Okay, before we can dive into the preview for Throne and Liberty, I need to touch base on my experience with MMOs. If you were to pick any Nichegamer staff member to talk about MMOs with, I should be the last one to ask. So, doing the Throne and Liberty preview is extremely out of my comfort zone.
To preface, the three MMOs I have ever played are World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and Star Wars: The Old Republic; in fact, my combined hours between the three games are less than 24hrs. I typically don’t play MMOs due to the grind-heavy mechanics.
Those mechanics are the same reason that I dropped The Division, Diablo, and Destiny. Will I look for better gear while playing through the story, yes? But will I grind gear to find the perfect stats, no; I get bored to tears.
Now let’s jump back to our Throne and Liberty preview. As we discussed before, I was extremely underqualified to preview Throne and Liberty, but like other games at Summer Games Fest, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and try it out.
Our preview of Throne and Liberty lasted only thirty minutes but unlike other MMOs that seem to drag on and on, this demo flew by.
After a three-minute cutscene, I had the opportunity to customize the character I was going to play as. Wanting to spend as much time as possible exploring the world, we went through character customization quickly but still made a cute character.
The demo really gives beginners a chance to learn the mechanics teaching the game’s core fundamentals. The beginning combat does take a bit to get used to between rotating skills, moving, and blocking.
Since I was not accustomed to the MMO style of controls, doing everything felt like a challenge. In the beginning, the game does not overload you with input options and lets you learn at your own pace without being too slow.
The World of Throne and Liberty is beautiful with a ton of things to look at. Unlike other open-world games, the terrain and objects in the land feel complete. Examining the environment, it does not feel like any space is wasted and allows the player to explore the beautiful environment.
We all can pinpoint a game that feels like a part of the map was copy pasted just to find a random chest or make the area bigger. Thankfully, they do not do this and give the player the ability to explore and dodge attacks.
Since time was limited, we decided to follow the quest path, but everything along that path felt polished and colorful, with no object feeling out of place or reused. At one point, we got to meet a magical user named Clay that resembled Harry Potter.
The demo gave us a good idea of how combat will play out but looks like it builds upon itself like Final Fantasy. The story felt like it got some inspiration from Inuyasha with rivaling factions looking for a special purple rock.
As our hero comes across an enemy also in possession of one of the shards (the Dark Giant Orc: King Verte), they realize that the shard grants them power that they can use to take down the other users or so it seems.
Coming out of Throne and Liberty, I can appreciate the work that developers put in to make these MMOs. Throne and Liberty seems to be better put together and more breathtakingly beautiful than World of Warcraft or the other MMOs I’ve tried.
The only issue we had with the demo was that the game kept switching from English to what I believe was Korean. This made us lose some context in the story but it was still relatively easy to follow. The combat in the game was easy to pick up once you learned the controls but figuring out hand placement was more difficult.
When Throne and Liberty comes to PlayStation or Xbox, I will be more inclined to try it out further. The game is slated to have a PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S release but no official date has been announced. It will be interesting to see how the Free to Play with in-game purchases aspect influence the game. This game is definitely something to look forward to alongside Blue Protocol.
