Next week will see NCSoft’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Throne and Liberty finally get its Western release after a rocky start in Korea last year. But the live service game has seemingly matured over the past few months. The developer is clearly listening to its community - player numbers have almost doubled in South Korea since the game’s lukewarm reception ♐way back in December 2023. Almost a year later and it’s seen many new additions that will arrive in the form of a launch update, including a streamlined leveling process, new lifestyle paths (fishing and cooking, yes please), as well as a new 3v3 Arena among other changes.
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Amazon’s track record with MMOs is solid, but also undermined by problems. Both New World and Lost Ark had huge launches with over a million players on day one. New World is of course getting revamped later this year with New World: Aeternum tied into a console release, but its performance on PC has been lacklustre for months. Current player numbers have it hovering around the 5,000✅ mark. Lost Ark is much healthier, with around 20,000 a𝓡ctive players. Those games have given Amazon time to learn the ins and outs of publishing MMOs in the west, but will it be enough for Throne & Liberty to stick the landing alongside its peers?
I think in part Iℱ’m hopeful because of NCSoft’s heritage of MMOs, including Lineage 2, a game that I devoted many hours to when I was first discovering PC games. Thron🐎e And Liberty feels like a natural successor to those classic MMOs of old - with some modern trappings.
Welcome To Solisium
Throne And Liberty is a modern MMO with a focus on social gameplay. Set in the world of Solisium, you are tasked with finding the Star of Sylaveth in order to defeat the worldﷺ’s great existential threat, Kazar the Wraith of Conquest. It’s a fairly generic story and Throne And Liberty does nothing here to reinvent the wheel. What it does well though is capture that classic MMO feeling🥃.
Throne and Liberty is part generic fantasy and part weird and wonderful. During the prologue you fight walking trees, transform into a panther (and an eagle), and then it's out into the open world to st♍art slaying goblins, wolves, sentient scarecrows, the🗹 whole lot.
The scale of the world itself is very impressive. It felt like I barely made a dent on the available regions, but the free and in❀stantaneous fast travel helps you get from place to place with ease. Draw distance is excellent and, although the world was mostly empty during this review period, you still get an elevated sense of scale when you’re surrounded by other players going about their business. This is most evident in the packed city centres. You are also technically your own mount, as you’re able to transform into an animal familiar.
A realm of skills, abilities, pets, co-op events, dungeons, huge cities full of players, menial tasks, cooking, fishing, you name i🥃t, Throne And Liberty has it: and if it doesn’t have it yet, it might get it in a future update. Large-scale co-op events, both PvꦗE and PvP, are the main focus behind the endgame grind. Before we get into all that though, we have to address something pretty important.
Microtransactions
These will naturally be a pressing question for anyone who might want to try out Throne and Liberty. ‘Pay-to-win’ is a term often thrown about by players, and it’s probably a term used frequently in Amazon’s head offices, too. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pay-to-win is a spectrum. You cou🧸ld place Diablo Immortal very high on the pay-to-win scale, whereas a gꦑame like League of Legends has plenty of microtransactions but no pay-to-win elements at all. Throne and Liberty definitely falls on the much lighter side of things. Most purchasable items are cosmetic.
You can, however, buy Lucent. This is an in-game premium currency used at the Auction House. Players can list their high-level gear and sell it for Lucent, essentially generating real-life cash. In theory, players will be able to instantly purchase powerful gear for money. However, 🤪having taken a look at the in-game auction house and read about some of NCSoft’s future plans for it, this isn’t really the case.
Players still need to grind out those items for them to appear on the auction house. Once purchased, they are not max level, which means players will still need to grind for upgrades. There’s a shadow of pಌay-to-win here, but it’s deeply convoluted and it won’t be common for players to be splashing cash on the best gear. You can also earn Lucent by selling your own gear. If you’re a hardcore player, you could generate enough Lucent to keep buying things from the Auction House whenever you want - no wallet required.
Questing and Progression
Questing is very traditional - go here, kill this, move to another area, and cont🐽inue. Each area has several unique quests and items to find that completionists will adore, although if you’re a player like me you’ll probably just burst through these to continue leveling as fast as possible. As you progress you can mix and match classes and weapons and find the one that suits you best, which is flexible in a way that MMOs often struggle to be.
I spent a few hours traversing the very quiet pre-release servers trying to take ꦚin as much as I could, but by their nature MMOs are meant to be enjoyed with other players —as many as possible, as many as you can feasibly fit on the screen. This makes it tricky to review MMOs before they’ve released, so I’ll try to focus on gameplay and progression - the two key parts of gett🌊ing started in an MMO.
However, this is still an MMO through and through - so the quests are repetitive. The zones you travel through are fairly interesting though, and mob variety is fine. There are rolling fields, beaches, gnarled watchtowers on top of hills guarded by goblins. Nothing here really scre🦹ams originality.. But there remains a soothing familiarity to the wayThrone and Liberty begins: when there are hundreds of players grinding scarecrows in a random field somewhere, you know this is a serious MMO.
This is a game that’s definitely best enjoyed with friends, and eventually as part of a guild. Late game activities revolv🌸e around guild-to-guild combat and PvE co-operative dungeons. You can tackle these as a solo player - while leveling, progression, and so on can all be achieved solo - but you’ll miss out on a lot of what Thr💃one and Liberty has to offer. Of course, this is all based on footage that I’ve seen from South Korean servers, as I wasn’t able to try these during the pre-release review window.
Combat
One of my main concerns with Throne and Liberty was its combat. It’s still not as flashy as I’d like, and sometimes you get locked into animations that feel clunky. Compared to the version I played earlier this year, however, you can tell how much work has gone into making the combat more action-packed and giving the player more agency over their abilities. We won’t know for sure about this until players start to reach the endgame and begin taking part in some of the large-scale PvE and PvP events, particularly the Castle Sieges - an element of the game I 🔯can’t wait to try for myself.
As it stands, I can’t comment on how skills evolve over time and how they impa🌜ct the way your character plays. Skill Specialization, a new feature that is a key part of the skills overhaul, will arrive at launch. The idea is to provide a lot moꦗre customization and the opportunity for players to unlock all skills right at the start of the game, so that they can begin trying out different set-ups.
The Future Of Throne And Liberty
Both NCSoft and Amazon have already proven that they’re willing to put in the work to make this game better. Combat overhauls, skill system overhauls, performance overhauls: Throne and Liberty has really gone through the works over the past year. If the western launch of the game is successful - which I have a feeling it will be, people are always desperate for a new MMO to play - we should see ongoing support for T&L🃏 well into the future.
O🐽verall, it’s difficult to give a score for Throne and Liberty based on what I’ve seen so far. I’ve been a bit too quick in the past to judge MMOs based on their leveling experience, where the real game begins when you’ve already invested dozens - potentially hundreds - of hours into the game. As it stands though, I can say that this is a game that I’m excited to play. There’s a real promise in what stands to be a modern successor to one of the all-time greats of the genre, NCSoft’s Lineage 2.
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