TL;DR: Modern voxel engine implementations have the potential to bring to the video game industry:
Voxel granularity fosters emergent mechanics. The most prominent example of voxel mechanics are the mining and crafting in Minecraft. From a simple concept of uniformly-sized static blocks came a plethora of creative player-made structures, and from the foundational mechanic of redstone came a plethora of advanced player-created machines. But Minecraft's voxels (as well as those of many other games and engines) are large and static. Modern PCs now have the computational capacity to render higher numbers of smaller voxels, each with material properties and realtime physics and lighting. The potential applications of an open-source game engine with these features would be diverse. Most notably, a physically scaled-down version of redstone would allow for a much more useable and accessible mechanic, because the redstone system wouldn't get in the way of the objects it interacts with (i.e. the redstone wires and devices would take up far less space). 1st and 3rd person combat games with strategic environmental manipulation (think of a CSGO-type game with a dynamic, malleable, physics-based world), racing games with player-built vehicles, and even aesthetically superior Minecraft alternatives with more advanced crafting and building mechanics would all be possible. Hence, instead of creating a single game (like Dennis Gustafsson is doing with Teardown), I want to make an open-source engine that supports diverse gameplay at scale ("scale" both in terms of support for several games made by different studios, and in terms of literal game world size and render distance).
"I can't imagine a world without Minecraft... [L]ike mirrors, television, Tetris and toothpaste, the invention of Minecraft seems inevitable once civilization develops to a certain age". — 2kliksphilip
Like Minecraft, Teardown seems to have been inevitable; As PC hardware has improved since Minecraft's creation, so have the prospects of a more advanced voxel-based game engine. However, it seems that Teardown was never meant to be a more advanced Minecraft; Tuxedo Labs has taken a more humble approach focused around a few simple game modes, such as a heist game mode, which employs a simple game loop consisting of planning/destroying/carving a path through the map, and then running through the path to collect all the key cards before the time runs out. There is also a sandbox game mode, which boils down to driving pre-made vehicles around and destroying the map with various tools. Although these game modes are fun, they are not built upon a framework that supports open-world exploration, building, crafting, survival, multiplayer, terrain generation, or high render distances. In short, Teardown brings new aesthetics and physics-based destruction to the realm of voxel games, but it's engine lacks the depth and breadth (feature set) of Minecraft's. I want to fill this void by making my own, more comprehensive game engine inspired by the best parts of both Minecraft and Teardown (as well as a few other games. See the Inspirations page). Like the engines of Minecraft and Teardown, the engine I envision seems to also be an inevitability; it's the next step of the natural evolution of voxel video games.
Voxels serve as an alternative to the currently popular video game art styles, offering a clean, sharp, minimal visual aesthetic that can be easily and rapidly developed with voxel editors (and in-game, like the building mechanic in Minecraft) without texturing, rigging, skinning, etc.
Next page: Inspirations