Neon Ninjas and Knights

Its A Voxel World

Trove 2014-09-25 21-00-16-293 Yesterday something pretty awesome happened…  Trove Beta launched and overall everything went pretty smoothly.  I have been a fan of the game since I got into the very first Alpha wave.  You can check out my first video from November of last year and see just how much the game has changed.  This is one of those titles that has changed at an almost staggering pace.  I would pop my head in about once a month… only to find that the framework of the game was in a massively different place than when I last left it.  I have to say during the Alpha this became a bit of an impediment to me playing it.  I would want to just pop in and do something interesting and essentially have to relearn how to do anything at all.  That said my friend Rae showed interest in the game early this week, and oddly enough we happened to both log in together on the very last night of Closed Alpha.

Trove 2014-09-22 23-56-16-632 We had such a good time running around and smashing things, that we decided last night when the Beta launched to skip playing Final Fantasy XIV at least for a bit and dive straight into leveling up in Trove.  The above mounts we found during the final hours of closed alpha, and they are essentially rainbow piñatas that shoot rainbows and confetti out of their butts as you ride along.  Basically it is my goal to manage to get this mount again during beta.  Nothing says Trove quite like leaving a trail of sprinkles everywhere you go.  Unfortunately the mount comes from their version of a lootbox.  I have no clue what the drop rate is for one of the piñata mounts but I know I purchased 10 of them last night and Rae purchased 5 with the points we were given going into the beta… and all we managed to get were a few crafting recipes.

Neon Ninjas and Knights

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One of the brand new things for Beta was the introduction of the Neon Knight class.  For most of the night this is what Rae ran around as while I played my Knight.  The class is a bit of a stealthy melee in that your right mouse click causes you to drop a decoy and shift into stealth.  From there you can throw shuriken at your target for a fairly devastating effect.  The purple rings around you seem to be some sort of a charging up mechanic that indicates when you are ready to throw shuriken.  Other than that if you attack from stealth you do a significant amount more damage.  I personally found the class a little frustrating, since I like to rush headlong into combat and bash all the things in the face.  For someone who wants more tactical game play however this might be the ideal option.

Fortunately or unfortunately I feel like the most “Bel” class in existence is still the Knight, which is essentially your default.  For starters it is a melee class with pretty high survival in up close confrontations.  The secondary attack is this impressive weapon slam that can knock back enemies and deal a cone of damage.  The first ability you get is a charge and god knows I love charge attacks, but this one also doubles as a movement ability and a way to dash across gaps to get to places more easily.  Finally the last attack is this shield that you can put up that causes you to take no damage for a period of time.  The last one is on a long cooldown, but it serves nicely as an “oh shit” button for doing some of the harder content.

Content Density

Trove 2014-09-25 19-18-34-398 One of the coolest things about late Alpha and now Beta is just how diverse and dense the content is.  Early on in the game each biome section would have a single objective be it a castle or a tower or something of the sort.  This time around you would be hard pressed to go for very long before discovering something that has a boss or a challenge or something of the sort.  Granted by the time I came back later in the night, the world was getting more than a bit picked over…  so I am hoping that the world reset happens pretty frequently.  In any case we were able to roll around the map going to areas that had not been touched and doing the challenges we encountered along the way.  The above shot is from this insane rainbow dungeon in the clouds that you get to by climbing up through the hollowed out tree pictured in the back.  Each biome has its own challenges with is own mob types which make the gameplay feel fairly fresh.

Essentially the challenges that I have encountered break down into a few themes.  The first involves triggering an event.  These tend to say that there is something dangerous inside in the upper right hand corner of the screen.  When you trigger the event you have to survive a few waves of enemies, and if you do so a chest appears.  The negative is that both you and the mobs you are fighting have to stay inside a blue ring that spawns when the event starts.  We had issues when fighting mobs up in the air, that they would fall off the edges.  The positive is you can retry the event over and over by simply moving out of the ring and waiting for it to reset.  The part that makes these challenging is that generally the area with the totem that triggers the event is covered in spikes or surrounded by these pillars that shoot fireballs in a Castlevania fashion.  So while the half dozen mobs really isn’t a huge problem… keeping them from knocking you back into environment obstacles totally is.

Something Minecraft Doesn’t Give Me

Trove 2014-09-22 22-31-52-013 At it’s core the gameplay of Trove is similar enough to Minecraft that you cannot talk about it without at least mentioning that game.  You could call Trove Minecraft with more meaningful combat and MMO style loot, but the game itself feels richer than that might denote.  One of the aspects of the game that I like the most is the existence of my Cornerstone.  This is basically a plot of land that I control and can build permanent structures upon… but that also moves with me around the world.  I can walk up to any plot that is presently unclaimed and the  game will rebuild my cornerstone before my eyes.  So I can have crafting machines travel around with me, and each time I do this it resets my spawn point.  This gives me some permanence that I crave in an otherwise very flexible world.  This however does not make for a great community, as folks are constantly picking up their home like a hermit crab and moving it with them.

What is more interesting is the fact that players can create clubs, which in essence give you guild like functionality.  I’ve created a Club for the Alliance of Awesome, and as such we have a “Club World”.  This is a fully instanced biome where we can control everything in it.  This means you can build super intricate guild houses and give other players the ability to teleport into them.  This is the more permanent structure from the looks of it, and gives folks a way to link up and meet in user created worlds.  While ours does not really do much of anything at the moment, I have plunked down a few machines and will likely keep adding to it as we go along.  You are given only the smallest of islands to start building on, but it looks like more or less you can freely build out over the ocean for quite some ways.  There are a number of websites giving away beta keys right now, so I highly suggest you track one down and give this game a shot.

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