Good News! - Cube World Isn't Dead

Alas, Cube World, we hardly knew ye. You sprang into our lives from Wollay's blocky womb an alpha with a big upside, but then you did probably the most unsettling thing an alpha's capable of: nothing. No growth. No evolution. No march ever onward to completion. After weathering a launch storm of server issues and DDoS attacks, the voxel adventure paradise suddenly ceased updates. The game and its website have been stagnant since July, leading many to fear that Wollay's bucket of building blocks has already run dry. The developer, however, has finally piped up to put an end to the radio silence.

The developer tweeted (for the first time in months), noting that work on Cube World still continues apace, but there's still a whole, whole lot more to be done. The two-person team further reached out to Kotaku to elaborate:

"The new update is coming along nicely. We're still experimenting with some features and are working on an improved launcher. At the moment there's just a lot of work going on behind the scenes, like customer support, server/website development, and we're currently moving to a new apartment with more space for our development studio."

"There's an option for a smaller user interface, the controls will be configurable and there are a few new creatures. We're tweaking game balance to make it easier at lower levels and harder at higher levels. We're also experimenting with some major changes but I'm not sure yet which ones will make it into the next patch."

As of now, unfortunately, Wollay's unable to pin down a release window. "We're doing our best to release the update as soon as we can but I'm really bad at estimating," said the developer.

It's worth noting that Cube World has long been a side project for its developers, and radio silence hasn't exactly been an uncommon occurrence. Still though, in this age of early access - wherein, we pay for sometimes very unfinished games with the implied promise of continued improvement - do you think developers owe us frequent status updates? If nothing else, then as a show of good faith or a means of staying accountable? Or are you willing to let devs seal themselves off in their own little underground creativity bunkers, bathed only in darkness and their ideas? I know "open" development doesn't work for every kind of game, but should silence be the answer?