Voxel-based Minecraft-like platform HYTOPIA, from the makers of NFT Worlds, has now officially launched in closed beta, with the first build now available for testing for NFT holders.

Closed Beta Details

The first game client build was made available for download this week for holders of Worlds, Gray Boys, and Avatars, so if you have any one of these NFTs, you can now try out an early version of what will eventually be a free-to-play gaming platform for anyone to create games and experiences in. To do so, holders need to join the HYTOPIA Testers Discord server in order to verify ownership of eligible NFTs by connecting to collab.land, gaining access to beta testing.

Based on discussions in Discord, it’s important to note that participants need not only have one of the eligible NFTs, but also a Minecraft account, as the current client, which is backwards-compatible with Minecraft servers, is actually using Minecraft servers for testing, so players also need to whitelist their Minecraft accounts via a Discord bot in order to play on the available servers. HYTOPIA will have its own servers eventually though, so you won’t need a Minecraft account to play in a future release, though it seems that backwards compatibility will remain so as to allow legacy Minecraft servers the option to migrate over to HYTOPIA and enjoy the benefits the ecosystem brings. No Mojang or Microsoft code is used for this, according to documentation.

In the announcement on the official server by one of the project’s co-founders, “Temptranquil”, it is stated that the team has worked “extremely hard” on refactoring the game client, fixing plenty of bugs related to gameplay, graphics, performance and more. Given that this is an early build, it’s still a work-in-progress version that they admit lacks polish and at times looks ugly, but these are areas that they state will “improve soon and quickly!” While many issues have been resolved, players may still experience various bugs and crashes. The studio is hot fixing the game this week to solve major bugs as they're reported, with the ultimate goal of the beta test being to see how compatible the game is with a wide variety of different hardware, as doing so will allow the developers to push out a more polished experience that will be accessible to a wider audience.

According to the Discord post, this game client is in a fully playable state, allowing testers to enjoy all the gameplay mechanics present in 2 playable servers. These two servers are called Avatars Battle Arena and Gray Boys Factions.

Avatars Battle Arena is a 20 vs. 20 battle royale that puts players in a free-for-all, “scavenger-style shooter arena” that continuously closes in as the match goes on. Gray Boys Factions is a faction-based PvP server where players can create teams of up to 20 members and raid each other to fight for dominance of the server.

Future Plans

Testers can look forward to seeing weekly updates made to the client accompanied by release notes explaining what’s changed in each update. From here on out, the game client is set to “rapidly evolve and improve” and have missing features added in, as currently there are missing sounds; the player’s arm doesn’t swing nor hold items, while entities and NPCs stay looking unanimated in one direction. All of this will be sorted out in the upcoming updates in the weeks ahead, but the focus for this first version of the client is said to be on solving crashes and testing hardware compatibility.