I have to be honest and admit that Trove has never really been on my radar. Sorry, I’m just not a Minecraft fan and most of the voxel-based games it spawned just never did anything for me. Still, I do keep an open mind when going into show appointments and Trove was no different. Being mostly unfamiliar with the game, Trion’s Andrew Krausnick and Adam Hetenyi gave me the full rundown on Trove and also shared some details on what’s coming up soon for the game.
If, like me, you’re unfamiliar with Trove, let me break it down for you. Trove takes a ton of inspiration from games like Minecraft and Terraria, but the key difference is that Trion’s put an MMO spin on it all by having everyone connected and playing in the same persistent universe.
Trove features hub worlds, which are essentially lobbies, that players use to connect to all of the game’s content. It’s here that you’ll enter portals into adventure worlds (where players, well, adventure!) or club worlds, which are somewhat analogous to guild housing.
Trion’s also employing a class-based design in Trove. There are currently eight classes in the game (you can switch between them freely on a single character), however, there is a ninth class, the Pirate Captain, coming with the launch of the game’s next update, Fish and Ships. And yes, as you can likely glean from the punny title, this update will feature both ships and fishing. Andrew described the game’s class system as MOBA inspired. Each class features two active abilities, a passive ability, and an ultimate attack.
)
You can do your building and hanging out in the hub worlds, but when you’re ready to go out and adventure, you’ll want to enter an adventure world. Adventure worlds come in a variety of difficulty levels and it’s here that you’ll do all your leveling, exploration, material gathering, etc. There aren’t as many plots to place your Cornerstone (house) on in adventure worlds, but they do pop up. You can bring your Cornerstone around with you from your hub to the game’s various adventure worlds by simply by claiming one of these plots. It’s a good idea, too, since your Cornerstone also serves as your respawn point in an adventure world.
The aspect of Trove that fascinated me most is the game’s sort of accidental success in user-generated content. A ton of content in Trove is actually player created and this even includes the game’s dungeons. Trion does actually curate this content, so don’t expect to see farming levels and the other sorts of typical pitfalls you’ve seen in other games that feature UGC, but it wasn’t necessarily the UGC itself that impressed me, but the way some of the crazier UGC in Trove has come to be. Trion hasn’t released tools for content creation in Trove, instead, resourceful players have basically developed their own tools and mod loaders to work with the game’s assets and come up with their own creations. One player even created a pair of Corgi guns. I knew about the game’s Corgi mounts, but I wasn’t fully aware of the game’s UGC insanity until I saw the Corgi guns.
What about those club worlds we mentioned earlier? Well, these are the most permanent worlds in Trove. Clubs are essentially Trove’s guilds and players can join up to five different clubs. Each club world is essentially a massive guild house in a sense. Players can be assigned various permissions in how they can affect the world based on the club’s ranking system as well.
Even though the Fish and Ships update is set to launch in just a few weeks, Trion’s Andrew Krausnick did want to highlight some of the more significant and recent additions that have come online. Last month, Trion launched the ‘Take Flight’ update, which added the Shadow Hunter class, wings, a sky biome, a new runecrafting profession, and more.
Trion’s committed to pushing out updates to Trove at a breakneck pace, so if you’re looking for a voxel-based MMO experience that’s being kept fresh not only from month to month, but even week to week, you may want to give Trove a look. Trove is currently in open beta and is set to officially launch sometime in late 2015.
