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Amazon has been establishing itself as the number one publisher when it comes to globalizing Asian MMOs for some time now . The latest hit in its history is the free-to-play Throne and Liberty , which originally launched in South Korea in December 2023. As you may have noticed, the game has been a hit on Steam with an all-time peak of more than 330,000 concurrent users that hasn’t declined much yet; not counting the still unknown number of players on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. But to what extent has NCSoft’s adventure in the fantasy world of Solisium convinced us ? Well, quite a bit, hey.
The important “modern MMO” factor
Personally, I didn’t like Throne and Liberty any more than the big names in the MMORPG genre ; but I do understand that a good part of its success is due to the fact that it has nailed what we in the industry usually call gamefeel . That is to say, it has comfortable and smooth controls , exchanging skills with enemies is satisfying and even aspects such as moving around the environment feel well done. The same can also be extended to navigating the world, in many ways.
For example, one big plus point of the program is that it doesn’t have loading screens . There are some fairly obvious transitions when entering and leaving certain buildings, especially when we’re talking about closed instances that are important to the development of the story, but these are rare exceptions.
It may not sound like much on paper, especially when we come from a generation of gaming where a zero-interruption policy is the norm. But I don’t think that detracts from its merits, and the in-game resolution of the matter is super-easy. Things like opening a group finder, finding people interested in playing a dungeon with you, and being there in one click without any kind of waiting, pay off in the long run. That agility also extends to other areas like the interface, although I personally find it unnecessarily complex at times.
The interface is customizable from the first minute, and very complete. But very overloaded.
Overall, I get the impression that Throne and Liberty is an incredibly fluid game : you don’t even have any “casting” times to get on a mount, because your character transforms on the fly into whatever you need to so as not to interrupt the action. Something that carries over into the design of the enemies themselves, too.
You see, every weapon archetype in the game—seven in total, with the ability to wield two at once to combine each one’s unique abilities and create synergies—offer you a parry mechanic that forces you to pay attention to enemies, while also preventing you from getting caught up in your damage rotation and therefore falling into repetitiveness .
Since that action is available to everyone, monsters can be designed around it: mandrakes are buried until you pass by, and then they jump out to quickly attack you. If you already know how this specific kind of opponent works, you’ll be prepared to react with a parry . It’s a little extra layer of knowledge or skill “borrowed” from the world-based action RPGs that Throne and Liberty is meant to compare itself to.
Another thing that really impresses me is the world design : Solisium is one of those regions where you feel morally obliged to use photo mode every now and then. The developers usually put the end of many missions at high points, so that when you finish you always find a beautiful view of a valley or a basin below your feet as a reward. And with the bird transformation, you can go wherever you want from there. I won’t tell you that this is the eighth wonder because we all know what games have done the same, but it is certainly satisfying.
All of this ultimately works well, and as a whole it gives me the idea that NCSoft are perfectly aware of what the industry is like these days, of our tendencies and tastes leaning towards so many single-player open-world RPGs, and their product is a reflection of that mentality. One aspect that I do find a bit irregular is the mission design. On the one hand, I think that on a very conceptual level Throne and Liberty does a very good job of seasoning numerous encounters in its campaign (and to a lesser extent, its dungeons) with puzzles or platforming sections ; but in practice I think only some of them work out well. Let me explain.
During the later chapters of the main storyline, the game presents you with a series of puzzles along the lines of “which cup is the ball in?” or a musical “Simon Says.” There’s nothing wrong with that kind of thing, and some of my favorite MMOs have done something similar back in the day, but in this particular case they’ve stayed a bit on the surface: you solve the puzzle, that’s another matter . What if enemies appeared every time you failed? Or if you could receive different power-ups for playing tunes? Anything to better integrate into the Throne and Liberty ecosystem.
As I was saying, in addition to the puzzles, there are also some platforming here and there. I think the game has surprisingly good initiatives in this regard, and it actually puts them to use quite often, but the most daring and best ones sometimes come up short because some effects can create an unpleasant rubberbanding effect in an online environment like this, or because the controls are not very well adapted to certain very tight environments.
Three quarters of the same for stealth : the little it tries to do with it is well-intentioned (e.g. a certain mission takes you into an orc camp using invisibility) but it stays so on the surface that it might even become frustrating for some. I don’t think it’s fair to crucify Throne and Liberty for trying, mind you, and it’s not that it’s terrible when it tries to break away from the norm: on the contrary, it’s better that way. But it definitely doesn’t manage to stray too far from what is clearly a traditional MMORPG trying to do things better.
Dungeon bosses also have unorthodox and interesting mechanics.
There are occasional flaws , but luckily they don’t spoil the experience. The dungeons also try their hand at unorthodox mechanics and they handle them well: ideas like “when the boss does this, we have to go to this place and do this other thing to move on to the next phase, otherwise he kills us all.” Overall, the experience is pretty good; and I’d say it might be worth it even if you’re just looking for something new to download until you finish the campaign. It’s not that the story is anything out of this world or that we haven’t seen a thousand times in the genre, to be honest, but it does have some very well-crafted cinematics and some plot twists in the last sections that you might find funny.
The less pleasant intense side of TaL
While Throne and Liberty’s main campaign is a varied and fresh entry point, everything regarding character progression and activities has its fair share of holes. One of my least favorite things about the game, for example, is that it artificially stretches out some areas and limits what you can do in order to experience other things.
This means, among other things, that you have a limited daily budget of coins to redeem in the final chest of cooperative dungeons. And if you want a specific reward that you need to make a lithograph (crafting template) or for your character, then obtaining it is subject to a double system of randomness : you have to get the relevant loot group, which does not all have a 100% probability, and the specific piece that you are looking for within that group.
Replaying a dungeon with unique mechanics can be a bit of a pain for a few reasons: very few people use random matchmaking because it’s full of holes, and the alternative is an activity board where many teams have crazy requirements, or take a long time to teleport, or enter without first checking out the mechanics in a tutorial. Sure, the developers are not to blame for this at all, but it would be nice if at least the matchmaking tool was more efficient and had better search criteria, especially with an audience as large as this game’s.
I’m also not entirely convinced by how weapon, armor, and skill development works : you need a series of specialized materials with the “development” suffix (e.g. development books), each associated with a specific rarity and type of equipment. Each of these consumables provides a semi-random percentage of progression to the next level of each weapon, such that the further you go into endgame territory, the rarer the pieces you’re looking for are and the less likely their effects are to trigger. To give you an idea, the most special ones give you 80% progression, but their effects only trigger 10% of the time. It’s an arbitrary way of lengthening the system .
Another point in common with many other MMORPGs in which one feels quite limited is in the sequentiality of the campaign: the acquisition of experience is very guided , and after each of the 10 chapters that make up the campaign, it leaves you at a fairly specific level. If you want to go through it in one sitting, you will find that you cannot do so because you will need to go up two levels until the next block of content opens up. And the volume of alternatives to do that is quite excusable.
Yes, you can replay the last dungeon you can reach or complete bounties. But the optimal route will always be to open the journal and look for the world activities associated with each region, which can get a bit repetitive over time . I understand the need to ease the player into the endgame in parallel with the open-ended campaign, but it’s still a super guided way to achieve that goal.
Does Throne and Liberty have any small gestures of generosity for the hardcore? Actually, yes, but by omission: it has no equipment durability , which means you’re free to wade into the ever-tricky world of PvP without fear of dying ending your progress. The same goes for more advanced PvE content, of course. If your party gets stuck in a dungeon, you’ll usually have to restart the point; but you don’t lose anything other than the consumables you’ve spent.
That, and bosses can be pretty good because they don’t just ask your party to tank, heal, and hit. As I said, they have unique mechanics that force you to do some internet research to succeed. When your team doesn’t do their homework, it’s frustrating, but just as honestly, when everyone does their job, it feels not only fresh, but genuinely interesting .
And what about the free-to-play nature of Throne and Liberty? Is it honest, or does it veer into pay-to-win territory? It’s a bit of a genre standard, really: the shop has a single pack of development consumables, along with repeatable purchases of development materials that will tempt more than a few. Those materials aren’t hard to obtain in the normal course of play, but they are consumed at a dizzying rate.
The most problematic thing is actually the auction house : through it, anyone who has reached level 50 can sell their stuff there and make some premium currency without spending it, but the reality is that you can also buy that same currency in large quantities to equip your character with the best weapons in the game as long as they are on sale.
On the other hand, the original Korean version offers some additional paid advantages that remain to be seen if they will be released in the West, and under what conditions. We are talking about a power-up called Solisium’s Blessing that is activated through a subscription, and that has not been included at launch because Amazon is investigating to what extent it may be disruptive to the experience.
Performance-wise, Throne and Liberty runs about as well as you’d expect: it’s built on Unreal Engine 4 , and while it has a few weak points like the level of detail of the faces in the open world or the overcrowding of the main cities, the PC version we used during the writing of the review didn’t actually cause any serious problems. It’s quite scalable, too, which means that if you have an abnormally powerful rig you can run it at over 60 FPS without any problem — something not too common in open world games.
5 things you should know:
- Real money can give you an advantage at the auction house
- Completely free of loading screens
- It mixes platform and puzzle elements in its bosses.
- Classless: Equip weapons (up to two at a time) to your liking
- The global version is slightly different from the South Korean one.
Throne and Liberty isn’t breaking any new ground and I doubt it will convince many WoW or FFXIV veterans, but at least it takes advantage of the contentious terrain of free-to-play massively multiplayer games to bring something that, with its pros and cons, is solid and current. With a fairly respectable technical quality, interesting mechanics and a certain variety of objectives, it’s easy to get you hooked: the hard part is not to frustrate you with the endgame’s rough edges and demands.