Throne and Liberty review

Throne and Liberty is a gorgeous game. I’m opening with that because it really is the first opinion I drew of NCSOFT’s new MMO. At face value, it’s easy to see the appeal. If you’re the type to judge a book by its cover then the first hour of Throne and LIberty will turn your head. From an opening cutscene depicting duelling wizards amidst a violent battle to the first time you step outside and are greeted by one of the most beautiful skyboxes in the genre, complete with an enormous flying whale, it’s back bedecked with rock and fauna, it’s enough to get any fantasy fan excited.

However, the facade can only hold up so long, because Throne and Liberty is an MMO, for better or worse, loaded up with all the baggage that goes with the genre. For a start, the story is a meandering plod through fantasy tropes in a world that looks eerily similar to Black Desert Online. You are the Destined One, etcetera, and have a singular purpose that only you can achieve. You and other few thousand Destined Ones running around town and hogging the vendors. You won’t get sick of seeing the character designs though; Throne and Liberty has a character creator that almost rivals BDO’s for the level of detail.

Regardless of the overall story quality, which struggles from the same localisation issues as other Korean MMOs like Smilegate’s Lost Ark (which I loved), the story is a serviceable framework for what you’re doing. Some odd lines of dialogue aside (some conversations will alternate between voiced and written dialogue, and the subtitles are rarely accurate), it’s easy enough to follow. I found some of the quest info in the UI to be a little difficult to read, and as with many MMOS, quests are thrown at you in such volume that you won’t always be able to keep track. Nor will you always need to, as you can quite often polish off two or three side quests in a given area.

Throne and Liberty employs a weapon and skill system reminiscent of New World. You won’t choose a class, but instead will select a primary and secondary weapon from a chest in the first town. I went with dual daggers and dual crossbows, because I always gravitate towards ranged damage and DPS. Once equipped, you assign skills related to the weapon to your hotbars, including a defensive skill that works like a timed parry.

Combat is one of my favourite elements of Throne and Liberty. Clicking attack will instigate an auto attack which you interrupt with skills and abilities on cooldowns – again, similar to Black Desert Online. The parry window is generous and the combat looks pretty, and it’s maybe the best element because it’s such a simple system to get to grips with early on.

Another cool element is the ability to Morph. Your character’s special lineage allows them to transform into animals, negating the need for a mount as you can become a huge wolf just by clicking the left stick. You can also become an eagle, among other things, to soar across the terrain. It’s a little iffy to control but it’s fun and effective nonetheless.

As a free-to-play game, Throne and Liberty offers a battle pass that’s filled mostly with cosmetic rewards and gives you something else to grind towards. Solo play will only take you so far, but there are plenty of options for teaming up with a Guild or even other players, such as the mass-player Siege events.

I struggled a little with the multiplayer element, though. It’s where the game suffers most in terms of performance, and although your character is always centralised on screen, it becomes chaotic pretty fast when everyone is firing off their rotations. Organised games with a Guild work much better than just charging in as a rabble, but joining and staying in a Guild requires an obvious time investment.

Handling PvP on a larger scale does separate Throne and Liberty from the herd a little, though, Abyss Dungeons in particular have an almoxt extraction shooter-feel at times. You head into raid them with a group, hunting down specific loot drops like a mini WoW raid, and hope you don’t run afoul of another player team. It doesn’t make much sense from a narrative standpoint, but few MMOs do.

Being a huge MMO and brand new outside of Korea, it’s going to take some time to see how Throne and Liberty develops and grows. Right now it has some solid ideas, but it’s mostly held up by the combat. The performance issues and localisation don’t help, and it doesn’t feel as addictive to me as Black Desert Online did when it launched in the West. It’s a good-looking game, though, and the character models and animations help sell the world. It’s just a shame it doesn’t do enough to fully distance itself from its competition.