4J Studios – the award-winning developer best known for bringing Mojang’s Minecraft to consoles – has shared details on its next game: Reforj.
Reforj is described as a creative survival sandbox game, and one the studio will develop with a community-focused approach. But no, Reforj is not Minecraft 2.
“Reclaim the future. Rewrite the past. Reforj the world,” reads the Reforj social media account.
“The fact this is coming from 4J means the comparisons to Minecraft are unavoidable,” said Minecraft YouTuber Joseph Garrett, aka Stampy, in an interview with Eurogamer’s sister-site GamesIndustry.biz. Garrett joined 4J earlier this year, working with the developer to bring Reforj to life.
“We’ve already had articles about 4J making Minecraft 2. But that’s not what we’re trying to do,” Garrett continued. “Despite all of us being huge fans of Minecraft, we don’t need to make another one. It already exists.”
4J founder and chairman Chris van der Kuyl added Reforj will offer players a “a very different gameplay experience” to Minecraft.
“That doesn’t mean they will still play the games they play and love every day,” he said. “They will. That’s something we revel in. We still have a marketplace in Minecraft. This is just something brand new for people who love the genre, and we don’t think they’ve had anything new for quite a long time.”
Reforj is being developed in Elements Engine, 4J’s own “proprietary voxel sandbox engine”. The team debuted the engine on YouTube earlier this year, adding it will “harness the incredible power of the newest generation of consoles and graphics cards” (see video above).
“We started on the Elements Engine about five years ago,” said van der Kuyl. “The obvious question is that Unity and Unreal have taken over the market, so why do this? Well, we love creative sandbox gaming. And we realised that nobody had really thought about features that you’d want to be accelerated by next gen that would benefit sandbox gaming. Of course we want nice graphics and shiny water. But there were opportunities around using GPU acceleration for something different.
“Generally when you get these block building games, or voxel-based games, they start to get performance restrictive quite early. So we asked ourselves, could we build an engine that gave you persistent 60-frames-per-second in this kind-of game. It may be a geeky thing to say, but for a player it would transform their experience.”
Garrett added the engine’s focus on the latest hardware is “not just about [4J] looking at ray-tracing” and other visual boosts.
“It’s about… the world’s saves being really efficient. It is this big sandbox world, but it doesn’t save the world, it just saves the changes you made to the world, so it means that the world saves are really small and can load really efficiently,” he said.
“We have gateways in the world where you can travel to other worlds and create new ones, and it all links seamlessly. It wouldn’t be possible if you’re loading data off a harddrive. [This engine] is not just adding bells and whistles to the game, it is about core design function and mechanism that is made possible by having Xbox Series S as the baseline.”
There currently isn’t a release date for Reforj, with the game still in the pre-alpha stage of development. You can stay up to date with the team’s progress in the meantime via social media.
As for Minecraft, did you get a look at the recent live-action movie trailer? It sure is the sight to behold!