f13.net

What's that?  You say you want more voxel based games like Minecraft?  And you want it to be yet another f2p MMO?  Well, Trion is making one just for you.  It looks a lot like Cube World to me. 

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/11/15/trion-officially-reveals-trove-endless-adventures-through-endle/

I'm perfectly happy with these kind of games NOT being MMOs.  So uh, pass.

How did they manage to make a worse-looking Minecraft?

They went for a cel-shading look, and I don't think it really works very well.

I would have thought they would have gone for a more 3d dot heroes type of look.

3d dot heroes, for people who haven't seen forgot:

That's, um, nice?

Why would I play it over Minecraft, though? I'm not seeing a clear answer to that very obvious and critical question.

I generally like cel shading but it *really* does not work for me here.

It doesn't work for you here because it looks like monkey ass.  :ye_gods:

Why is this an mmo? Because Trion?

If Scott Hartsman wanted to send me an alpha invite I'd accept, though  :drill:

This looks pretty terrible to me. I can see the EQ thing being attractive because it doesn't look like Minecraft. It looks like professional developed models. I think Minecraft has a geeky charm to its simplicity. This seems to have neither.

It looks like cube world, just with an edge shader. Same vertex coloring, nearly the same cube scale ETC..

I don't want to care but I am such a sucker for procedural content, I just might.

Reminds me more of this one (http://play.blocksworld.com/).

They need to separate this from Minecraft as much as possible, do things that vanilla can't in order for it to have a reason to exist. Makes sense to try a new art style.

Minecraft itself is still extremely ugly to people who've never played it but still talk about it.

I think the problem with cel shading here (I mean why it looks so ugly) is that cel shading is used to give the impression of hand-drawn stuff and procedurally generated cubes is about as far from hand drawn as you can get.

I think it looks pretty good, but I'm not a Minecraft guy.

Hartsman.  Listen, man.  There needs to be a grid.  Either a repeating texture as in Minecraft, or a literal grid as in 3D Dot Heroes.

I know you read this site sometimes.  I've never asked anything else of you.  Even if I had, this is for your own good.  Did you see what happened to Pirates of the Burning Sea when they ignored me (and others?).

You can make it look good without it, Cube World manages.  But I would have to agree with the idea that a grid is the way to go. At least get rid of the black Champions Online style outlines.

Cube World:

It's the thin stroke outlines that really make it look terrible.

This game looks like a marketing plan to get people to buy eqlandmark.

It's just making me miss the super adventure box from GW2.

That's because this isn't cel shading. Cel shading typically has some degree of invariance or granularity with respect to the angle of illumination. It's what gives it the flat-cartoon or rotoscoped-layers effect. This basically looks like late 90's gourad shading with some kind of edge/AO shader tacked on.

I knew someone was going to say this, and it is why I said "cel shading look" in the first place instead of just cel shading.

In any event, it looks like garbage.

EDIT: It looks slightly better in motion, but not a lot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB0utUwgweI

You knew somebody was going to say that? I didn't even know how to describe cel-shading any better than pornography. I know it when I see it.

Cube World is an indie thing that had a low bar to clear to make money.

This is like, just some strange thing and I can't quite understand how it made it through any number of pitch sessions.

I'm confused.

Literally every time this style of graphics comes up there is always someone that brings up it isn't real cel shading because x, y and z.

Edit: Examples, Champions Online, Borderlands.  There's always some debate about what techniques constitute actual cel shading, what is just comic-book outlining, etc.  I'm not educated in drawing/graphics enough to have a good grasp on it, but pretty much every time I say the word cel shading someone comes and tells me I didn't use it exactly right.

And really, that's not even the discussion that Trove needs. There's already (http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1d882k/cell_shading_minecraft/) cel/"cel" shaded (http://youtu.be/jf3v_s1723A?t=3m58s) MC.

Trove cannot just be because some developers figured they could make their on Minecraft tech. There's been years of me-too MC games, so that's the easy part now, in every graphic style there is.

So what's going to make this worth looking at?

They could have come up with a better name. Something like "Minecraft Derivative #39: Give Us Money Too!" might work.

LOL, I love the part of the video where they are like "what set's us apart from the competition.  For one thing we are free to play".

How in the hell in this age does that set you apart from the competition?

EQ Landmark costs money for alpha?  :awesome_for_real:

These are collector editions that include alpha. Obviously YMMV if the extras in this CE are worth the price.  Selling extras is the business model of F2P.  I pre-purchaced beta with my CE for GW2.

I can't help but be jealous of how good eq next alpha looks compared to the shit sandwich of Hex alpha.

EDIT: Thought I was in EQ Next thread. OOPS

I think Minecraft still costs money on every platform and that is what this is competing with.

Honestly, you can look at this and say "How does making another Minecraft-style game in 2013 make any sense?" but it's not like making another MMO or MOBA in 2013 would make any more sense. If a competent F2P version of Minecraft hasn't been released yet, Trove seems like a much smarter investment than anything else Trion has worked on since Rift (which was arguably also not a great investment).

Not a fan of the art style either though. The 3D Dot Heroes style people mentioned earlier in the thread is much more appealing.

Kinda, but there's some differences.

MMOs are largely singular experiences where content and abilities evolves according to the arms race between designers and gamers and the push/pull between market forces and development realities, all within a comparatively narrow set of conditions. Only a few MMOs tried to radically reinvent themselves midstream, and most of those are no longer with us. So in this context, one can imagine MMOs are more just games that can get sequels and competitors can steal players to.

Minecraft meanwhile is more a platform than a game. It's very easy to outgrow if you only think there's vanilla adventure mode or the freebie public shared-space creative mode they host. But if you get past that, you quickly realize it isn't really a "game" per se. Rather, it's the quintessential sandbox, at all layers from end users building whatever the hell they want, through people who swap skins all the way onto through mod users to mod creators. This isn't the old UO player economy vs EQ contrivances debate. UO has more in common to EQ than either does to MC.

This is why Trove can't just be positioned as a free MC. The price is so low they've got everyone who wants a MC like experience. And they can't peddle it on its look because anyone who wants a cel-shaded MC can download a texturepack for it.

So instead, they need features that differentiate, things that the base game can do that anything short of a heavily-modded MC can't. Because as easy as it is to mod MC, not nearly everyone is comfortable doing it, and that's not available to the ever-control MC console/tablet players.

I think this is where you are wrong. MC may not be expensive, but any cost at all is a large barrier to entry. $5-20 may not be much for you, but it's an insurmountable cost for someone that doesn't easily have a way to make credit card purchases online. This includes younger kids/teenagers in the US/EU and huge portions of the population everywhere else.

If League of Legends had cost $5 for the client, a pretty trivial value, it wouldn't have taken off the way it did outside of the US/EU. A F2P Minecraft clone that is solid could definitely do well.

This doesn't look like a Minecraft clone, it looks like a Cube world clone.

This.  Cube world also gets old VERY quickly.  I don't see how this will have any 'stick' to it at all.

If I understand properly this does actually have building stuff in it, right?

This really looks like some legit game devs decided cube world looked awesome and that they could easily outpace cube world's development speed.

The shader does look pretty ass however.

For me, its just the black lines really. Not a fan of that in this application.


From that article, I didn't read anything about building in the free form way Minecraft does, it reads more like cube world/Diablo.

I just don't know. Fun in sandbox games is usually based on trial and error and vision of a single individual. Who is this person Trove?

I see EQ Next as a much better plan.  Take the sandbox fun pioneered by Notch, bring it to 21st technology. Then use it as content generation resource for modern content-based MMO.

"Things you never expected to see posted on F13 dot net" for 250 please.  :awesome_for_real:

LOL, I just scope that to the subject of cloning minecraft. I still have great doubts about Sony's commitment to F2P or viability of raid centric content.

The problem with Trove will be turning all the neat features it could have into something that's actually fun for a lot of people who have to interact with each other.

Whenever I see the "you can create / destroy what you like in the game" I know it will either be abused by players or so minimised as to be unimportant to game play.

TIL: the reason nobody has replicated minecraft is because nobody at the management level understands minecraft. Or how to monetize it.

And the few indies that do get it are painfully unprofessional.

I'll agree they have a really wierd checkout and profile-management UI, kinda like devs just slapped it together and did no UAT with normal people.

However, the amount of revenue they've generated disagrees with you. There's free versiosn of MC on select platforms, the gateway drug to eventually convincing the parent to make the purchase. If they project stratospheric adoption numbers by going free/f2p, they'd have done it.

But then, just as they have issues with the business side of the experience, I'm also not sure they have much business savvy. That allows for competition which is good.

But like Sky said: the competition doesn't really understand MC.

Hey remember going to their website to sign up for beta? Looks like Trion jumped on the pay for beta KS-like bandwagon.

I fully expect Activision to give it a shot within 4 years.

I'm getting awful fucking sick of "Founder's Packs."

You are voxing awesome.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3584773/Trove.png)

So all the Trion games are cash shop based, but they all use different points?

That doesn't seem smart

Sure it is.  Look at the shampoo aisle in any store.

It's got a better ring to it than "Pre-pay for Alpha", but the result is the same.

This is how children die.

This is $5 for the next couple days. http://www.trovegame.com/2014/08/trove-access-sale/

For less than a burger and fries I snagged it. It's sort of a cube world where the devs actually update it regularly.

Meh. I'm weak.

Quick comments, using Minecraft and Landmark as references?

If Cube World is the reference point then the building is probably sadly limited to non-existent.

There are monsters to fight and some neat mini-dungeon things, but somehow the world manages to feel emptier than Landmark. I'm probably doing it wrong.

Does it require installing Trion's pet version of Origin/Uplay?

Yes

Then not even for $5. :\

Thanks for the answer!

No, there's a lot more building than that. I haven't done it yet though. I'd say more like Landmark where you get a small claim to develop.

Since there is a dopey cape for Rift for hitting level 10, I decided to give it a shot. It's definitely nailed the adventuring vibe of Cube World. Seems like they're keeping content pretty modular and plugging in different dungeons and bosses across the world, and of course there's dinglewtz. Lots of player-created content, most of the loot has a maker tag on it.

Still haven't done a whole lot with the building, but there are some pretty cool structures here and there.

No doubt I got $5 worth out of it as-is. I'm interested to see in where they go with it, given the modular stuff and player content (which I assume is curated).

If your key is still available I'll give it a go

It's free for the weekend. All you need to do is to install Glyph, and download just 200MB. It's kind of cute.

Played this over the weekend. I was impressed how well it ran ( Compared to cube world ). The user sourcing for content is well curated and is likely to provide more variation in items and environments then other games of the same style. The combat is enjoyable, its fun to explore, and the random item system is akin to Diablo like games. Classes appear to be more like MOBA characters in some aspects.

Right now, its game play is rather basic, Build and Explore/Dungeon, Garden. But the above is promising, if they add more layers to this, they just may have a great title here. Its a solid foundation.

The pocket housing is clever, especially in a MMO setting, and I hear tale that "guild" or "club" areas are free build instances.

Still waiting for someone to actually give me MMO creation (NPC scripting, etc.) tools along with the content creation tools.

That will happen after someone figures out how to un-reveal Sturgeon's Revelation.

edit: unless you meant they should only give the tools to you, as opposed to the general public  :grin:

Did you ever try Neverwinter's Foundry? Pretty powerful tools.

Yes.  You get a small bit of land in a huge area.  You can craft biomes to thrown down and expand the area you have, which requires resources.

It's fairly simplistic overall, but I'm enjoying it.

Trove Open Beta November 5 (http://www.trionworlds.com/trove/2014/10/30/trove-open-beta-arrives-nov-5-2014/)

This is now free to play on steam.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/304050/


Edit: well it took a bit, but I was able to recover and upgrade my old RIFT account. Everything was pretty painless and it's nice to see Trion using more modern technologies for their account website.

Also, I have a referral link (http://"https://trovelive.trionworlds.com/account/reg/account-registration-short-flow.action?voucherCode=KFKMC3W7DXDZ7ED36QD6&request_locale=en&experience=aaf&utm_source=manual&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ascend_invite") if anyone is so inclined.

So after playing for a bit, it's essentially Cube World with more content. Sadly, the gameplay is lacking when it comes to the actual combat and looting aspects - it feels shallow and I found myself rapidly losing interest.

Which means that the crafting etc aspects I don't really care about, since there's not an entertaining game engine underpinning them (same issue I have with minecraft, basically).

How does it compare to Minecraft sandbox-y stuff? I'm mildy curious but not enough so to download without some type of endorsement :-)

As a quick overview:

There is a hub world which serve as a beginning spot.  Adventure worlds are randomly generated biomes of a certain level.  Club worlds are the static lands where you do most of your building.  Club worlds consist of biomes you place and modify and can get rather sizable.  You'd only run out of space in a very large club.  Cornerstones are personal instances of 16x16x128 areas that are portable.  All throughout the adventure worlds (and the hub) are plots you can freely move your cornerstone between.  This gives you a little mobile base for crafting, bank access, class changing, etc.

Classes have 20 levels, though each has all the abilities by 5 or 6.  Items are from 1-10, with a bunch of item levels, but you can also twink the pre-req level down.  Each class has its own set of gear and appearance.

You break down unwanted items for resources and appearance slots.  A large part of the game is unlocking the many, many item appearances.  Most are player designed, so new items and dungeons are showing up constantly.

I've surprisingly heard good things about it. I've never been a Minecraft person though. Shame, I would of eaten this up as a kid since I was a lego maniac back then.

I started playing this a year or so ago in closed beta. Generally just play short sessions between other activities. Have not been able to get into game for last week after it went to "release" and became available on steam. Hours long queue times when I log in. They say have been adding servers. This morning the queue counts down really fast but then left on the loading screen still unable to get into game. Supposedly some kind of limited time free patron status for having made a certain level during beta but think it will expire before can ever log in.

That actually doesn't sound half bad.

I find it fun, and it's a good way for my friends and I to have a shared little world where we can mess around in.

There's a lot of content and a nice cube building engine. I just found the combat / rpg elements really lacklustre.

If your preferred focus is collecting and / or constructing, though, I'd check it out.

True, combat is nothing special, though some of the classes really do play differently from one another.  They're just not interesting enough to be more than a means of doing the collecting.

This is fun. Playing as Xanthippe, if anyone wants a friend. (Not playing this moment will be playing again).

Gave it half an hour this morning. While probably not enough to really get a feel for it I have to say that it wasn't grabbing me.

I really do feel done with FTP mechanics. Having a large window thrust into the centre of my screen when reaching the hub saying "£3.99 for 1 month of 50% extra XP, more loot, more stuff!" just makes me constantly aware that all of that stuff is pre-nerfed to jusssst below the actual fun level.

Plus the building & sandbox elements seemed really rudimentary and uninteresting. Chance of pulling me away from Minecraft: zero.

Trion is all about that, though. I'm playing the free sub 15 day period in Rift right now. Got a decent earring drop...need to buy the expansion to equip earrings.

I played Trove early on and it wasn't terrible but I don't feel any urge to return. Rift, on the other hand, has such fun mechanics, great QoL and classish system that it bugs me there's a ton of cool stuff sitting behind a paywall. If only there were a good story.

I enjoyed playing Rift when it was subscription based. Haven't tried it since, but Trion seems like a good outfit.

Only problem with Rift is that it's pointless MMO. I tend to read the lore and sit through cutscenes, but for me Rift is a click-through. Brought it up quite forcefully through the alpha *shrug* That dev team had so much talent and so little creativity it was really a sad experience.

This is the a fun game if you enjoy block based whimsy and bite sized gameplay.  I love running around and finding charming shit like parrot pirates or giant dungeons that look like a steam train.  Would probably get old fast if you poopsocked though.

Also Giant Red Panda mounts.

I didn't even realize the adventure box was giving these out until I pulled one from it.  This is the Best Game Ever.

I just unlocked Fae Trickster.  Enjoying it more than my first class, Candy Barbarian.  Candy Barb was a bit of a faceroll because you tanked and healed really well.  Plus AOE melee meant aiming was never an issue.  With Fae Trickster you have very strong damage but you're fairly fragile.  You also have a cool ability to make copies of yourself that the mobs will attack first.  So I'm zipping around spamming copies and having to aim my spells.  The combat feels more engaging.

Fae Trickster is probably my favorite class.  It reminds of of Guild Wars Mesmers.