Amazon is promoting Throne and Liberty, the new MMORPG from South Korea, which finally has a release date. It is set to be released on September 17, 2024, for PC, PS5, and Xbox.
This is the situation:
- Throne and Liberty has been in development since 2011 and has undergone many mutations. In 2016 it was still called Lineage: Eternal and was close to a worldwide release. Then it was long referred to as Project: TL, and now it is “Throne and Liberty”.
- The MMORPG was released in its home country in December 2023, but South Korea struggled with the MMORPG. It received a lot of criticism there and is already considered a flop.
- Amazon wants to bring the game to the West and provide its own console versions for PS5 and Xbox, but everything was delayed and there were questions about whether the MMORPG would really arrive.
But apparently, there was a breakthrough during a visit from Amazon to South Korea at the end of May 2024 and now the release date is set. Amazon is entering the hype phase.
There will only be one version of Throne and Liberty
This is what Amazon says about the release: In an interview with “TheGamer“, two officials talk about Throne and Liberty: Marv Lee Kwai, who was already known as the Western face of the South Korean ArcheAge, and Daniel Lafuente.
The two emphasize: Western players will get the “original Throne and Liberty” and not some other version. The MMORPG was developed with a global audience in mind and they have considered massive feedback from players, including feedback from Western players in beta tests.
In any case, there will only be one version.
Every class fights two-handed, allowing for cool combinations
What is supposed to be the uniquely engaging feature? Amazon highlights a peculiarity of the game: Every class in the game fights two-handed and players can mix items.
So, for example, one might carry a dagger and a wand or a great sword and a crossbow or a combination of sword/shield and a longbow.
This is meant to be the “ace up the sleeve” of the game, say the developers.
Lafuente says:
The dual-wielding system determines the abilities you have. I think you have more unique possibilities to create these crazy classes where someone carries both a sword and a staff. And that gives them access to magical abilities and abilities in the style of “I’m going to swing my big sword at you,” so you see some pretty unique types of builds created by players. I think the most important thing is that players can experience more than one playstyle.
“Everything about Throne and Liberty is massive”
How does Throne and Liberty differ from other MMORPGs? Here LaFuente says: From day one, everything about Throne and Liberty was designed to be called “massive”:
Massive scale, everything about it, the world, the buildings, everything. And the technology being developed right now will enable things like castle sieges where thousands of players participate in a castle siege. That is not an exaggeration; this is already something that has been seen in the Korean live operation: thousands of players participating in this castle siege. That is probably the biggest event we have. And then there are other things that hundreds of players will participate in, down to guild fights that will be more in the realm of 50 vs 50, 60 vs 60. The scale is a big part of what we expect in Throne & Liberty, especially when it comes to PvP battles.
We have reported on battles with 1,000 players here.
There is a good reason why the massive has disappeared
This is behind it: One should view these hype statements skeptically before a release. One big question is, for example, how on earth you are going to have 1,000 concurrent players in a castle siege on a PS5.
Anyone who has experienced such mass battles in Dark Age of Camelot or The Elder Scrolls Online knows how enormously performance-hungry they are.
There are good reasons why mass battles were abandoned 20 years ago and since then have relied on instanced areas where only relatively few players can be active at the same time: In WoW, it’s five (dungeons) or a maximum of 80 (the PvP battleground Alterac Valley) in most areas:
- These battles are extremely laggy and performance-hungry
- It is unfair because one side often has many more people than the other
- The gameplay isn’t that fun; it all feels very random and hardly coordinated
If Throne and Liberty were as awesome as the developers describe, it would not explain why the developers in South Korea kept the numbers about the MMORPG secret and had to answer some very uncomfortable questions at a press conference about why things were going so badly with the company.
But we also don’t want to paint everything black right away and describe one of the most exciting MMORPG releases in the past ten years before it has even come out. The visuals of the game seem to be flawless in any case. And one can hope that Amazon, as the publisher, has learned quite a bit from the two gigantic launches of New World and Lost Ark.
While it must be emphasized that the version for PS5 and Xbox is indeed something new and neither Amazon nor NCSoft have any experience to draw on here.
But the game will be free to play, and there will be opportunities to take a look at the PC version very soon. Then we will all know more: Throne and Liberty: Everything important about release, classes, gameplay, open beta, pricing, and platforms
