Minecraft console developer 4J Studios announces new survival sandbox game

The studio behind the console versions of Minecraft has announced a new open-world multiplayer survival sandbox game called Reforj.

Dundee, Scotland-based 4J Studios is developing the game for PC and current-generation console hardware on a proprietary voxel sandbox engine which it hopes will transform the genre.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, 4J founder and chairman Chris van der Kuyl said the studio intends to build the game “with the community”. And to that end, in January it hired popular YouTuber Stampy (Joseph Mark Garret) to work on the project as a game designer.

“In the 1990s we believed that game developers were the new rockstars… but I actually think we’re more like Fender and Gibson,” van der Kuyl said. “We make musical instruments, and we have people like Joe taking those instruments and playing tunes on them that we didn’t think possible.

“We’re looking to this generation of creatives, and this will be the most creator-friendly game out there, to take our game and show us journeys and stories, and find things in our games that we didn’t think were there.”

He continued: “Joe has things like his Bonus Points podcast, and it means we have someone on the team who is as connected to the community as anybody could be.

“We’ve already had the first group of YouTubers we know in the studio, and as soon as possible there will be a pre-alpha version to play.”

4J, which also previously developed HD remasters of Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark, currently has around 50 employees, not all of whom are working on Reforj yet.

van der Kuyl said the studio started working on the Elements Engine, which is powering the game, about five years ago.

“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.”

“It’s not just about us looking at ray-tracing. It’s about… the world’s saves being really efficient,” van der Kuyl said. “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.

“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.”