Cube World, which began life with a paid alpha in 2013, is finally launching. Developer Picroma announced it will launch on Steam “hopefully around the end of September/October 2019.”
For those who can’t recall — and six years is geological time in this industry — Cube World was (well, is) a voxel-based, procedurally generated action-RPG that gathered some anticipation back when those concepts were a lot more buzzy. It was seen as a kind of Minecraft-meets-World-of-Warcraft riff and designer Wolfram von Funck published an alpha in July 2013, which let early players in for $15.
Cube World will be released on Steam! https://t.co/Lap10eQVKX
— Wolfram von Funck (@wol_lay) September 6, 2019
Hopefully around the end of September/October 2019. #cubeworld
But the game only got one further update — at the end of July 2013 — and was removed from sale four years ago. Von Funck has since communicated about the game only sporadically. Even if Von Funck would resurface to say work was still continuing on what the developer called a “passion project,” most players treated it as effectively over.
In a message to backers published earlier today, von Funck tried to explain “why everything took me so long, why there were no updates and so on …”
Von Funck noted that Picroma was hit with a distributed denial-of-service attack “as soon as we opened the shop. It might sound silly, but this event traumatized me and kind of broke something inside me.” Von Funck spoke of “dealing with anxiety and depression ever since,” and that social media didn’t help, which somewhat accounts for Von Funck’s lack of communication.
“There were several points in the past years where I considered releasing an update, but every time I was afraid it wasn’t good enough,” von Funck wrote. What is launching in September/October is effectively “Cube World 2.0,” von Funck said. So, this a full release, not an alpha update.
Von Funck’s tweet yesterday afternoon was accompanied by a new listing on Steam. The page advertises a long list of features, including co-operative online multiplayer, “procedurally generated lore,” “non-linear, open world gameplay,” and “action-based combat.” Players can choose among four classic RPG classes, Warrior, Ranger, Rogue and Mage, to build their characters. That’s Mage in a 16-minute gameplay video above that von Funck published a week ago.
Von Funck specified that “owners of the alpha will get Steam keys,” so, check your libraries if the alpha was so long ago you forgot if you bought it.