Earlier this month, Trion Worlds announced that Trove would be released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One later this year. The Free to Play voxel adventure debuted in July 2015 on PC and it currently holds a 78% user rating on Steam. We've had the chance to send a few questions to Executive Producer Andrew Krausnick about the upcoming console release and what the future holds for the game.
Trove certainly is a rather unique kind of MMO. What were your main inspirations, both in terms of gameplay and graphical style?
When it comes to working with voxels we obviously saw the creativity and massive modifiable worlds of Minecraft as an inspiration. Being RPG, MMO, and action combat fans we knew the ways we wanted to take the core fun of creation in voxel games and expand it.
Why do you think this is the right moment to bring the game over to consoles?
We’ve been live on PC for a year and made a ton of updates to the game. As a voxel-based action MMO, Trove has shown that it appeals to a really broad audience of gamers – and it turned out it’s a ton of fun on a controller - so we knew it was the right fit. Further, we recently surveyed the PC/Mac Trove players – and they overwhelmingly indicated that they believed Trove would be a great console experience.
Many developers have cited the User Interface as one of the biggest hurdles when porting a PC game to console. Did you have to change it for Trove and was that problematic?
We definitely agree. We’ve spent a lot of our time working on the UI to make sure it’s compatible with the console experience.
What was your experience with PlayStation 4 and Xbox One from a hardware standpoint? Did you have to make any graphical compromises at all?
We’ve spent a lot of time optimizing for console. While there are many similarities to current PC’s there’s also a number of ways we needed to rethink how we were doing things. Fortunately some of these changes have also resulted in improvements to the PC version of the game as well.
What are your targets for frame rate and resolution on the two consoles?
30 FPS and 1080p.
What do you think of the recently announced PlayStation 4 Neo and Xbox One Scorpio? What are the chances that you'll support them down the road?
As an avid gamer I think it’s interesting to see the direction they’re headed in. If the support and players are there, I’m sure it’s something we’ll be watching closely.
Several games have started using cross-platform play, even between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Is that something you're interested in for Trove?
Right now, and especially for free to play titles, this is still a big enough hurdle that we opted to keep each platform separate. We have a great deal of faith based on our PC experience that even with this restriction there will be a very healthy number of people to play with on both consoles.
The advent of VR is certainly one of the hottest topics in the industry. Have you considered adding VR support to Trove and if so, for which platforms?
We’ve had a version of Trove running in VR for a while now, and it’s quite impressive to see the world from that point of view, let me tell you. Our focus for the time being is to deliver an awesome console adaptation of Trove, but VR is something we’re definitely watching.
What can players expect to get in terms of updates in the next six months?
It’s still early for us to start talking about specifics, but we’re adding at least one new class. A new biome. New rewards, new events, and new ways to play the game. It’s going to be an exciting end of the year, and we have some big stuff planned to show up on both PC and console.
Thank you for your time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhvpwMCsPjk