While at PAX East I had the opportunity to tryout Trove on the Xbox One and to chat with Character Animator Robin Luera about the upcoming console launch.
One thing I noticed right away, is while there are radial menus to select various things there aren’t nested radial menus. When games go from PC to console I often find myself in nested radial hell and it makes me sad so this was pleasant surprise. Also, the controls felt natural and they were mostly intuitive. These were the two things I was most concerned about because it’s never fun to play a game which just doesn’t feel natural on the platform you are playing on.
In the update, which brought Trove live on consoles, they also added some inventory upgrades which are super helpful. Currency, Components, and Gems are now stored separately on different tabs which keeps your inventory clean and simple. The Loot Collector is a useful tool to quickly breakdown items which you don’t want but would like to keep the look of, and in addition there have been a few improvements to how the Loot Collector works on console.
When the Loot Collector is opened any item that can be collected will be automatically imported into the menu. Anything of high value is automatically locked so if you want to destroy it and collect the appearance you must specifically enable it. Then it’s one button press to collect all unlocked items and all materials that can be placed in the specialized tabs goes right in. This is a pretty huge quality of life improvement.
While I was running around in Trove I went to a few different dungeons to get a feel for how combat felt on a console. These aren’t long plodding areas to get through like in some MMOs, dungeons are short little areas where you kill things and collect loot. Most of the time I could jump down to the boss in each one and just kill it, collect my loot, and head out to the next one. Of course, I was on a fairly high level character and doing lower level dungeons so it probably wouldn’t be as easy if I was doing things at my level.
Unfortunately, as with the case with many cross-platform MMOs, the PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions will all be separate from each other which segments out the players a lot. Also, the PS4 and Xbox One versions are not at the same patch as the PC which means the PC version of Trove is ahead of the consoles in terms of content. However, Robin Luera did mention they are working on a patch to catch the consoles up to the PC in the near future.
As a free to play game there’s no good reason to not try out Trove if you have an Xbox One or a PS4, it’s a ton of fun and the optimization is really smooth.
