Hytale launched into early access just last week, and modders are already starting to do some wild stuff. Well, one modder in particular is worth highlighting – the same person who got Windows 95, Doom, and Hytale itself running in Hytale has now done something that's arguably even more impressive. He's gotten crossplay working between Minecraft and Hytale.

While developer Hypixel's origins lie in running modded Minecraft servers, Hytale is an original game that simply shares Minecraft's block-building sandbox genre. The idea of crossplay between the two games is as absurd as the thought of crossplay between, say, Call of Duty and Battlefield. World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14. Fortnite and PUBG.

Yet iamcxv7, whose social media profiles describe him as a 15-year-old music and programming enthusiast from Bangladesh, has shown off crossplay between Minecraft and Hytale working like the two games were always meant to work together. Clips posted to Twitter show a Minecraft player and Hytale player existing in the same world, watching each other jump around, and seeing blocks placed in one game appear in the other. Time of day is synched between the games. Cross-game text chat is even functional.

How is this apparent magic possible? "It's all just Packet Trickery," iamcxv7 explains on Twitter. "You could say I am running a Minecraft Server in the Hytale JVM which uses the Coordinate System of the Hytale World (As its the same) As well as takes a Snapshot of the Hytale World and reconstructs it and then send it to to the Client via Packets."

Put the emphasis on "trickery" there, since the project in its current state is fairly limited, and iamcxv7 adds in a Reddit post that it's currently "more of a proof of concept" with "no end goal for now." But hey, he also adds that he has "all the time and energy," so who knows what form the mod may eventually take.

Still trying to figure out how to play with friends in Hytale and join their worlds? We've got you covered.

As a 32-year-old senior citizen, I still remember what the state of internet discourse looked like around the time The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion came out. Most people liked the game, sure, but what was going on with that engine? Why were these animations so weird? The combat so floaty? Why is my character's face carved out of a ham hock?

Now, of course, it's very different: sometimes most people don't like the game. They're still complaining about Bethesda's Creation Engine though, which remains based on that rickety, hilarious Oblivion engine from 2006 (itself based on the engine of games before it).

Someone else who's perhaps a tad fed up with the Creation Engine? Dean Carter, lead on Fallout: London, the sweeping Fallout 4 overhaul that transplants you from Boston to the Big Smoke. In a chat with Esports.net, Carter said that—while the Creation Engine actually has a lot of upsides—he's worried Bethesda is gonna stick with it for Fallout 5.

"I’m really worried that they’re gonna keep going with the Creation Engine," said Carter. "I’m not just someone that’s going to sit there and lie and say it’s a terrible engine… but I do think it started to show its age."

In particular, it sounds like Carter thinks Creation is holding Bethesda back in terms of what it's technically possible for the studio to do in its games. "If they can overhaul it, then there’s no reason why they couldn’t push its limits and start adding things like drivable cars, maybe even metro systems like what we built in Fallout: London."

You'll probably recall, of course, that getting a pseudo-train into Fallout 3's DLC required turning a carriage into a hat and putting it on the head of a hidden NPC, which might be an argument for keeping the old engine, now that I think of it.

But the big thing for Carter is that an engine upgrade (or change) could have a big impact on "Load screens and optimization.

"That was our biggest complaint, rightly so from the public, that our game wasn’t optimized, and that’s because it was far too late in development to be able to change it, and it was because we as gamers did not want load screens." The Creation Engine just couldn't really do the dense and wide environment the FOLON guys wanted to pull off. Hell, it wasn't just a problem for them: famously, Obsidian had to cut up New Vegas' strip into a load of distinct screens, separated by loads, to get it all working back in 2010.

"If they have to upgrade it, that’s what they need to solve: get rid of the load screens and allow better optimization," says Carter. I'm no modder, and certainly not a game designer, but it sounds good to me.