Minecraft meets the traditional MMO in Trion Worlds’ free-to-play Trove

By Kris Wouk July 9, 2015

Trove — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Trion Worlds is no stranger to taking a well-established idea and making it its own. The company’s first MMO Rift was heavily inspired by World of Warcraft, but the game’s titular Rifts planted the seed for many of the “world events” seen in modern MMOs. Later on, Trion’s Defiance married FPS and MMO mechanics years prior to Destiny.

If you’re a big MMO fan, chances are fairly good that you’ve already heard of Trove, which officially launches today. The voxel-based “MMO Adventure,” as Trion calls it, has been around in open beta form since November of last year. As of today, the game has officially been released.

The game’s blocky look and building mechanics certainly bring Minecraft to mind, but Trove has more in common with a standard MMO than with Minecraft’s open-ended building style. As opposed to different servers, Trove takes place in one vast open world.

“Trove started out as two guys who had been working on Rift,” Trion CEO Scott Hartsman told VentureBeat. “They had been working on Rift for a lot of years, and they asked if they could go start a passion project. It took them about six weeks, and they put this prototype together. We said, ‘There’s something there.'”

Like a traditional MMO, the game features different character classes. The latest, which is being introduced with the official launch of the game today, is the Tomb Raiser. As the name implies, this class raises skeletons from the dead to aid it in combat.

The official launch of Trove is about more than the version number ticking over to 1.0. This also marks the launch of the game on Steam, which is sure to see more players flocking to the game. Trion plans to continue to add new features in addition to keeping the game fresh with content, and PVP combat is planned for the future.

For a more in-depth look at Trove, take a look at the first five hours of the game from Trion’s perspective on the official website.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Kris Wouk is a tech writer, gadget reviewer, blogger, and whatever it's called when someone makes videos for the web. In his…

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