Etaew, Ylva and Evilagician meets the Trove team and other Trion people at Gamescom.

After the cookies and showing some non-seen art, we fired our questions at our two developers.

GEODE - What's next?

First, in October we will get the Halloween event, but there is more on the horizon to look forward to.

When the surface of Geode releases, we will have access to 3 different sub-biomes with its own distinct style, with attention to lighting, color and resources. For the new biomes, our engineers were encouraged to experiment with new terrain contoursl everything from mountains to anthills to scars and corkscrews. Dungeons and lairs of U10 echo the harsh climate that geode has and look weathered, beaten up and ruined. There are ae few dungeons that still have a little life left in them, which is expressed with minimal lighting.

The "surface-update" is scheduled to release later this year and we will finally be able to fight the minions of Undertow.

When phase 2 comes out there is a gem golden thread, so it will educate people on how the gem system works, and give players stuff to help them get caught up quicker, things like dust etc. This way you don't have to do as much grinding during phase 2, so people can get caught up easier and ready for U10. 

Speaking of the tutorial, there will be some tweaks made to it at the moment the information is dumped on players all at once and can be overwhelming. The gem tutorial will trigger at an appropriate time after this the main tutorial.

There is also a Gardening update coming... which will be more compelling and sophisticated to what is is currently. Lots and lots of new assets!

Undertow

Undertow is the menacing presence of Geode. While we haven't seen much of him just yet we should get acquainted a bit more in the next big update. Undertow and his minions have a lot of dark corrupt deep-sea influences / agents of Q'bthulhu. He takes the gems we use and improperly smashes them together, creating more power which is corrupt.

His minions also utilize the corrupt power and can be seen with the gems attached to their sinister bodiesl as they eat things in their path.

Also, they said he won't be in the Shadow Tower.

Community ART

Twixler likes the baking ones and the ones where people do something new and take a risk. Biome specific ones are nice too as people have different takes on the biome.
We've also asked the developers what they wanted to see in future art contests. Pretty soon they have a new way of featuring fan art, so they would like to see more art of specific gameplay activities.

MODDING / CREATORS / BUILDERS

Of course, we couldn't go without asking about modding since the modding community for Trove is very active. The developers also know this and they love the modding community. Its a good way for players to be creative and contribute to the game.

We also talked about bringing modding to consoles. There are some hurdles for mods on consoles, lots of things like file structures and are locked down. The T-mods should make it slightly easier but requires an engineer to look at it (no promises).

Upcoming improvements were also discussed about metaforge. Some tweaks were planned for the quality of life-update but not all made it in. Don't worry they are still on the task list and will make it in game one day. Developers told us they used metaforge a lot too!

There will be a new developer appointed to dungeon reviews soon. As for ingame builders, rejoice! The team wants to make vertical building easier. Geode rockets boots could be a possibility to enable to sort of hover state.

MINIGAMES

Minigames will probably get less support in the future. There aren't that many players engaging with them and they can be frustrating, especially on consoles. In the future developers want to focus more on quality of minigames instead of their quantity. We will see more big things like the caves and bomber royale being added to the game.

Speaking of bomber royale! A new map is coming to it soon. The developers want to have a new map with every major update!

New Trove Team Member

Coby is a new member of the Trove team. She does some design and project management but right now helping to run things for consoles.

As in helping make sure things appear on stores correctly, like descriptions and entitlements and test them, and do them early for certification, doing some work on gardening stuff, like adding the assets into the game. Keep an eye on the site because there will be an interview coming soon.

Dungeon Design

The developers want players to spend more time in dungeons. At the moment players come, bomb, kill and take off again. Some new ways to experience dungeons might be on the table. Dungeons designs need to be better and more time consuming (also more rewarding).

But designing dungeons for Trove is a hard thing to do. Veteran players have bombs, dragons, and jumps but newer players won't have access to all of those things right away. This prevents the design from including elaborate jump puzzles.

This was followed by a long in-depth discussion on dungeons... that's what you get for bringing to dungeoneers to an interview.

Bomber royale skins

Skins for bombs, probably coming in u10 update, but might be in Halloween update, has not been playtested internally to make sure it's not confusing.

The first set of bomb-skins are Halloween and Geode themed. Individual players will collect the skins and equip via the collections window like you would a equip style. Bomb Styles will come in sets.

Class costumes for bomber royales are something that might happen, and could be something obtainable from the merchant, but is a mod project atm that hasn't been reviewed. A new season in bomber royale is around the corner, with new token and new rewards, but the old rewards won't go away. This includes 2 new dragons, the later one shoots the bouncy bombs.

PLANS AFTER GEODE

Just before we had to say goodbye, we did try to fish for plans. For now, there will be two more geode phases, but no big plans for after. Once phase 2 is live, it will be time to start planning. And of course there will be another class in the future.

Miscellaneous

• Dnd is going to be fixed.
• There will be ways to obtain shadow ganda, none exist in game on player accounts (UPD: one was awarded during last Trion stream).
• James has no DEV-ally. We joked that it needs to be a flying plate of spaghetti (we are now Challenging modders out there to make loads of different spaghetti allies).
• The developers also said they would love to rework the older biomes like they did with neon city. But the main focus now is Geode.

Non-shareable information

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Community Questions

Below are the questions posted on the site by the community that were selected to ask, separated into different categories.

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General

• Question by dnb_gaming:
  Are there still tradable chaos chests in-game?
• A: If there are it's because older players have held on to them. Chaos Chests are no longer tradeable.

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• Question by WhiteNail:
  Will we be seeing more Twitch drops for future streams or possibly another Twitch Prime bundle?
• A: Yes! We definitely have plans for more Twitch drops in the future =)

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• Question by Oops Prime:
  I saw on Trovesaurus that class helmets where added. Will those be available in Trove soon and how will we be able to obtain them?
• A: They will be available either this coming update or the one after. All are made and ready to go.

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• Question by TankyTanky:
  Any plan to create a trade world where you can go afk and sell your stuff by creating a little shop?
• A: No plans for this. Having extra worlds and people needlessly afk is more stress on the servers.

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• Question by Marion_S:
  What are you planning to add for more mount type/species? I would love to have more dragon-like wyvern and long-necked dragon. And something new would be exciting. I’m always ready to put my effort on them.
• A: With U10, we'll have new creature types and a few have totally new rigs. Which we don't have any new mount rigs - that doesn't mean some of the new NPC rigs can't be converted over to mount types in the future.

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• Question by MonokumaKing:
  Why are there so many dragons?
• A: Because people love them, and the amount of awesome mods are hard to pass up.

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• Question by Rus_Pro:
  Will the first-person view be added to the game? It would be very useful for building and digging.
• A: No plan for this, unfortunately. Supporting different camera types is actually quite a bit of work and the effort it'd take to implement just hasn't been worth the benefit.

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Tutorial

• Question by Itwist101
  Could you make an expertise tutorial on gems? Because it is very hard for new players to get pr unless they watch YouTube videos.

  Unless you watch youtube videos, trove could be a bit hard. Are there plans to extend the beginner tutorial and make the game a bit more simple especially for people coming from a non-mmo-background; Currently only 1% of players reach 10k pr, so adding more expertise tutorials on that would be very helpful, as these will tell people how to get pr and make the game understandable for everyone; thus extending lifetime of the game, and avoid people quitting early.

• A: Good timing, we are adding an expertise thread for gems with U10! Adding more of these threads is something we'll be doing over time.

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Class Reworks

From the developer stream, we've learned the Tomb raiser is next on the list of class reworks.

• Question from WheezingMuffin9:
  Will the Chloromancer ever get a rework, The DPS from the Chloromacer is lacking due to its damaging flowers not stacking DPS (5 flowers doing same DPS as 1 flower) it would be a great addition to the class if the damage would stack and if the class gem (cactus turret) drop rate would be increased so it can catch up on extra damage, it may then be a viable class for ultra shadow towers DPS builds.
• A: This is good feedback to have. We can't give any definite comment since we aren't on Chloromancer yet, but having this feedback is great.

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• Question from DAWZI:
  Will the dino tamer get a rework because sometimes he just feels like an underpowered gunslinger or if not a full rework maybe some small buffs like faster attack speed or getting that tri shot ability he had on pts. on a side note why doesn't his divinity costume have lunar-themed dino bodies or a lunar the ult the regular Dino's just seems out of place with the costume and it's not like its the same for all the classes because the Draco got a lunar-themed ult and lunar-themed baby's
• A: Yea, all the classes will eventually get reworks. Thanks for the feedback! :D

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• Question from Itwist101:
  Lunar Lancer rework is needed, due to his class gem being bad as they don't have much health. So any plans for a Lunar Lancer rework?
• A: Yea, all the classes will eventually get reworks. Thanks for the feedback.

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Geode

• Question from invGamma:
  What were the lessons learned from the Trove: Geode concept development and release process (the good, the bad, and the simply interesting)? How might these findings shape what Trove expansions bring in the future?
• A: We learned that players are receptive to this new type of non-combat gameplay and that it fits our demographic. We knew it was a risk so it was interesting to see how it was received. It didn’t revolutionize the game, but it didn’t crash and burn either. We’ll keep supporting the Geode gameplay – even learning the costs associated with now supporting another gameplay pillar has been informational.
  
  Making the HUB with a lot of verticality was more of a challenge than we initially imagined (for both design and technical reasons). We wanted it to feel more interesting and more alive – the tradeoff, of course, being that it took longer to build and populate.
  We are very happy with the quest thread that introduces players to Geode, so we’ll be doing more of that sort of thing in the future. The one downside during development is that bugs with it can completely block player progress, so we have to be very careful making sure the thread was bug free.
  
  It’s the first time since the game launched that we did a self-contained economy as well. We’ve received a lot of feedback (Both positive and negative) about the Geode economy – and this feedback will help shape economy decisions going forward.

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• Question from Lok_D_Shad:
  As seen on the recent Geode expansion, the gameplay style greatly varies from that of regular Trove. Will we see more gameplay variations in future updates? Are these changes a test for upcoming titles?
• A: This ties in a bit to the question above. It’s unlikely you’ll see another huge gameplay variation in the near future. Both because of the cost to implement and the cost to maintain it. You’ll see us make variations within the existing systems instead. These changes were honestly not a test for an upcoming title. When we make a new game, we obviously draw from our learnings and experience on past products – but this was implemented as something we truly wanted for Trove – not as a testbed for something else.

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• Question from RagingKitten:
  What are the plans for the future of Trove?  Are there gonna be any more classes added or more worlds?
• A: The immediate plan is to finish up the Geode arc. We are definitely evaluating new classes – as for new worlds, it depends on what you mean. U10 will introduce the surface of Geode, with new land to explore – as far as new planets, we’ll wait until we are done with Geode before worrying about that :P

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• Question by pendk:
  Since u10 is coming, can we expect a new difficulty for shadow towers or if not, at least rebalancing on the different tiers, since right now people can do ultras pretty quickly and we will only get stronger when u10 comes out?
• A: We'll most likely be evaluating Shadow Tower difficulty after U10 is released

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• Question by El_Sergetoo
  What's the new gem color?
• A: We really want to answer this, but we're not allowed to say just yet. It's not green :p

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• Question by Jacket kid
  Any plans to add/change anything with geode?
• A: Assuming you mean the cave exploration specifically, so: We'll continue to add to Geode (there's a new companion coming with U10!). U10 is all about combat, so there are less changes for cave exploration, but we'll definitely will continue to update it.

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• Question by DAWZI
  What type of class is going to be added next magic or physical and when will it be released end of this your or next year and what weapon type will it use an old one or a new one like the Vanguardian?
• A: These are all up in the air! It will not be released this year. We've got some ideas we are kicking around internally, but nothing concrete enough to answer yet.

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• Question by jejezman:
  Will the upcoming geode companion be as cute as the Gleemur? 
• A: Trick question. Nothing can be as cute as Gleemur! And the new companion is a bit more on the "silly" part of the spectrum.

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• Question by XxRepsaJxX:
  In future time are untradeable mount/ally's/costumes getting tradeable?
• A: That's a very broad question. I would say as a general rule, they'll likely stay as they are. There are specific ones that may change, however, as we've done that in the past.

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• Question by Skulair:
  Tradeable crystals? 
• A: Crystals wil not become tradeable. Their core design was to not be tradeable, so you'll have to adventure in the caves to get them.

Concept Art

Surface Screenshots