Although ArcheAge was very much my game of show at GDC last week, another of Trion Worlds’ games took a close second: the delightfully cute and complex Trove. It’s silly, it’s visually appealing, and it’s seemingly chock full of collaborative adventure.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to check out Trove just yet, suffice it to say that Trion’s newest addition is a voxel-based MMORPG with procedurally generated worlds and an emphasis on teamwork and player-made content. It’s very much an MMO in the sense that you’ll have classes like the Knight or Gunslinger to choose from, and will fight monsters, level up your characters, explore different worlds, and run dungeons, but you’ll likely be spending even more time adventuring with friends and building/destroying your environs. Trove’s all about shared loot, open dungeons, and voxels, so if you’re looking for Minecraft meets your favorite MMORPG, you might find - or build - a nice home here.
Trove is currently in Alpha, but there are already a variety of ways that you can put your voxel-based creativity to work. Plots are scattered around the world, for example, where you can build 16x16x150x150-voxel Cornerstones, which are towers crafted from raw blocks that you can get from loot or destroying stuff. You’ve also got your own personal Home World that you can build to your liking, as well as the Metaforge, a tool that allows you to view and balance all of the things that you’re building. The game will allow you to build wild and zany dungeons, but will adjust them for you to promote better gameplay, slimming down those ten treasure chests or bosses that you’re trying to place in the entrance to a more reasonable number.
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A new addition to the Alpha build is the presence of Adventure Portals, which will transport you to the aptly named Adventure Worlds. These areas are on par with your character’s level, and could be zones already occupied by other players, or pristine worlds for you to conquer. Adventure Worlds have been introduced to mitigate issues with persistence on Hub Worlds, where all of the available Cornerstone plots, for example, might already be taken.
In our preview, I was very impressed by the developers’ discussion of their responsiveness to the game’s needs and its community. Equipment, for example, has been heretofore subject to decay over time, but the Trion team is changing this mechanic to allow it to be persistent and modifiable. They’ve also heard a lot of demand for guild-based worlds, and although they have nothing to announce along those lines just yet, I could see that their community’s requests carry a lot of weight in their development outlook. Additionally, and perhaps most interesting, Trove players will be able to create stuff like weapons with third-party voxel editors (or the in-game editor), have them vetted by the game community and then developers, and find them added to the game.
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PvP is not a focus for Trove, and the developers’ goal is to implement a larger number of classes with fewer abilities apiece, to encourage a more “instinctive” style of combat. To be honest, I’d kind of like the option to punch other voxel-heads in their voxel-faces with my voxel-fists, but we’ll see what Trion decides for the launch product.
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I was assured that there will be a wipe between Alpha and Beta, but not after Beta, so hopefully we’ll be able to get in there and get building very soon!
Som Pourfarzaneh / Som has been hanging out with the MMORPG.com crew since 2011, and is an Associate Director & Lecturer in Media, Anthropology, and Religious Studies. He’s a former Community Manager for Neverwinter, the free-to-play Dungeons & Dragons MMORPG from Cryptic Studios and Perfect World Entertainment, and is unreasonably good at Maze Craze for the Atari 2600. You can exchange puns and chat (European) football with him on Twitter @sominator.
