Trove

Gotta… Keep… Grinding…

A new player in the mmo scene, Trove is made by the same developers as Rift and Archeage so you know they have good mmo roots. It’s an action MMORPG set in a minecrafty style voxel world where your objective is to adventure in the land, do quests and build your own personal base. Playing as a character up to the first ‘Uber’ rank I am by no means an expert in this game so consider this a type of first impressions.

There isn’t really a story in Trove, though there is apparently some hidden lore. So instead of discussing the story I think it is better to talk about character progression. You level up each character based on class and you also gain a ‘Mastery Rank’ which is your overall progress. Each rank gets you more stats and for mastery you can unlock buffs and new items. Some of the best items in the game can be unlocked by gaining high mastery. The game is free to play so there is also some elements of payment to gain items however most items can just be bought with in game currency, however there is a big incentive to buy with money which could lead to a problem.

One of the many ‘Cornerstone’ designs

The presentation in this game is pretty good. The voxel based graphics seem very Minecrafty however it most reminds me of Cube World, an action rpg that was actually offline but was quite similar to this. Its certainly a lot more detailed than Minecraft, however this can be a bit jarring when it comes to things like Biome transitions which seem very strange when they are clumped so close together, especially when the weather changes. The other big thing is you can actually build in this game. You can make your own home, called a ‘Cornerstone’ which you can build on any empty plot and even better you can move it seamlessly to any plot that you want. This makes it so you can keep moving your home as you adventure, which is a great feature to me.

The gameplay is where Trove really shines. There are several classes to play all of which seem fairly generic but it is how they are presented which is interesting. Classes such as the barbarian type character are augmented by being a ‘Candy Barbarian’ which uses candy canes and sweetie abilities to crush his enemies. Awesome. I chose to play a fire type mage who used dragon based abilities, including briefly transforming into a dragon myself! The combat is fairly simple with a primary and secondary attack, one ability and an ultimate ability. This is also augmented by having potions which you can refill at your home base which is a hugely useful feature as it allows you to focus on adventuring and questing rather than resource management. As mentioned before base building is also a huge part of gameplay and you can craft items and building blocks by going through the normal gameplay. A really cool feature is the ability to use the skin of whatever weapon you have by scrapping it for resources, this alleviates the main problem I have with MMO’s where you HAVE to use the best equipment no matter how they look. This system allows you to still use that best gear but also use the appearance of whatever weapon and armor you actually like the look of. There are your typical MMORPG quests and daily grinds with loot at the end to pillage and take but there is also a heavy emphasis on dungeon delving and playing with others as the worlds (and thus dungeons) are randomly generated meaning that every world is going to be different and with all players in the same dungeon sharing loot and exp you should always try to bring a friend with you.

Yes, that IS a Pumpkin space hopper.

There are of course negatives however. The game has had a rocky start on Steam with the problem of Queues making waiting times to get into the actual game reach into the hours for some people, these issues seem to be dying down however which is fantastic. The other problem I foresee is that the game starts to become a bit repetitive if you are only questing as you start to realise that many dungeon layouts are copied and that you can just run to the boss at the end to get all the exp. This however can be solved by playing with friends and creating a ‘Club’ which gives you and others who are in your club a personal world space to build anything you want. Finally as I mentioned before the art design can be rather inconsistent which the strange world transitions, perhaps a buffer zone between biomes would make the transition seem more natural. Also with many of the items in the game, such as weapons and masks, being made by players rather than developers we will have to hope that the community will stay alive to ensure that fresh new content is always available.

In the end this is still a great MMO. Fun, simple and yet can become very complex when you get into the end-game. The building mechanics allow a greater amount of creativity than any other MMO and it really feels like the definitive retro voxel MMORPG. Give it a go, it’s free! Now if you don’t mind, I need to grind. Gotta unlock that Tomb Raiser…