I’ve done my time in major MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft, but outside of that I’ve only dabbled in the various other forms this subgenre can take. So when I say that Throne and Liberty isn’t quite rising to my past experiences with massively multiplayer dungeon-diving, loot-grinding, and boss-slaying, it’s an opinion coming largely from a “normie.” That said, both FF14 and WoW have big expansions launching the same year as this, NCSOFTs Guild Wars 2 follow up, and though its world is beautiful and its combat grows into a compelling and active ballet of skill interactions, the largely boring story and repetitive quest design I experienced in my 10 or so hours with the Open Beta makes me worried for Throne and Liberty’s chances at unseating the kings of the genre.
It is a great-looking game, though. The character creator lets you customize your avatar with some commendable levels of detail. And no matter what you put together, the end result will look fantastic, and shows no signs of the sort of player character uncanny valley that some games suffer from, where the overall quality of your PC is lower than the handcrafted NPCs from the developers. The world is pretty stunning, too. Once you see the huge flying whale for the first time, you’ll go quite a few hours before you see something that majestic again, but the environments you’ll travel through on your journey are rich in color and detail. I really loved the swampy forest overrun by spiders and the colorful plains with giant wild birds that are Definitely Not Chocobos. Even better, all of this runs remarkably smoothly. Becoming your own mount and morphing into a wild cat to sprint through cities or fast traveling from location to location loads lightning fast and in real time no matter how many people are on screen.
You’re going to do quite a lot of traveling from place to place, guided around by a completely unremarkable story about magically blessed youngsters growing into warriors of destiny, and the various factions in the world of Solisium that want to use them for their own gain. I didn’t get too far into it – only around chapter 5, which is halfway through the available content at the time – but none of it stood out as compelling. Thanks to a reliable narrator that recaps important parts of the story I did soon after doing them, I found myself skipping through much of the bland dialogue in non-cinematic exchanges.
The bulk of the quests both on the main path and side missions are pretty run-of-the-mill MMO fare. You’re gonna be collecting pieces of the local wildlife to make a potion, find missing people, do a stint as a mail carrier, etc. There’s a steady pace of new things to learn and do as you go along, but Throne and Liberty treating the main story as an elongated tutorial gave me a bit of anxiety about how to use all of the random stuff I was getting as rewards, to the point where I was very conservative with how I spent any loot because I didn’t what to spend it on upgrading something if I was only going to learn that I could have spent it on something else in the next couple of quest phases. Every region of the map has its own specific side tasks, which are worth completing for their rewards even if you aren’t usually the type to make sure all of their boxes get checked. These are more likely to feature more interesting missions or puzzles to solve than the main quest, but there’s plenty of “kill X of Y” here, too. I didn’t get to see too many of these myself, but I chatted with a few folks in my travels who described some more complex platforming missions in instances that I definitely wanted to try out myself.
You’ll do a great deal of fighting on your journey, of course, and its active combat is Throne and Liberty’s standout feature. Players aren’t restricted by classes. The pair of weapons they choose to wield determines what abilities are available to them. Similar to NCSOFT’s other big MMO, Guild Wars 2, fights require lots of positional awareness, and skills have lots of synergies with one another both within and across weapon types, and encourage lots of trial and error to figure out the best combinations for getting the most out of them. Every weapon has an auto attack pattern and can parry enemies' big attacks so long as you hit the button prompt just right, and each weapon has their own set of follow-up attacks that take great advantage of the opening you made. This mechanic seems ancillary against smaller foes, but against bosses and other strong enemies, defense is a must if you’re going to make it out of their clutches alive. Mastery of it was an absolute must in the Bloody Palace-style boss rush mode where you face off one-on-one with tough foes that have lots of power and small margins for error.
I used the greatsword and the staff, giving me lots of power and health in melee and also some escape tools and long-range magical options. I used them mostly to charge into close combat, blast all of my abilities, then use a magical freezing cloud to leap me away from enemies and blast them with fire and lighting bolts until they closed the distance. These abilities have more direct synergies, too. Greatsword players have access to a skill that can stun targets, and can follow it up with another skill that does bonus damage to stunned foes. The staff can put burning conditions on your opponents, and a second bigger fire spell will do more damage to enemies with burning stacks on them. Late in the beta I experimented with some cross weapon synergy with other weapon options like the wand, which focuses on debuffing and healing, with some promising results.
Most of the stuff I got up to like big world events where I had to race other players to collect the most macguffins from orcs, or smaller, more simple fetch quests, rewarded me mostly in money and gear upgrade materials. . It’s a double-edged sword, because though much of the source of your ever-growing power outside of your characters leveling up also comes through leveling up your gear, but a lot of that gear is bland and boring through much of your climb. I was around the mid-to-late 20s in level when I logged off for the last time from the beta, and I had only picked up two different swords – neither particularly impressive in looks or stats. Armor was a bit more dynamic, but I had almost no connection to the loot I was grabbing at all outside of making the numbers go up. I can’t speak to how that shakes out towards the higher levels, where one would expect equipment to get more exotic, but trudging there means that the only things you're slaying are bad guys.
Overall, I certainly enjoyed most of my time with Throne and Liberty. There are big, late-game things that I want to come back and participate in, like large-scale PVP battles between guilds and raid dungeons. The story and quests won’t upend any long-standing MMO conventions. The inner voice that usually commands me to make sure every task that can be done must be done very quietly let me skip through slow dialogue and turn a blind eye to many menial side tasks. I never skipped an opportunity to fight, though. The parry system mixed with the joy of discovering sick skill combos across the various weapons available to you was by and large the most fun I could find in my time with it, and might be enough for me to come back to test my mettle against the cream of the crop when Throne and Liberty finally launches in September.