Cubeworld Alpha- General Informational (Part One)

Cubeworld is a new game currently in the alpha stages of development.  It can be obtained for roughly $20 American (something in the vicinity of 15 Euro, which is the currency of origin, so you’ll need to go through Paypal to pick up the alpha).  The game is ostensibly an RPG, though the current state of its beta (August 19 2013) leaves it much more akin to a cross between Minecraft (which is a creativity tool with monsters in) and Maplestory (which is a class-selecting grinding game with no actual role-playing involved).  That said, it’s not a bad game per se, but it should not be treated as a roleplaying game in its current incarnation.

The developer has given every indication that they intend to install the RPG elements from here on, so it is entirely possible and plausible that it will become an RPG.  There is a lot of potential in the seed-generated landscapes and city/dungeon locations for the game to grow to resemble more open-world RPGs such as Skyrim, although it is equally possible it will fall into a similar mold as Everquest and World of Warcraft.  Time alone will tell.

The current state of the game displays its potential in many ways.  As the terrain and environment is all procedurally-generated from a seed, Minecraft style, no two servers nor single-player games will have the same geography, and the world of the game itself is essentially limitless, generated in roughly square plots of land as encountered by the player.  The overall feel of the game is rather whimsical thanks to taking the Minecraft paradigm of ‘everything is made of blocks’ several steps farther and creating everything from cubes.  This is a change from Minecraft, where many objects are non-solid cubes with holes in the sides, other objects may be flat images that ‘float’ over a location, and small details are generally left out- absolutely everything in Cubeworld is made of cubes, and their sizes vary widely- so while you do encounter terrain shapes highly reminiscent of Minecraft, with hills having multiple tiers or layers of height and occasional floating cliffs or random balls of rock, creatures of a large size will use similarly-sized cubes and things of a more normal or smaller size will use smaller cubes.