Throne And Liberty 2024 Review

Hello, gamers. It’s nice, and I hope everyone waiting for the next good MMO is having a nice day today. I am excited to finally bring you my review of MMO Throne in Liberty. As a disclaimer, please keep in mind that this is a first impressions review based on the knowledge and experience of someone who has not made it to endgame. For this review, I wanted a true new player experience, which involved things like not looking up guides, builds, or tutorials.

Introduction

Also, please keep in mind that the following is just my opinion, and if I get anything blatantly wrong, I’ll try to have a section in the description to pretty much keep an updated section of corrections. So if you have any questions, corrections, and/or opinions, be sure to leave them below.

First Impressions

In this review, I will go over general information about this NCSoft title, Throne in Liberty’s changes and improvements since the update I posted last year, сombat visuals, questing, PvP, core gameplay features, pay-to-win, recent news, and lastly, its future and potential.

Game Overview

MMORPG Throne in Liberty, at the time of this review, has only launched in Korea. But don’t worry, because I flew to Korea to test this MMO for you and rolled first class on VPN Airlines. There is no available release date for the global launch, which will be handled by Amazon Game Studios. We’ll talk about that more towards the end of the review.

This MMO is free-to-play with no box cost. This game was in development for over a decade, but what they presented as their 10 years’ worth of work for their beta last year was an inexcusable horror of a mobile game that wanted to be an MMO when it grew up.

Combat System Critique

And I won’t show it here as it’s no longer relevant, but to top it off, the game had what everyone agreed was perhaps the worst iteration of tab targeting сombat that we’ve ever seen. Your character could not move and attack at the same time, and it was very stagnant сombat. There was even functional autoplay, letting the game play for you—no hands on the mouse and keyboard.

Combat Evolution in Throne in Liberty

You know, and I don’t know about you guys, but personally, I wouldn’t play or plug any game that revolves around AFK gaming. However, since then, Throne in Liberty has gone into the lab and made huge improvements to the сombat and removed the autoplay, from what I can tell.

So, let’s discuss the сombat in Throne in Liberty. Throne in Liberty is a tab-target MMO. One of the first things I noticed and enjoyed, since playing earlier versions of the game, was the addition of the action camera. In my opinion, this was a big quality of life feature. This basically means you no longer have to click to drag and can move your whole mouse to rotate your camera, and you get a small indicator or crosshair at the center of your screen to target things.

And you can still tab-target per usual with this camera mode. But also, if you’re used to your more traditional old-school MMORPGs, you got traditional tab-target as an option.

Combat Mechanics and Fluidity

The developers also took the feedback from the beta and made сombat less restrictive. Some skills will still keep you in place, but these are the skills where it makes sense for balance purposes, that it keeps you in place, you know, like charging a powerful snipe. But other skills, such as rapid firing of your crossbow, can be done while mobile.

Throne in Liberty has a very fluid сombat system, and this really surprised me. The сombat genuinely feels good, in my opinion. It’s an even better version of the tab-target seen in Guild Wars 2, which I really enjoy. Think Guild Wars 2 but without the annoying or restrictive bar swap cooldown, if you will. That’s just my opinion, but it flows so well.

Weapon System and Versatility

You can have two weapons equipped at a time, but there’s no bar swap needed. If you press a skill on your skill bar, you will automatically pull out that weapon to perform said skill. The purpose of bar swapping seems to be to determine your auto attacks, and pretty much that’s it. Your basic attacks are indeed auto-attacks, so once you click a target, you’ll automatically perform these autos if you’re in range for that auto attack. This feels even better when you have one melee weapon and one range weapon, such as the staff and dagger combo.

Weapon Combinations and Flexibility

Speaking of weapon combinations, you aren’t really restricted based on the attributes that you selected. You can pretty much use whichever weapon combination that you want. I won’t go into too much detail, but it really does look like every weapon combination can be made viable thus far.

If you wanted to be a battle mage with a staff and sword and shield, you can really make that work. A great sword and a wand? Why not. Using a wand with sword and shield for a Paladin spec was really fun to me. However, I eventually landed on great sword and sword and shield, which is a lot of gameplay that you’ll see in the сombat, and I was going for more so of a tank role.

There are currently the following weapons: staff, wand, bow, crossbow, sword and shield, great sword, and the dual wield daggers.

Advanced Combat and Mechanics

I can definitely foresee them adding more weapons down the line. Aiming AOE and skill shots feel good, and the skills just really feel like they have an impact to them, if that makes sense. You really got to try it. There are normal stats to affect range сombat that you would expect in any tab-target MMO, such as evasion and accuracy.

And similar to MMO New World, there’s no race or class system, but your weapon combination determines your class essentially. One of the most impressive things for me is that each weapon has a sort of defensive maneuver, which you can time right and be rewarded for, especially against enemy heavy attacks, which you’ll see on screen as like a purple circle that gets smaller or whatever. It feels really satisfying to pull off. Think about it as like timing a parry in a Souls game. It’s just so satisfying when you get the timing right, and you get rewarded for it.

It feels very responsive too, and each weapon has a different defense capability, if you will. And you can choose which one of those weapons is going to be used for your defense capability. So, if you’re a sword and shield crossbow build, you can choose the defense capability of the shield, where it’s like a well-timed block, or you can do the roll dodge from the crossbow, for example.

Revolutionary Mobility and Transformation System

Mobility feels very good in Throne and Liberty. This game is somewhat innovative in the fact that it basically replaced your standard mount system or sprint with the ability to transform into a creature of your choice. I expect divided opinions on this, but what are your thoughts on going this route?

You even have a transformation to replace your swimming, such as a cute little otter. There’s also the ability to transform into various NPCs, and I could be wrong, but I think these transformations could allow you to avoid aggro from similar NPC types. Like, say you’re a wolf; you transform into a wolf and go near some wolves that would normally attack you, maybe they won’t attack you, something like that.

But I’m not sure, or you can transform into certain NPCs and use this to gank players who may mistake you for another regular open world mob. But I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m sure it’s something that players do. And the reason I think this is because it replaces your name and everything like that, so you look like an actual NPC.

Transformational Aspects and Their Impact on Gameplay

However, despite how you may feel or not feel about the transform to sprint or transform to swim, I think we can all agree that the decision to replace traditional gliders with an actual flying transformation, such as the eagle, is pretty dang cool. This feels so epic when you jump from a high location with a great view. Speaking of getting into a high view, there is a cool traversal mechanic of grappling hooks, which I like, but I wish they were more commonly scattered throughout the world. You need a specific thing to grapple to and launch yourself into the air that way, and they didn’t really seem too commonly scattered throughout.

Grappling and Aerial Mechanics

In my opinion, you can actually fling your character really high and then transform into your aerial transformation and then go back to a grappling hook. You know, just a lot of mobility, cool things like that, and I just found that impressive.

However, I don’t know if it’s a ping or connection thing, but grappling just did not feel smooth. You know, it’ll be weird because I had no lag or ping issues while playing with anything else, so I think this is just the system. And the grappling itself just feels clunky. That’s the best word I can use to describe it. It’s just clunky. So, I think this mechanic needs work.

Challenges and Triumphs of Mobility in Throne and Liberty

And the best way I can describe it is your character has to be brought to a complete standstill before grappling sometimes, and sometimes grappling from an aerial transformation isn’t always smooth. And as cool as it is, it needs help, like it should flow a lot better than it does currently because I would like to see mobility be really skillful depending on the timing and how you use it on a battlefield.

Like, it’ll feel good turning into a wolf, grappling right from that form, and then flinging yourself into the air, then going into your aerial transformation before landing behind your opponent, hitting them with a stun, and just using all this stuff naturally throughout сombat, throughout a big battle. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen often.

Also, I won’t discuss the passives and active skills, but just know I feel they are done right, and they feel good to level. Even the leveling screen itself is designed to give you a little dopamine rush, and you feel good when you get those skills leveled up.

Visuals and Graphics

Next, let’s discuss visuals. Throne in Liberty is an Unreal Engine 4 game, which is surprising in the current year, right? With so many upcoming MMOs boasting about being an Unreal Engine 5, it’s definitely becoming quite the buzzword. However, upon first entering this world and having a look at my character and the environment, I only became even more excited to play a UE5 MMO because this game in UE4 looks great.

Art and graphics are really subjective; however, I want to say this: I’ve not played an MMO on default settings and had such a far render distance. If you get to any high point in the game, you can see for miles the places you can actually go. This is just one of those small things that I thought was really cool.

The skills effects, the NPC character designs were also done great as well, and I think playing this game with max settings on a good PC or console will definitely satisfy most people.

Questing Experience

Speaking of that, NPC design leads me to our next subject: questing. There is a lot of good but some bad here. This game seems to be good at keeping your focus as to what’s going on and why you’re doing it, not just spamming dialogue for the sake of it all the time. And better yet, this says a lot because it’s Korean vocals with English dub for me.

Questing Experience

So, I imagine when there’s more language support, it can seem even better. There’s actual voice acting, which isn’t always a thing in MMOs. The quest was some normal fetch quest, of course, but a lot of the main story had unique gameplay and fun сombat opportunities, in my opinion. I actually haven’t had this much fun questing in an MMO since Guild Wars 2, to be real.

However, very early on, I became very annoyed when I’m playing a game. The one thing that annoys me is the slowing down of the player to complete the main story narrative. Sometimes it’s not too bad, you know, in a game you’ll get a message saying, “Hey, you need to be level 32 before this main storyline opens up,” or before you can access this story mission, or maybe that story quest is so difficult, you’ll want to be level 34 and want to have more levels, gears, passives, etc. And you know what? That’s quite fine.

Navigating Time-Gated Quests in Throne and Liberty

But what annoyed me about the way Throne and Liberty does it is things were being time-gated. For example, a very early quest confused me until I realized there needed to be a specific event going on in order for me to complete it, and these events are on a schedule. So, for a guy like me, you know, I get off work, I log in, I want to finish advancing the story, I can’t because that event was three or so hours away. And I at least understood this or accepted it because the game wanted you to be aware of how these dynamic events work, so they made it mandatory that you would have to see one to advance the story. You know, cool, whatever. I could see the argument there.

Time Gating in Narrative Progression

Well, what about later, when I was even more annoyed on a main story quest where I had to leave a building that I just turned the quest in at and return later at nighttime? This is an MMO, so there’s no resting to accelerate time like in a typical RPG or Survival Game. I had to literally wait quite a long time for nighttime to occur just to go back in this house that I was just in and kill an NPC. A quest that took place inside of a house, I’m going to say this again, inside of a house, needed it to be nighttime outside. Yeah, I was pretty frustrated.

I can only imagine how much more of these elements exist throughout the rest of the game’s story. But overall, when not getting time-gated, things felt pretty good. I really like the solo and the group challenges and dungeons and stuff like that, and I cannot wait to delve more into them.

Throughout the course of the review, I’ll try to have some dungeon gameplay scattered in the background, so you guys can get an idea of сombat and dungeon сombat and gameplay that you can expect when you pick up this title yourself.

PvP Impressions in Throne and Liberty

I really love MMORPG PvP. However, I did not make it to PvP in-game in Throne and Liberty. However, from the little bit of dueling that I did in the dueling arena in the starting town with a buddy who was leveling up aside from me, it was pretty good. The сombat feels good at our level, and your cooldowns seem to have a lot of weight on them. I’d say, with the limited time that I tried it, it was fine, but trying to attack a player even 10 levels higher than you was a death sentence, and literally, all your attacks would just miss the opponent, and you kind of just get that hint that gear does matter a lot, like most games, right?

The Harsh Realities of PvP in Throne and Liberty: A New Player’s Perspective

There was also a world event that occurred near me, which apparently makes the area a flag PvP zone. There was a lot of players attacking each other and the boss, which sounds like some good PvX fun. However, for me, I was level 20 at the time, and whenever a player focused me, I was getting one-shot or maybe two-shot, maybe two-shot sometimes. And I thought I had to go over there to loot the boss to get my rewards for the event, and every time I came back to try to loot the boss, I was literally just getting one and two shot by players, and well, that’s when I learned that there’s XP debt on death, apparently.

But luckily, there’s a priestess in a couple of different locations who you can purchase back this lost XP from, you know, just for the price of some gold. As I said, this is a new player and first impressions review, so I don’t have much to say on PvP, but from what I can tell, the game is not solo-friendly and has a huge focus on guilds, which, depending on who you are, can make or break things for you.

Core Gameplay Features

Next, I just want to talk about a couple of core gameplay features and things I noticed throughout my playthrough. I haven’t played every game or every MMO for that matter, but this game has the best quality of life settings that I’ve seen. The settings menu has the ability to customize almost every aspect of your experience, and the entirety of сombat and the keybinds allow for everything that you could ever ask for. Something that caught my eye was the customizable UI.

The ability to move where your health bar is and other HUD elements is a huge quality of life feature. Crafting and the crafting UI felt good as well. Upgrading attributes, leveling both skills and passives felt decent as well, and once again, I didn’t really have performance or ping issues consistently throughout my questing. And, well, as far as bugs.

Encountering Bugs and Game Mechanics

I only encountered one, but this one bug resulted in me umming myself for 15 straight minutes on stream. “Please transform, am I forgetting a mechanic? Because that keeps happening to me. All right, so we’re going to go in that direction. What am I doing wrong?” Basically, I could no longer glide out of nowhere, like there was just an issue, and chat and I just could not figure out why. Though, simply logging in and logging back out fixed the issue.

I will also like to say, however, at times, things felt super mobile-gamy and presented a sense of forced dopamine rushes. After four quests, you’ll have things from like three different battle passes to collect and constantly accept things to check off, quest rewards, a codex to clear, then a reward to pull from the Codex, and more. In short, it feels like you’re almost over-rewarded for the simplest of tasks, and it almost feels just as predatory as the cash shop constantly being flashed on my screen like, “Hey, look, you did this, or you earned this; come check this out.”

And if that doesn’t make sense to you, just trust me, the free battle pass has you going in there a lot, like you’re visiting the cash shop a lot to check off that battle pass.

Experience with the Cash Shop

Speaking of cash shops, let’s go ahead and discuss perhaps what most of you came here to hear about, and we’ll conclude the article with recent Throne in Liberty news and predictions for the Western release. MMO Throne in Liberty is not only a free-to-play game but a Korean MMO. Those two things together perhaps have already alerted you to where things are headed. While Throne and Liberty isn’t the most pay-to-win game ever, it is, in my opinion, pay-to-win.

And I didn’t have to do any extra research other than trying to buy something off the guild trader or auction house, if you will. Anyone claiming Throne of Liberty isn’t pay-to-win should perhaps be checked into an insane asylum. I know I’m a new player and could be missing the bigger picture, but upon looking at the auction house and seeing that things are bought and sold via the store currency, I was appalled.

Market and Currency System in Throne and Liberty

I had saved up 700k gold, which is perhaps not a lot, but to me, it made me feel like I was a millionaire at the time, and I managed to save this up just through normal questing. Figured it was time to check the traders and maybe get a jump start on some of my gear, right? Maybe pay 100K gold for a better sword. To see that things on the auction house was a separate currency was absolutely appalling. Legendary items and important materials locked behind what can be looked at as a player-ran C cash shop.

This currency here can be literally purchased via the cash shop. A buddy of mine bought 6K of this currency, which was really only about 4,600 because he had not factored in the 1,400 that the trader is going to tax, which is crazy. The auction house has a trading tax, so yeah, this is absurd but perhaps not even as blatant compared to other Korean titles.

I guess the pay-to-win is bad in Throne and Liberty, but it doesn’t automatically mean it will be bad when it comes to the West or Global launch.

Western Release and Potential Changes

Amazon Game Studios or AGS, as I’ll refer to them as, will be handling the Western/Global release, and NCSoft recognizes the differences in cultures and their respective markets. So, what will AGS do to limit the Pay to Win? How much is being overhauled on the game in comparison to the Korean version? Well, AGS has been pretty silent on a lot of this, but let’s discuss some predictions and get into the recent news.

There has been no word from NCSoft or AGS on when we’ll get our hands on Throne and Liberty for the global launch, nor do we know how this game’s pay-to-win will for sure be handled. At the end of the day, this is a business that needs to make money, especially if we want things like DLC updates and server maintenance, right?

Possible Monetization Strategies for the Western Market

Either that or we could see different practices implemented, like a mandatory monthly sub fee, or perhaps we’ll just see some pay-to-convenience things implemented, like The Elder Scrolls Online, where you have to pay if you want any kind of manageable bag space or storage space. I wouldn’t imagine Amazon nor NCSoft are going to really bet on the fact that optional battle passes are going to be funding them and just hope that all the players get the battle pass.

But then again, the MMO player base is desperate for a good MMO. The launch of New World, as bad as it was, saw record-breaking numbers. Throne in Liberty is also coming to console, and if that happens simultaneously with the Western release, interest will skyrocket, as there aren’t really many options.

Console MMO Prospects and AGS Strategy

For console MMOs, either way, we don’t really know right now, but we can only hope that AGS nullifies the pay-to-win, and we can only hope that they learned from New World’s launch.

Last but not least, before our conclusion and summary, I want to go over two instances of recent news that occurred. First comes from Thon and Liberty.com, which may or may not mean anything, but it could be hinting that the global release of Throne and Liberty may be getting a playtest here soon, and then maybe a launch announcement after that. This is due to a Steam file registry or something like that. There’s no date, but with all the recent silence, I imagine a beta sometime in the next month or two, and then maybe a launch announcement after that.

Hopefully, it’s not too far out, as people are wanting a new MMO, and with Ashes of Creation’s Alpha 2 approaching in quarter 3, I hope it’s sooner than later.

Financial Performance and Game’s Popularity

Now, our second bit of news is that NCSoft’s financial report was released, showing less revenue than the previous year and quarter. This is troubling because Throne and Liberty, according to massivelyop.com, apparently, NCSoft tried to mask the game’s revenue performance, or lack thereof, on a recent earnings call. And when pressed on this, NCSoft told investors that Throne and Liberty had underperformed and that it’s working on sorting out things with the game’s rocky launch, and maybe alluding to that they’re kind of like really putting all their eggs in a basket hoping that Amazon’s global release would make things better.

The Botting Dilemma in Throne and Liberty: Impact on Game Population and Economy

This is troubling as this was the game’s targeted region and market, and this doesn’t exactly instill confidence for those waiting on the global release. It makes me curious about the game’s population, being that this game has a huge, and I mean huge, botting problem. It is literally ridiculous how often I see huge zergs of bots crowding a dungeon or farming materials open world. With this being a guild-oriented game, I imagine this is just how guilds fund their efforts and make their money in-game and outside of it if you understand what I mean.

It is far too common to walk through town and see eight characters with the same outfit at the same location, mimicking each other’s exact movements with similar usernames, sometimes too. And of course, you’ll typically see that they all just happen to be in the same guild, which tells you all you need to know.

Conclusion and Summary

In conclusion, the сombat in this game is really good, but it’s surrounded by a lot of pay-to-win and botting issues. The questing and story seem great thus far, and by being able to play this game for free, it will literally cost you nothing to at least give it a try.

Anticipation for Global Release

I will perhaps halt my current playthrough in belief that we’ll be getting a global release beta soon. I really hope AGS sees that they have potential with this global launch and is learning from the mistakes of the Korean version of this title. As I mentioned, I think this is the perfect time to get an MMO out there, as most of us are just buying time until the next big thing is released. I see a lot of potential for this title, and I’m thinking that just the fact that it’s a new MMO and the fact that it will come to console, NCSoft will eventually see success if they handle it right.

Community Engagement and Personal Recommendation

I don’t see a lot of hype or sense of community around Throne and Liberty as of late, and I wanted to wait until I saw no one was really covering Throne and Liberty a lot before giving it a try. I wanted to wait for the hype to die down, plus I was just hoping for some news from Amazon on a release date. So, if I had to give my suggestion to those wanting to give this game a try, just wait for the global release. I neglected a lot of content and gaming to get this review out. While I enjoyed the title, I do see some writing on the wall for it in regards to a lot of things.

Reflections and Looking Forward

However, if you can ignore a lot of the negatives like botting, the pay-to-win, and just focus on the core gameplay, loots, focus on the story, and things like that, you can see the potential with this MMORPG. However, this may be too much to ignore for now. I hope to revisit this upon global release. And hey, if you made it this far, it truly means a lot. I don’t expect this article to get a lot of views, but it’s one that means a lot to me because I really enjoy playing this game and making this review. Nothing beats that feeling of exploring and just learning a new MMO; it’s just so immersive. I hope all of you are able to capture that feeling.

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