Minecraft console developer 4J Studios are making Reforj, their own open world survival game

Powered by their own voxel engine

A few months ago, Minecraft's original console developer 4J Studios showed off a new in-house engine they had created, called the Elements Engine. Now they've announced what game they're making with it. It's called Reforj, and it's an "open-world multiplayer survival sandbox." But it's not aiming to be Minecraft 2, they say.

The screenshot above is from a pre-alpha version of Reforj, which has no release date at this point. The trailer below shows more of the engine in action.

"The fact this is coming from 4J means that the comparisons to Minecraft are unavoidable," Joseph Garrett told GamesIndustry.biz in a recent interview about the game. Garrett is better known as Stampy, a Minecraft YouTuber, and he's working with 4J on Reforj. "We've already had articles about 4J making Minecraft 2. But that's not what we're trying to do. Despite all of us being huge fans of Minecraft, we don't need to make another one. It already exists."

Reforj will instead offer "a very different gameplay experience," 4J co-founder Chris van der Kuyl says. The Elements engine has been designed to serve an open world survival game, however, one where players can change the world much like they can in Minecraft.

4J Studios say they're hoping to release Reforj early and build it in partnership with its community, and that they recognise they're a small team and so their expectations of likely player numbers are low.

We're long past the point in the industry where there's a new Minecraftbut launching every two months, but it's too early to tell if Reforj will offer something more than Ylands or Trove or any of a thousand of other block-building games which came and went. I will say this: I do not think swapping cubes for smaller, angled pieces is the good idea so many of these games think it is.