kind of excuse because even if he was 'pressured' into releasing an alpha early it should have been made 100% clear what the intentions were with it instead of misleading customers and not delivering on what you are saying you will do.

It specifically says "planned" - not "yeah this will 100% happen" but "planned". Something being "Planned" quite literally means he wasn't fully committed to be doing so, thus you can't exactly write it off as a "lie" - we don't know if something came between, which is what the speculation surrounding the game is about. He didn't say what he will do - he said what he plans to do. The reason why the game being incredibly successful has to do with the store page saying regular updates are "planned" comes down to the context of the previous discussion, being the speculation that he might've been incredibly overwhelmed with the explosion the game had in terms of popularity. And yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head. A lot of negative attention could've been spared if he simply communicated to the people as to why he stopped regular updates and instead is working on what appears to be a full-version privately now, sometimes sharing a screenshot here and there. I'd love an Interview with the guy, so perhaps we can understand him better, given what he did - or rather, didn't do - is just confusing and incredibly anti-costumer.