Trove Fireside Chat

Hey all,

Its been awhile since I've had a chance to sit down and write about Trove in depth and the topics have been piling up. So while I'm still coming down off the long weekend I figured why not write a few notes.

First of all, and to set some context, I wanted to point out just how far we've come since the start of this year! We began the year with basically had no game to speak of. There were unlimited building materials, no quests, no real loot or progression, one class, hardly any monster behavior, no homeworlds or adventure worlds, a bit of crafting, no character customization, and our visual style was still developing. Now, well, we've got all that (and plenty more besides). We're now in a period that we're thinking of as 'late alpha'. There are still bugs and some features (a few relatively large ones) still to come, but the structure of the game is in place. We're going to earn stuff, trade stuff, fight stuff, create stuff, and hang out with other people while doing it.

But enough about the past! Let's talk about where we're going!

Adventuring for fun (and profit)

Adventuring is one of those areas has been and will just keep getting better. Lairs are getting polished and will soon be opened up for community creation. In addition our adventuring 'end game' currently relies more on randomness than we'd like. It should be pretty easy to see how time spent turns into worthwhile rewards and we're going to be giving that some serious attention. Adventuring also doesn't have the 'serious chase' factor like we want it to, so we need to give a little love there to make sure there's some extra hard to get/rare items you can keep or trade as you like.

Community

Clubs (our type of player organization) are obviously still on the short list. On top of that our opinion is that hubs still aren't back to the glory days and we've got a few shots in the arm for those. We also feel like another reason or two to group up and tackle the hardest challenges possible wouldn't hurt, so we'll be throwing those in as well (and if you're just an amazing solo player don't worry, you'll be able to tackle this too).

Economy

Buy it, trade it! A lot more stuff in the store is about to be tradable (pets, mounts, etc.)

New Areas, New Classes

The Fae class and biome are drawing to a close (for real) and we've learned a lot. This means that while I do anticipate that there will be some rough edges we are going to get better at making these and hitting our targets (also learning where those targets should be set so we can give you guys realistic expectations). We also want to make sure we have a good cadence of other updates (new mounts, new chase) to go along with the everything our community has been making. We've started on the Dragon, and we've even got a few solid plans for after that (some even thanks to other contributions).

Mysteries and Surprises

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Fun!

Sometimes you just want to kick back and do something off the beaten path. Minigames, music. It's coming. We've been working on toys for sports (balls and pucks) and music blocks are on their way soon. We don't have any plans (or way) to make money on these or integrate them into the game at large. They just... seemed like fun.

Beta

We have a list and we're checking it twice. We know broadly what needs to be in for beta to be a thing (including some core concepts like key binding). I also want to take a moment to warn you: don't expect early beta to be all that different from alpha. We'll still be developing rapidly and there might still be the odd bug or three that lasts for a couple days between patches. This will stabilize as we get in to beta proper, but we also know how much people want to be able to keep their stuff (and how much our Scout supporters want to take part). So we're hustling to arrive at a point where we can make those dreams come true. It's not tomorrow or next week, but we're aiming sooner than you might think.

And More

There is an incredible amount of other stuff I'd love to talk about but this post is already far too long - pretty much every area of the game in one way or another is going to be improving. Feel free to drop a comment or question if there is an area of particular passion for you and we can chat further there. I cannot tell you how much fun it has been making the game in front of and with you all and I look forward to it being even better in the future!