I’ve played large MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft, but other than that I’ve just played around with the various other forms that this subgenre can take. So when I say that Throne and Liberty doesn’t live up to my previous experiences of massively multiplayer dungeon diving, loot gathering, and boss killing, that’s mostly coming from a “normal” person. That said, both FF14 and WoW had major expansions released in the same year as this, NCSOFT’s sequel to Guild Wars 2, and while its world is lovely and its combat unfolds into a fascinating and vigorous ballet of skill interactions, the largely tedious story and repetitive quest design I experienced in my 10 or so hours with the open beta make me worried about Throne and Liberty’s chances of toppling the kings of the genre.
It’s a great looking game though. The character creator lets you customize your avatar to a commendable level of detail. And no matter what you put together, the end result will look fantastic, with none of the player character anxiety that some games suffer from, where the overall quality of your computer is lower than the developer’s hand-crafted NPCs. The world is also stunning. The first time you see a giant flying whale, it’ll be hours before you see anything as majestic again, but the environments you’ll traverse on your journey are opulent in color and detail. I really enjoyed the spider-infested swamp forest and the colorful plains with giant wild birds that are definitely not chocobos. What’s more, it all works incredibly smoothly. Become your own mount and transform into a wild cat to run through cities or travel from place to place quickly, instantly and in real time, no matter how many people are on screen.
You’ll be traveling from place to place a lot, guided by a thoroughly uninteresting story about magically blessed newborn men growing up to be warriors of destiny and the various factions in the world of Solisium who want to exploit them for their own benefit. I didn’t get into it much – not until Chapter 5, which is halfway through the content available at the time – but none of it stood out as compelling. With a reliable narrator who summarizes crucial parts of the story, which I did shortly after doing, I found myself skipping most of the flat dialogue in non-cinematic exchanges.
Most of the quests, both on the main path and in the side quests, are pretty typical MMO fare. You’ll be collecting bits of local wildlife to craft potions, finding missing people, working as a mailman, etc. There’s a steady pace of modern things to learn and do throughout the game, but Throne and Liberty treating the main story as an extended tutorial left me a bit anxious about how to utilize all the random stuff I was getting as rewards, to the point where I was very cautious about how I spent my loot because I didn’t know what to spend on upgrading something if I was going to find out I could spend it on something else in the next few quest phases. Each region of the map has its own specific side quests that are worth doing for the rewards, even if you’re not usually the type to make sure all of their boxes are checked. These will likely have more intriguing missions or puzzles to solve than the main quest, but there’s also a ton of “kill X of Y” going on here. I haven’t seen too many of these myself, but I’ve spoken to a few people in my travels who described more convoluted platforming missions in cases that I definitely wanted to try for myself.
Of course, you’ll have to fight a lot of battles along the way, and vigorous combat is a defining feature of Throne and Liberty. Players aren’t constrained by class. The pair of weapons they choose determines what skills are available to them. Much like NCSOFT’s other major MMO, Guild Wars 2, combat requires a lot of positional awareness, and skills have a lot of synergy with each other both within and between weapon types, encouraging a lot of trial and error to find the best combinations to make the most of. Each weapon has an auto-attack pattern and can parry vast enemy attacks if you press the button correctly, and each weapon has its own set of follow-up attacks that make great utilize of the openings you’ve made. This mechanic seems helpful against smaller enemies, but when fighting bosses and other tough enemies, defense is a must if you want to escape their clutches alive. Mastering this skill was an absolute must in Bloody Palace’s signature boss fight mode, where you’re pitted against tough enemies with high power and little margin for error.
I used a greatsword and a staff, which gave me a lot of power and health in melee, as well as a few escape tools and long-range magic options. I mainly used them to charge into melee, destroy all my abilities, and then utilize a magical frost cloud to jump away from enemies and throw fire and lightning at them until they got close to me. These abilities also have more direct synergies. Greatsword players have access to an ability that can stun targets, and can complement it with another ability that deals extra damage to stunned enemies. The staff can apply burn conditions to enemies, and a second, larger fire spell will deal more damage to enemies with burn stacks on them. Towards the end of the beta, I experimented with some cross-weapon synergies with other weapon options, such as the wand, which focuses on debuffs and healing, with promising results.
Most of the things I did, like the large world events where I had to race other players to collect the most MacGuffins from orcs, or the smaller, simpler fetch quests, mostly rewarded me with money and materials to upgrade my gear. It’s a double-edged sword, because while most of the source of your ever-increasing power outside of leveling up your character also comes from leveling up your gear, a lot of that gear is flat and uninteresting for most of your climb. I was around mid-to-late 20 when I last logged out of the beta, and I’d only gotten two different swords—neither of which were particularly impressive in terms of appearance or stats. The armor was a bit more energetic, but I had almost no connection to the loot I was collecting beyond increasing the numbers. I can’t say how that plays out at higher levels, where you’d expect the gear to become more exotic, but getting there means you’re just killing bad guys.
Overall, I certainly enjoyed most of my time with Throne and Liberty. There are large, late-game things I want to go back to and participate in, like the large-scale PvP battles between guilds and the raid dungeons. The story and quests don’t break any long-standing MMO conventions. The inner voice that usually tells me to make sure every possible task is done very quietly allows me to skip the slow-paced dialogue and overlook the many menial side quests. However, I never missed an opportunity for a fight. The pairing system, combined with the joy of discovering crazy skill combinations across the various weapons available, was overall the most enjoyable thing I could find in my time with the game, and it might be enough to make me go back and test my mettle against the best when Throne and Liberty finally releases in September.
