168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Throne And Liberty is a different kind of MMO for Amazon - not only is it a game it’s publishing globally, but also one that the studio had more of an impact on during development. Lost Ark, for example, was already available in Korea before Amazon published it. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Blue Protocol is already available in Japan. NCSoft’s Thr♉one And Liberty, however, is aiming for a global release. I met up with Merv Lee Kwai, who’s leading the Amazon team in conjunction with NCSoft, at Gamescom 2023, to talk about this new challenge.
“We’ve listened to players and collected so much data from our MMO ventures so far, and we hope that this is reflected in how fair Throne And Liberty is,” Lee Kwai tells me. “I’m going to use the word fair a lot, but we really mean it. Thiꦐs is one of the fairest MMOs I’ve seen, or been a part of.” What exactly does this mean? We’re all well aware of the microtransaction discourse around Lost Ark, alongside its RNG-heavy crafting and grinding, and now Blue Protocol is facing similar problems. Fair, in regard to Throne And Liberty, is the removal of pay-to-win mechanics, the axing of gear that is destroyed or wasted upon crafting, and better balance for endgame grinds.
“This is still an MMO, so we want players to work, to earn what they’ve got, but we want it to be fair,” Lee Kwai says. This is a significant step for the publisher - to work with NCSoft developers to make fundamental changes to the way th💎e game works. “The team in Korea are really receptive, really open to🎀 these suggestions - just like us, they want players to enjoy the game,” Merv says.
It marks the beginning of a change in Eastern attitudes towards microtransactions that have been prevalent in many games for many years. Take one look at Black Desert Online, from Pearl Abyss, another Korean studio, and you’ll see the stacks of premium currencies and unbelievable grinds that have meant the game never really took ꦚoff in the West. Attitudes towards Lost Ark changed considerably in Korea once the game was globally released - players realized that they didn’t need to put up with predatory microtransactions and painful grinds for gear. If players in the West could speak up, why couldn’t they? The same is happening with Blue Protocol now in Japan.
In terms of other changes made to Throne And Liberty𒅌, it was also an Amazon decision alongside NCSoft developers to remove autoplay from the game. This was a huge point of contention during earlier tests. One issue was that a game built around autoplay will need to make changes to the way combat works - Amazon and NCSoft have said that they want to make combat more dynamic, allowing you to move whil💟e casting spells.
All of these changes take time, which is why Throne And Liberty has been delayed again to 2024. This is something that I felt resounded across Gamescom when I spoke to developers - delays are fine if the players get what they want when the game finally releases, insp💛ired recently, in part, by the massive success of Baldur’s Gate 3 which went through three years of early access 🧜before it was finally released. Merv Lee Kwai told me that “Feedback is so important. We’ve definitely learned that from our previous testing. We want everyone to enjoy the game as much as they can when the game releases.”
I got a chance to play an hour of Throne And Liberty’s tutorial, and if it can hold true to its bold promises of MMO fairness, this could be a brilliant game. The combat is fluid and detailed, yes, that’s right, you can move around and cast abilities; it looks and feels much more dynamic than what we’ve seen previously. Autoplay is completely gone. Yo༒u can morph into a variety of animals, and the world-building is already striking - huge cityscapes, giant trees, twisted monsters. It’s stylish, which is something MMOs often struggle with. Almost every new MMO I see excites me in some way - I love the genre - but this one has really stood out to me. At the end of the hour, I didn’t want to stop playing, but the endless wheels of Gamescom had to keep churning.
Overall, we’ll have to wait and see h♎ow Throne And Liberty turns out - I was pleasantly surprised by what I got 𝔍my hands on at Gamescom, and if Amazon and NCSoft can continue to listen to feedback and make changes before the release of the game, we might finally have a new, worthy MMO to spend our time in.