A Discussion about the decision to pickup Hytale and include it into Vintage Story as a Mode instead of making a separate game, & on if picking up Hytale is a good idea. RESPECTFUL RESPONSES ONLY.

[cosmobeau]

EDIT: 

When talking to other people on this forum, please be kind. If you disagree with their take, then offer information as to why. That's how a forum works, to share information. Do not attack anyone personally. My view on this decision has changed a lot because of people who have respectfully disagreed and were not rude. So if you agree with me, and want to debate why, do not use ad hominem. Even if you agree with me, if you're being rude to other people in the community I'm going to completely disregard your position.

Honestly the more I hear other people's opinions I think my majority issue was

- the timing for revealing they're working on basically a completely different game was kinda poor. I think some people would have received it better after a STABLE Ch.2 release.

- The language around their friends at Hytale, on top of it being a failed game, seems very personally motivated. If you just like Vintage Story, and know nothing about Angeo Studios or the people who work there, just reading the reveal does look sketchy. Most people are defending Tyron & Co based off of their perceived endearment to them. Some people have no prior engagement or knowledge to base off how much they "like" or "trust" them.

- First stating it is a game mode then saying it will be it's own game and it's wildly different, then saying it will be in Vintage Story threw me off. 

I still sincerely believe if their intention is to make a new game, they can still share all the code and such, and actually just make it a new game from the start. Don't put it in Vintage Story if it won't even look, feel, or be the same genre of game. Just literally make another game.

End of Edit 

I can't be the only one that felt that Tyron's post about their new idea "adventure mode" is filled with excuses, deceptively optimistic language, biased takes, red herrings and contradictory reasons why it's suddenly okay to absorb Hytale into Vintage Story, effectively developing a whole other game with a completely different theme using Vintage Story's resources and funding, and admitting it "Could spin off into another game entirely."

Let's get this right... Hytale didn't make it, and now they're making a new game "mode" that will be: "departing significantly in aesthetics, setting and game mechanics compared to Vintage Story. More focused towards fantasy and adventure/rpg-y compared to the gritty, realism based nature of the current experience. "

On top of that, they've said:

the purely hypothetical scenario where it really takes off we could spin it off into a fully separate game.

Because, you see, even though you're supporting Vintage Story with your money, attention, and playtime, and had no interest in Hytale, Tyron is buddy buddy with the people at Hytale. So now you're getting a fantasy RPG game tacked on inside your gritty, realistic survival game???

We are reaching out to the Hytale community and its devs as they too truly and deeply believed in Hytale. This is a chance to maybe maybe at least partially keep that dream alive. When I worked for Hytale in 2015 I really felt their passion for what they are working on. The team there really believed in the work they did. It was also this very experience that gave me the confidence to start Vintage Story in the first place. It was Noxy that saw my work on worldgen and handed an olive branch to me - believed in my skills to work on their project.

And they claim, well, it's helpful to do this so they can share code between the two projects. They also claim somehow they can develop a whole other project that's completely different than Vintage Story in genre and gameplay at "no additional cost" & somehow claim both they hardly have enough time to update the devlog posts for ONE game because of how many changes there are, but adding an ADDITIONAL GAME - a whole new project- won't slow Vintage Story's development???

 

It is already a significant struggle for me to put together the devlog posts, because there is so many changes being made to the main game on each update. More people means more opinions, means more possible development directions. We had to split our weekly meetings into 2 subgroups where each group can talk only every 2nd week because there were simply too many voices going on at the same time. I don't like it because I want everyone in the team to have a voice, but due to the team size this is no longer possible.  We in the VS team are not fond of a strongly hiearchical management structures where only the leadership gets to decide what to add. If we want Vintage Story in its full glory AND with its original vision, then we need to stop diluting the vision.

Tyron claims they don't like a hierarchy, but continuously talks about how they also have a main vision for Vintage Story, mainly from their wife Saraty, who came up with the visuals and the gritty mechanics of the game. I'm sorry, but a bigger team isn't the problem, and not having enough projects isn't either- tell your developers how to develop the game. I'm so done with the kindergarten logic, honestly. Maybe not every single person on your team needs to have such a hefty sway on the development of the game if you already have a vision for it. You are hiring on more people to deal with the bulk of the work that comes with said vision, not to get more people into a democracy on what mob or fence variation we feel like adding that week. You are not "diluting" the vision you are allowing your vision to be diluted RIGHT NOW by adding a game that completely conflicts with Vintage Story into Vintage Story. You also claim you're not adding more people to that vision- but also talk about hiring- which is it? Are you keeping the VS team the way it is, or hiring on more people to save and develop your friends game, Hytale?

adding more team members to original VS is very difficult. So if not more team members why not make us of these additional funds for a small side project?

There are no "extra funds" to the early access game your community is giving you money to finish, until it is done. What you're really doing is deciding, well all these people bought and support Vintage Story, but I'm going to use their money to also make another game. Meanwhile, the next chapter of Vintage Story isn't recommended for long term multiplayer play, because of how buggy and undeveloped it is.

 "I paid for Vintage Story, not this"

And you got Vintage Story in the very exact form as advertised with many more updates to come. I am not sure how this is not a fair exchange.

It's not fair because we can see straight through the bs. Yor community is that of gamers that have supported early access and small indie devs for decades now. It's unfair because not only are you using Vintage Story's funds to make another game, Vintage Story isn't even close to being done yet, hell not even the first part of the actual "story", and that game is going to be APART OF THE SAME CLIENT even though it's a genre that conflicts with VS, you're also giving us the poor excuse of not wanting to tell your team how to develop the game, while we see that become not just one game that takes too long to finish, but two now. We did not get it exactly as advertised, and we have no idea what updates to come you're talking about. This is vague posting and not encouraging to hear, it sounds like Kickstarter language.

> "This new mode should be a separate project"

This would prevent us from sharing code between both projects, decreasing the symbiotic benefit we can get from this

Actually, you can make this an entirely separate. I don't want to be forced to download another game in a early access game. You can actually share all that stuff, and have it be a separate game, separate team, seperate lead, separate game page and patreon, all that. You have full permission to use your own code however you want. But that's not the real reason you're making us download another game inside Vintage Story. This is called free forced advertising. Every time you launch Vintage Story, even if you have no interest in Save Hytale, The Game that's Nothing Like Vintage Story, you will see it every time you launch the game. If you want to play VS? You have to keep "Adventure Mode" aka Hytale downloaded and updated. It feels really scummy that you'd literally admit this is basically just a whole other spin off game that will be it's own thing, but we have to be apart of it no matter what just because... Well, nepotism really. Your friends want to make another game, so you said yes, and you also said I'm going to force my players to download it.

It's honestly not acceptable to force players who are paying for Vintage Story to download another game that you're literally using our money on instead of the game we paid for. At least be a decent human being and separate the clients and games, so I don't have to see a thinly veiled advertisement for a different game I'm not interested at all whenever I just want to play Vintage Story, nevermind also have it FULLY INSTALLED on my machine.

 

Edited August 23, 2025 by cosmobeau
Discouraging bad faith posts by changing the title & intro.

[Krougal]

While you make some good points, but then I'm old school and too many of my attitudes are shaped by the military so I see this trying to be all democratic in the work place as bullshit.

It may work fine with a very small company, but I am a firm believer that no manager who has more than 10 direct reports is an effective manager. Yes, that means that the majority of managers in the world are not effective managers.

I fully believe in a hierarchy and chain of command, and if I interview with a company that wants to tell me about their "soda fountain and ping pong tables and open floor plan and unlimited vacation" I thank them for their time and say goodbye.

The way I see it though, we are getting another game for free. It is just going to be a mod, just like the regular game is now.

Forcing you to download it? Are you paying an outrageous price for bandwidth? The whole installer is a little over 500 MB at the moment. That's half a gig. Half a gig!

Even if that makes it double in size, we are talking 1 GB. Hell, let's quadruple it even. So 2 GB. That is fairly insignificant these days.

Granted I was a little interested in Hytale (not enough to follow it much, but I've heard of it, I don't really go for hype) although considering that it is a failed project, I can't say I am enthusiastic about them picking it up, but Tyron has taken a "path less traveled" by most companies and has been financially successful. I have to give him the benefit of the doubt about how he chooses to run his business.

Adding more people doesn't necessarily make the work go faster; 9 women can't have a baby in 1 month.

Adding more work doesn't necessarily make the work slow down either, especially if it is work that does not impact the existing workers workloads.

 

[Never Jhonsen]

You paid Anego Studios, the creators of Vintage Story, for a Vintage Story license. 

Game studios like to do this thing, called making games. Vintage Story is just one game from this game studio. And with how successful VS has been for them, it would be silly to NOT try making another game. 

That's like saying "I paid for Half Life, why is Valve making Portal?" Game studios make games

[cosmobeau]

10 minutes ago, Never Jhonsen said:

You paid Anego Studios, the creators of Vintage Story, for a Vintage Story license. 

Game studios like to do this thing, called making games. Vintage Story is just one game from this game studio. And with how successful VS has been for them, it would be silly to NOT try making another game. 

That's like saying "I paid for Half Life, why is Valve making Portal?" Game studios make games

Fair enough, but they didn't put a Portal Demo inside of a early-access Half-Life. It would've been seen as distasteful then, so it should now.

[cosmobeau]

58 minutes ago, Krougal said:

It may work fine with a very small company, but I am a firm believer that no manager who has more than 10 direct reports is an effective manager. Yes, that means that the majority of managers in the world are not effective managers.

I fully believe in a hierarchy and chain of command, and if I interview with a company that wants to tell me about their "soda fountain and ping pong tables and open floor plan and unlimited vacation" I thank them for their time and say goodbye.

The way I see it though, we are getting another game for free. It is just going to be a mod, just like the regular game is now.

Forcing you to download it? Are you paying an outrageous price for bandwidth? The whole installer is a little over 500 MB at the moment. That's half a gig. Half a gig!

Even if that makes it double in size, we are talking 1 GB. Hell, let's quadruple it even. So 2 GB. That is fairly insignificant these days.

Granted I was a little interested in Hytale (not enough to follow it much, but I've heard of it, I don't really go for hype) although considering that it is a failed project, I can't say I am enthusiastic about them picking it up, but Tyron has taken a "path less traveled" by most companies and has been financially successful. I have to give him the benefit of the doubt about how he chooses to run his business.

Adding more people doesn't necessarily make the work go faster; 9 women can't have a baby in 1 month.

Adding more work doesn't necessarily make the work slow down either, especially if it is work that does not impact the existing workers workloads.

I do really respect the game devs, I'm just wondering why pick up a project that's already failed. On the bright side, they get the fans of that game to maybe buy their game. Maybe not so great for those fans, if the adventure mode doesn't go well they effectively get to see Hytale die twice. Meanwhile, chapter 2 isn't stable enough, they recommend against multiplayer/long-term play. It's just frustrating, and as you said, the whole ineffectiveness to me at least seems to come from letting everyone have endless meetings over what every single employee wants in the game instead of Tyron & Saraty telling their devs what to work on. They even admitted to splitting the VS team into two seperate meetings because everyone has too much input.

I'm not the most tech savvy, my boyfriend works in IT though and I'm not so sure if this is a "9 women can't have a baby in 1 month situation" if it's bug fixes, errors, and certain busywork, a bigger team will definitely get that done faster. But I'm not a fly on their wall, I have no idea what they're working on.

Hopefully this all goes fine, I posted this to Reddit and people are losing their sh!t over it. Hopefully I don't have to go back and say I told you so, I love this game and want to see it finished. I've seen the most trustworthy devs, hardworking and all, flop a game, even with the best intentions for their player base.

Edited August 9, 2025 by cosmobeau

[Echo Weaver]

5 hours ago, cosmobeau said:

Fair enough, but they didn't put a Portal Demo inside of a early-access Half-Life. It would've been seen as distasteful then, so it should now.

I'm pretty sure you're 100% wrong there. Demos for new games have been included in existing games before. It's considered a benefit.

If you don't like Homo Sapiens mode, you could say the same thing. Or Exploration.

This game is built around being insanely configurable to dozens of playstyles. Some features that are added to a game just aren't going to be ones you like. Full stop. 

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, cosmobeau said:

I do really respect the game devs, I'm just wondering why pick up a project that's already failed. On the bright side, they get the fans of that game to maybe buy their game. Maybe not so great for those fans, if the adventure mode doesn't go well they effectively get to see Hytale die twice.

To my knowledge, Tyron himself used to be a Hytale developer, and parted ways with the Hytale team due to creative differences. So I'd wager that's at least one reason he's attempting to absorb some of Hytale's talent into Anego Studios and create a gamemode similar to what Hytale was supposed to be. I'd probably do similar if I were in his shoes, honestly. Hytale was/is a great concept, that a LOT of people were looking forward to, that ultimately failed due to mismanagement, if I'm not mistaken. 

As I've understood Tyron's posts on the matter, the team that's working on the new Adventure Mode concept is separate from the team that works on Vintage Story itself. It's similar to Homo Sapiens game mode in that matter too, in that it's technically a different game but using Vintage Story as the engine to power it. If it's popular enough, then it would get split off into it's own proper game, instead of just being an alternate mode for Vintage Story.

That being said, yes, there is a chance it could fail, and it would be disappointing for Hytale fans. However, that could be said for any project, really. Given Tyron's current success with Vintage Story, I'd expect there to be success with Adventure Mode as well. I'd also say there's quite a demand for a more fantasy-based gamemode in the VS community itself, given the number of fantasy-themed mods on the database, fantasy-RPG servers, and suggestions about adding more fantasy content to the base game itself. Like Homo Sapiens, it might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it'll be nice to have as an option for those who prefer that kind of setting, or just want a change of pace from the standard game.

[Thorfinn]

I'd add that Adventure Mode and (probably) Secret Project are games in their own right. In the current launcher, playstyle is the only place that makes any sense to put them, but I think that's going to have to change. From the Anego Engine launcher, you select the game you want to play. If you only have one Anego Engine game, maybe it skips that step, or maybe there's a button to explore other Anego Engine games. Dunno. But then it takes you to playstyle, where you select for the specific game, then each game has it's own mod section. (And I hope that becomes more properly instanced. Maybe that is not important in a completed game, but mods are aiming at a moving target, and probably have to be forked for application to specific playstyles.)

Upshot is that with the current VS launcher, it might be a bit hard to see how something with a radically divergent art style could work, and that's probably why they have resisted all suggestions of player-added playstyles. That's intended to be the game selection screen.

One not need fear being forced to download a new playstyle. It would hardly surprise me if Adventure Mode gets its own website, though they may share the same forum space. ModDB would take surprisingly little work to support multiple games.

Re: hierarchy, not necessarily a problem. Tyron could have easily tasked someone with coming up with each new critters, with a lot of creative license within broad boundaries. We know he hired the guy who did the new models for wolves from the mod community. Give someone with good skills and self-motivation a goal and set him loose is an excellent management style for high-caliber talent.

[Echo Weaver]

2 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

We know he hired the guy who did the new models for wolves from the mod community. Give someone with good skills and self-motivation a goal and set him loose is an excellent management style for high-caliber talent.

I did not know that! That's pretty cool.

3 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

But then it takes you to playstyle, where you select for the specific game, then each game has it's own mod section. (And I hope that becomes more properly instanced. Maybe that is not important in a completed game, but mods are aiming at a moving target, and probably have to be forked for application to specific playstyles.)

In a highly-moddable game like this, I almost never run two games on the same set of mods. I am currently playing Vanilla+, but I'm building two modpacks to try out at some point -- one centered around biomes and Fauna of the Stone Age (debating whether to play Homo Sapiens, but I kinda like the unholy monsters, so I think I'll keep rift activity and disable temporal storms) and another built around fantasy and magic inspired by all the Adventure Mode discussions. The latter uses a brighter, more saturated texture pack.

All of that is a long way of saying that IMHO mod profiles are a must whether the game is finished or not. And I'm not sure this game exactly gets finished anyway. 

[Thorfinn]

Oh, agreed, @Echo Weaver. I'm rather surprised that user-created modlists are not already a thing. It should be rather easy to do from the Mod Manager page. But I think that's a different thing than playstyle, which at present, is just a list of setting changes. Ideally, modlists would be at the top of the Mod Manager, and each modlist you enable checks the box beside each mod in that list.

[hstone32]

9 hours ago, cosmobeau said:

It's honestly not acceptable to force players who are paying for Vintage Story to download another game that you're literally using our money on instead of the game we paid for

I feel like there are a number of assumptions being made here that developing any additional projects are going to negatively impact VS development. This is an example of a mindset I have started calling "pie-think," which is when you think of all tasks as being consolidated as a finite allocation of resources, like slices of a pie. Those under this mindset believe that any effort put into a task must come at an equal effort cost to other tasks. Thing is in real life, we all tend to have limitations on the amount of effort or resources we can dedicate to a single tasks at a time, as well as interactions between tasks that are difficult to predict. This means that if we ever only focus on one task, we often end up accomplishing less overall than if we worked on multiple concurrently. There's a career out there for efficiency analysts, whose job it is to discover what number of concurrent tasks is the optimal number for total resource usage.

I may not know anything about business, but I've seen plenty of examples as an engineering student of how implementing concurrency ends up increasing total output rather than remaining consolidated. I have learned that the principle of concurrency has applications everywhere in life. I'm not inclined to think that Anego can't develop multiple things concurrently, and I believe we aren't the most likely people to know at what degree of concurrency too high for Anego specifically. That's up to Anego's management to decide. So far, I have been pleased with the choices they have made.

[Echo Weaver]

4 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Oh, agreed, @Echo Weaver. I'm rather surprised that user-created modlists are not already a thing. It should be rather easy to do from the Mod Manager page. But I think that's a different thing than playstyle, which at present, is just a list of setting changes.

OK, ha, this is a terminology issue. I didn't realize that "playstyle" is a technical term referring to the game config. I think of playstyle as an abstract way that one chooses to play a sandbox game. That might be the game settings, might be mods, might be guidelines that exist only in your head, and is probably a combination. For example, one game I'm considering is a vegetarian one -- no consuming meat or killing animals for anything except self-defense. It would make protein very challenging, and without access to leather, I'd probably need to mod the recipes for metal armor to be built on gambeson instead of leather jerkin. I'd consider that a "style."

Also, focusing on sneaking around rather than open combat is a style. Also considering a run through where I cap or severely limit access to metal and stick around in the stone and pottery age for a long time.

So, in that sense, a modlist is an integral part, but it probably needs another word.

5 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Ideally, modlists would be at the top of the Mod Manager, and each modlist you enable checks the box beside each mod in that list.

Yeah, this seems like a lovely way to implement it. 

[Katherine K]

I find that objections to adventure mode is very strange in a game where the base survival mode is technically a mod. Just one that happens to ship with the game.

I can see some concerns about the team resource allocation, but it sounds like the intent is to expand the team. Adventure mode would then be developed basically as an in-house mod. The impact on the survival side should be more mechanics and functional blocks that ended up working for both. That seems like a win-win.

Having worked on projects where sharing code between multiple games in flight is difficult due to them existing on completely different versions of the engine (or worse, different engines) and on projects where there is a shared core for multiple games, I much prefer the latter. Being able to share fixes, features, and just sections of code makes development far more efficient, expands the pool of people who can help, gives you better redundancy if someone goes on vacation or something, etc. You end up with better games in less time with less stress for the entire team.

Throwing that away just because somebody is only here for game A and not game B is really silly.

[cosmobeau]

7 hours ago, Katherine K said:

I find that objections to adventure mode is very strange in a game where the base survival mode is technically a mod. Just one that happens to ship with the game.

I can see some concerns about the team resource allocation, but it sounds like the intent is to expand the team. Adventure mode would then be developed basically as an in-house mod. The impact on the survival side should be more mechanics and functional blocks that ended up working for both. That seems like a win-win.

Having worked on projects where sharing code between multiple games in flight is difficult due to them existing on completely different versions of the engine (or worse, different engines) and on projects where there is a shared core for multiple games, I much prefer the latter. Being able to share fixes, features, and just sections of code makes development far more efficient, expands the pool of people who can help, gives you better redundancy if someone goes on vacation or something, etc. You end up with better games in less time with less stress for the entire team.

Throwing that away just because somebody is only here for game A and not game B is really silly.

Honestly the more I hear other people's opinions I think my majority issue was

- the timing for revealing they're working on basically a completely different game was kinda poor. I think some people would have received it better after a STABLE Ch.2 release.

- The language around their friends at Hytale, on top of it being a failed game, seems very personally motivated. If you just like Vintage Story, and know nothing about Angeo Studios or the people who work there, just reading the reveal does look sketchy. Most people are defending Tyron & Co based off of their perceived endearment to them. Some people have no prior engagement or knowledge to base off how much they "like" or "trust" them.

- First stating it is a game mode then saying it will be it's own game and it's wildly different, then saying it will be in Vintage Story threw me off. 

I still sincerely believe if their intention is to make a new game, they can still share all the code and such, and actually just make it a new game from the start. Don't put it in Vintage Story if it won't even look, feel, or be the same genre of game. Just literally make another game.

Edited August 10, 2025 by cosmobeau

[cosmobeau]

16 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

To my knowledge, Tyron himself used to be a Hytale developer, and parted ways with the Hytale team due to creative differences. So I'd wager that's at least one reason he's attempting to absorb some of Hytale's talent into Anego Studios and create a gamemode similar to what Hytale was supposed to be. I'd probably do similar if I were in his shoes, honestly. Hytale was/is a great concept, that a LOT of people were looking forward to, that ultimately failed due to mismanagement, if I'm not mistaken. 

As I've understood Tyron's posts on the matter, the team that's working on the new Adventure Mode concept is separate from the team that works on Vintage Story itself. It's similar to Homo Sapiens game mode in that matter too, in that it's technically a different game but using Vintage Story as the engine to power it. If it's popular enough, then it would get split off into it's own proper game, instead of just being an alternate mode for Vintage Story.

That being said, yes, there is a chance it could fail, and it would be disappointing for Hytale fans. However, that could be said for any project, really. Given Tyron's current success with Vintage Story, I'd expect there to be success with Adventure Mode as well. I'd also say there's quite a demand for a more fantasy-based gamemode in the VS community itself, given the number of fantasy-themed mods on the database, fantasy-RPG servers, and suggestions about adding more fantasy content to the base game itself. Like Homo Sapiens, it might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it'll be nice to have as an option for those who prefer that kind of setting, or just want a change of pace from the standard game.

For sure, Tyron did say himself that they worked there, how much they liked the devs, and wanted to keep their dream alive. 

I honestly knew nothing about Hytale, and I'm a huge fan of Vintage Story, but I'll admit I don't follow the people who make the game outside reading updates to the game. I don't have a huge opinion of the studio outside this game they've made so far is awesome, obviously.

It is cool to have an option for more modes such as Dwarf Fortress "Adventure Mode" which doesn't actually depart from the game or it's genre, look or feel that much at all. This however, is something they intend on making a whole other game.

I'd like to see them commit to that, and actually just make it a new game from the get-go instead of tacking it on to the Vintage Story Client. Still make your seperate team, let them develop this game using your engine & code. It's from a failed game sure, you want to continue it that's your free will. However from an outsiders perspective of someone who just plays the game and knows nothing of Angeo/Tyron, the reveal added in the updates seems weird, personally motivated, and a confusing course of action?

I just don't know of many indie devs who pickup a failed project and inject it into their game while their original game is still in development, that's what threw me off so hard. If you're making a new game, then make a new game. Why pretend it's a story mode for Vintage Story, when you admit it's not like vintage story at all/doesn't follow its lore?

And damn, how much is love a survival horror RPG actually based off of Vintage Story's lore and aesthetics. But we get Hytale instead (something I had no idea existed LOL) :'c

Edited August 10, 2025 by cosmobeau

[Krougal]

@cosmobeau

If you think of VS as game engine as well as a game, maybe it would make more sense to you?

So we have the 3 mods (creative, game and survival) that make up the base game.

Not being sure exactly how it would work, but assuming that...we're going to call it HyTale mode because it's late, and I am tired.

HyTale mode will also have 3 similar named mods, or maybe it will just have creative and survival, and it will use the VS game mod for the functions it contains. Or maybe it will just be 1 module. Whatever.

Say also that you got really ambitious and got some friends together and made up your own total conversion mod, that maybe would use the game mod from VS, but then have your  own mod(s) that work together. Maybe a few other groups do this too.

So we've got 3 or more distinct games from each other, that run off the same launcher and engine.

Maybe someone comes along later and says, you know I like the features from all of these, I want to mash them all together into 1 game mode. It would be a lot of work, although certainly a lot less than making it all from scratch, but they could probably grab all the pieces they like and stitch them together into yet another game mode.

Although I am actually starting to like vanilla VS more, the appeal of it has always been the way modding isn't an afterthought like it was for MC, the game was designed from the ground up to support it.

So maybe we get a 2nd free game out of this, and who knows, you may decide you like it.

Maybe it is a total bust. Hopefully it doesn't take the company down with it.

Like I said before, so far it seems like Tyron and his wife have good business sense. They did build a  successful software company out of nothing. They are beholden to no publisher that would take the lions share of their profit and possibly interfere in their development as well. They aren't publicly traded and so they have the freedom to do as they see fit.

They could be in debt up to their eyeballs too, and they could always turn around and sell the company to Microsoft tomorrow, but giving them the benefit of the doubt and taking them at face value here.

Their sales could always dry up too, but the HyTale mode will also no doubt bring in more sales, as maybe there was a fan base there that would not have been interested in VS, but will now buy it when their game is released with it.

TLDR, I wouldn't worry over the future of the game too much.

[Never Jhonsen]

12 hours ago, Katherine K said:

I can see some concerns about the team resource allocation, but it sounds like the intent is to expand the team. Adventure mode would then be developed basically as an in-house mod. The impact on the survival side should be more mechanics and functional blocks that ended up working for both. That seems like a win-win.

[...]

Being able to share fixes, features, and just sections of code makes development far more efficient, expands the pool of people who can help, gives you better redundancy if someone goes on vacation or something, etc.

This sums up very nicely all that Tyron had said about it on the locked thread; even if Adventure Mode fails, it will have still helped Vintage Story grow

I have been excited to see what comes out of Adventure Mode. While I've never cared for Hytale, and the style of game it brings, I do care about Vintage Story, and seeing how this game is, I have high expectations for it

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, Krougal said:

So maybe we get a 2nd free game out of this, and who knows, you may decide you like it.

I'll also note that I asked Tyron in the announcement thread whether Vintage Story players would need to pay for the new game if it begins as a VS module but later becomes a separate game, if players would get it for free, or if players would get it at a significant discount. The answer seems to be that players who already own VS will get a copy of the new game for free, or at a significant discount--either option feels fair to me. It ensures that previous VS players don't have to fork over a lot of money for something they really already owned and played with for a while.

 

6 hours ago, Krougal said:

If you think of VS as game engine as well as a game, maybe it would make more sense to you?

@Thorfinn mentioned this a while back, and I didn't think too much of it at the time. However, after poking around in the code for modding purposes and watching updates roll out, I'm inclined to think it's a much more accurate description of what Vintage Story is than I first thought. Yes, it's still a game, but it's also very much a game engine in itself, that anyone with the grit and know-how could overhaul into a brand new game via a mod.

It's not an entirely foreign concept either. People have done similar with mods for Skyrim; Enderall is technically a separate game, but it's also a total conversion mod for Skyrim. The Skywind and Skyblivion fan projects are also total conversion mods.

[Thorfinn]

7 hours ago, Krougal said:

and it will use the VS game mod for the functions it contains.

It probably won't even do that. The purpose of the JSONs is to provide the parameters to pass into the engine. I haven't gone through all the JSONs yet, but I have yet to find one that actually does the function. I'm not even sure it's possible for JSON to do, but I've been surprised by talented coders before.

But, for example, I doubt the current combat system will be sufficient for what looks to be required in MyTale. They will have to develop something more robust, and then it's just a matter of writing JSONs and making art for VS to take advantage of their contribution to the engine.

Edited August 10, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

n mentioned this a while back, and I didn't think too much of it at the time. However, after poking around in the code for modding purposes and watching updates roll out, I'm inclined to think it's a much more accurate description of what Vintage Story is than I first thought.

Exactly. It's why I've taken to speaking of the Anego Engine and the VS game as two separate things. You need the engine and a game to make anything one can play.

Edited August 10, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Altimely]

You're making aggressive accusations and seem bent on framing this in a negative light. Tyrone was very transparent about the resources being allocated to Vintage Story and the new developing game mode, and VS players aren't getting shafted.

You don't want "Vintage Story: Hytale edition". Cool, neither do I. If your concern is not wanting the Hytale mode installed by default then make a diplomatic request that it be a separate, optional download. Accusing the developer, who has been transparent and delivered a solid product so far, of shady dealings based on your interpretation is unnecessary.

[cosmobeau]

On 8/10/2025 at 4:13 PM, Altimely said:

You're making aggressive accusations and seem bent on framing this in a negative light. Tyrone was very transparent about the resources being allocated to Vintage Story and the new developing game mode, and VS players aren't getting shafted.

You don't want "Vintage Story: Hytale edition". Cool, neither do I. If your concern is not wanting the Hytale mode installed by default then make a diplomatic request that it be a separate, optional download. Accusing the developer, who has been transparent and delivered a solid product so far, of shady dealings based on your interpretation is unnecessary.

Unless you know these people personally, I'm not sure how "transparent" it actually is. In what way does the transparency help, though, if we take everything face value? I still just straight up disagree with certain aspects of the reveal, that have nothing to do with deception. 

I don't think I framed it as shady so much as confusing, frustrating and concerned. You can have devs that are transparent all day long and still stall development, without even picking up a failed projected on the side. That's the main thing, it was a failed project, and my main "shady" accusation was around them picking it up because they're great friends with them, not necessarily because it was a good idea or allocation of efforts. Other than that, I don't think I really accuse them of anything that heinous.

Understanding now that a lot of people hold not just the game in high regard like I do because I've been playing it, but they also have a high opinion of the devs. I am not that quick to develop a parasocial appreciation for companies and groups of people I don't know outside reading game updates.

From my perspective, it was

- VS is in development 

- Tyron & his wife technically own and run the show

- A game called Hytale failed

- Tyron is close friends with the people who made that game 

- Tyron decides to pick up failed game and put it into VS while its in development 

- The failed game will appear in VS when you play

- The game will be nothing like VS

- Tryron claims this will come at no extra cost 

- Tyron claims that VS can't develop any quicker and this won't slow development

- Tyron says that he and his wife still have a very distinct vision for the game and where it should go 

- Contradictorily, he also says he lets the whole team decide it's direction to the point that there's so much input on its direction that he's had to split the team into two meetings

- Also complains that they don't have enough time to write devlog updates??

- Explains away any concerns people have about VS current development and explains away two different type of popular requests that this be a separate project 

Now if you were an outsider, had no attachment/personal bias for Tyron & Angeo, how would that look to you? Like honestly, for people who don't follow the company who makes the game, and they just play the game and only look at the updates, this is whiplash.

Edited August 12, 2025 by cosmobeau

[Katherine K]

3 hours ago, cosmobeau said:

- VS is in development 

- Tyron & his wife technically own and run the show

- A game called Hytale failed

- Tyron is close friends with the people who made that game 

- Tyron decides to pick up failed game and put it into VS while its in development 

- The failed game will appear in VS when you play

- The game will be nothing like VS

- Tryron claims this will come at no extra cost 

- Tyron claims that VS can't develop any quicker and this won't slow development

- Tyron says that he and his wife still have a very distinct vision for the game and where it should go 

- Contradictorily, he also says he lets the whole team decide it's direction to the point that there's so much input on its direction that he's had to split the team into two meetings

- Also complains that they don't have enough time to write devlog updates??

- Explains away any concerns people have about VS current development and explains away two different type of popular requests that this be a separate project 

Without seeing this from the inside, I can't speak with certainty, of course, but a lot of this is just how gamedev runs, honestly. I sort of get why these can look like a bunch of red flags, but it doesn't align with my experience.

People making games have opinions about what they're making. If we didn't care what to make, so many of us could make better money elsewhere. But in the end, somebody has to call the shots. So there being a lot of input from the devs, while one-two people are making final decision is not a contradiction.

You can often find resources for game B that you can't for game A, even if game A is already in progress. This partially goes to the point above. People don't necessarily all want to make the same game. More people working on the same project does make the project go faster, but it's not linear. If you double the team, you don't get the game in anywhere close to half the time. Because you get more inefficiencies, more management and planning overhead, more people butting heads, more stuff that gets made and gets thrown away, because some designs changed... In cases where there is shared tech, build pipelines, and other scalable parts of the project, having the team get split into two games might be the most sensible thing to do with the resources you have.

And finally, finding really good people for all of the disciplines is hard. Even now, when so many awesome people got cut from their jobs due to many studios downsizing, hiring is a huge challenge, because so much about game dev talent is hard to put on a resume. When you know people, you've worked with them, you know that they're good and you know how to put a project together, and there's an opportunity to work with them again, you jump on that opportunity. I'm not going to say it's never nepotism, and higher up the chain you go, the more often it is nepotism. But what I'm seeing here, with Tyron wanting to bring in some known good talent from Hytale, is very sensible.

[Dark Thoughts]

You're getting upset over semantics? Is that it? What the hell difference does it make if they call it a "separate game" vs. "a separate VS module" when they use the same engine?!

This is literally a good opportunity for VS & Anego Studios so I really don't understand the outrage at all.

4 hours ago, cosmobeau said:

Now if you were an outsider, had no attachment/personal bias for Tyron & Angeo, how would that look to you? Like honestly, for people who don't follow the company who makes the game, and they just play the game and only look at the updates, this is whiplash.

It sounds like someone's ignorant & uninformed and rather spends their time feeding outrage culture instead of reading up on the matter. You also seem to like to do mental gymnastics to further feed that outrage through your bias.

[cosmobeau]

5 hours ago, Dark Thoughts said:

You're getting upset over semantics? Is that it? What the hell difference does it make if they call it a "separate game" vs. "a separate VS module" when they use the same engine?!

This is literally a good opportunity for VS & Anego Studios so I really don't understand the outrage at all.

It sounds like someone's ignorant & uninformed and rather spends their time feeding outrage culture instead of reading up on the matter. You also seem to like to do mental gymnastics to further feed that outrage through your bias.

Do we sincerely live in an era where when people are upset over a decision a company makes, in a industry that has failed products all the time, is called "outrage culture"? Lmao 

I barely think Vintage Story is a topic that garners a lot of drama and outrage. I think things are going to be okay I don't think I'm feeding anything especially considering that overwhelmingly people disagree or only softly agree with some of my points.