It may come as a shock to those who had previously been following Cube World, but developer Picroma has today confirmed that they are indeed still developing the open-world voxel RPG, with the release of a new video demonstrating the previously talked about revamped quest system.

Though we initially heard a little about Cube World's questing system back in January, today the developers gave us a glimpse of how they would work in the gorgeous voxel-based RPG with a new gameplay demo. Currently the alpha that players can participate in through a one-off purchase holds a handful of different types of quests — such as monster quests, dungeon quests, mini quests and main quests. Co-creator Wolfram von Funck explains in a new blog post accompanying the video on just how they arrived at the new system, which emphasises the spirit of exploration.

There were some challenges due to Cube World's procedural generation: The world is generated on-the-fly in a small region around the player while he's exploring it, but we wanted to be able to define quests more globally. E.g. there should be quests that send you from one end of a land to the other. So I developed a system which allows me to create quests in areas that haven't been generated yet. Complicated, isn't it? ;) Also NPCs, monsters and items need to be generated before the actual landscape, so they can be logically linked to quests.

So we made the system more exploration-based: we removed quest-givers and also removed all markers from the world map. Quests are just there and players can find them by exploring. E.g. you might find an old crypt and when you enter it, there is a skeleton boss that you have to defeat. Maybe the boss will drop a key or a treasure which is needed for another quest.

Picroma notes that the video footage below is still incomplete, with only a selected handful of quest styles showcased. Those eager to jump into the game right this minute can find an alpha available for purchase over here.