While Hytale's early access experience is surprisingly good (in spite of the developer Hypixel's warnings), there are some clear holes. The biggest one for me is its rather linear progression based around moving through the zones to find new ores, from copper and iron to cobalt, adamantite, and mithril.

I'd forgive you for believing that your end goal right now is finding mithril ore, but that's not the case. Mithril's not actually available yet, despite it being required for several recipes listed in-game.

The good news is that, when it's eventually added, it won't just be another block to break—presumably in the unreleased fifth zone. Hypixel's founder, Simon Collins-Laflamme, says, "We got some fun ideas about Mithril… let’s say it won't be as simple to mine as the others".

As for what these ideas are, exactly, that of course remains to be seen, and it's added to an already long list of to-dos the team already has to tackle—Collins-Laflamme only bought back the project two months ago and whipped up the early access build in record time, after all. Nevertheless, changes and new features are coming out at a breakneck pace right now, such as adding the ability to hide armour after significant community requests.

Given Collins-Laflamme's hint, I'm hoping mithril will require some extra, more intricate steps to mine. I'm all for making mining ores more interesting than a few whacks with a pickaxe, especially since higher-tier picks effectively just increase durability, unlike in Minecraft where better pickaxes let you mine new materials. It's partly why Lucky Mining is one of the best Hytale mods in my eyes, adding a fun strategy to mining ores.

I'm spitballing, but perhaps mithril could see the arrival of specialised mining equipment and machinery. People love creating factories in these types of games, myself included, and mithril (and/or potentially with the fifth zone) seems like a good opportunity to introduce more complex gubbins to mess around with.

Fallout 4 could've potentially been set in New York instead of Boston, but The Big Apple proved too popular as a video game setting at the time.

Fallout 4 lead designer and writer Emil Pagliarulo explains in an interview with the PC Gamer magazine, "We wanted to do something grand and American: that's New York for you." However, the New York plan was quickly abandoned by Bethesda due to the popularity of the region.

"At that time, other games were being set in New York, one of the Crysis games just came out, and that was set in New York, then there was another game," Pagliarulo explains. He doesn't mention the other game in question, but it's likely he could be talking about the Prototype games or Resistance 3, given they both released around the same time as Crysis 2 and 3 – which were both set in New York.

Pagliarulo recalls the team deciding, "You know what? Maybe New York's not the right call." So, that's how we ended up with Fallout 4 being set in the Commonwealth. However, he and Fallout 4 lead artist Istvan Pely have different memories of how Boston was chosen.

Pagliarulo says, "I didn't want to push for Boston, even though I thought it would be a great location," adding that Pely and director Todd Howard came to him with the idea. Meanwhile, Pely says, "I remember when it came time to do Fallout 4, Emil's like 'can we do it in Boston? Can we do my hometown.'" He adds, "I don't know, maybe he got a kick out of that, blowing up his hometown."

Fallout: London lead is "really worried" Fallout 5 will use Bethesda's proprietary Creation Engine

We just got our first major update for the year on Riot's long (long, long) awaited League of Legends MMO, as former World of Warcraft producer Raymond Bartos has announced that he's joined the project. Bartos's announcement highlights his reuniting with engineer Orlando Salvatore, after the two worked together on some of the better-received features of modern WoW, including Plunderstorm and the gear update.

"From my very first conversation with Riot," Bartos says on Twitter, "I immediately gravitated toward their values—and I was genuinely impressed by how clearly those values showed up throughout the interview process. It made it obvious that kindness, respect, and care aren’t just words here, but something the team truly lives by."

Bartos is taking on the title of senior game producer on Riot's MMO, having previously worked as lead producer on WoW. In his farewell message to Blizzard last year, he noted that it "was an honor to help ship Plunderstorm, multiple Remixes, Gear update, Dungeon Followers, holidays, the 20th Anniversary, and events like Dastardly Duos."

Many of those features are also on the credits list of former WoW lead software engineer, Orlando Salvatore, and Bartos notes that he's particularly excited to work alongside him once again. "Given our track record on World of Warcraft, I have a feeling we’ll be moving fast on day one."

Yearly reminders that Riot does, indeed, have at least some intention of making an MMO have become something of a meme at this point, given how long the project's continued to stretch on. Will we someday finally see an actual game at the end of all this? Only time will tell.

Here are the best MMORPGs you can play today.

Today marks one week since the early access release of Hytale, the Minecraft-like that was famously rescued from oblivion earlier this year by original co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme. By all appearances it's been a very successful rebirth, and Collins-Laflamme underscored that feeling with a message on X saying he has "no regrets" about resurrecting the game.

It was a sticky situation for a while: Riot's decision to cancel Hytale and close Hypixel Studios after seven years of work (and for reasons that will probably never be entirely clear) seemed a definitive end to the story, but a seemingly faint hope that someone would step in to save the day became reality when Collins-Laflamme struck a deal to reacquire the whole thing in November 2025. The reborn studio managed to get the game out the door just two months later, and while it's still notably very early access, it's also pretty good.

"It’s now been 7 days since early access launch and I can confidently say that I have no regrets saving Hytale, it’s been the most challenging but rewarding experience of my life," Collins-Laflamme wrote.

"Thank you everyone for the amazing support, and a big thank you for the rebuilt Hytale team for trusting me to get this to the finish line in just a few months. I haven’t been involved with Hytale development for many years and coming back was a big unknown and risk for me, and my family. I fully trusted the people and it just worked. Amazing team, every single one made a big difference."

Hytale isn't on Steam so we don't have access to concurrent player numbers, but it sure seems like it's going well. The day before early access release Collins-Laflamme said pre-purchases had "officially secured the next two years of development costs," and when it launched the following day it became the most-watched game on Twitch, with more than 420,000 viewers. Modders are doing some amazing things with it too.

But none of that was assured in advance, and there was real risk in the venture: Riot Games, with nearly-limitless resources, couldn't get the job done, and while there seemed to be a high level of demand for the game, there also seemed to be a high level of demand for a theatrical re-release of Morbius, and we all know how that worked out. (And in case you don't know, it did not work out well.) Given all that, I'd say Collins-Laflamme deserves a little bit of a victory lap, even if it is just reassuring Hytale fans that everything worked out as they'd hoped.