After the first beta tag, the MMORPG community is discussing whether Throne and Liberty is worth it. MeinMMO editor Karsten Scholz has also dived into the fray for several hours and summarizes initial impressions from the testing phase.
On July 18 at 7:00 PM, the open beta of Throne and Liberty started. At least theoretically. Practically, many interested parties could not initially get into character creation or onto the servers. As an editor for MMORPGs at MeinMMO, I was, of course, on board and battled – like many others – with timeout errors and connection drops.
Just before 8 PM, I was able to log in successfully, and after that, I had no more problems. A glance into the official Discord channel is enough to see that not everyone had such luck. The developers are working on it and released a patch with fixes for the Steam version of Throne and Liberty at 9:30 PM.
A flood of player characters
Beforehand, NCSoft and Amazon Games promised to bring the massive back to the genre of MMORPGs. While in many modern genre representatives, the player base is split across numerous channels, layers, and so on, and there are a variety of instantiated challenges for manageably sized groups or even solo players, Throne and Liberty wants to set a different focus.
As soon as I finished the tutorial, I immediately saw what that meant:
I landed in the harbor of a capital city and found myself in a huge crowd of other characters. The flood of bodies streamed through all the streets of the settlement; it’s been a long time since I’ve seen so many avatars piled together in an MMORPG. As mentioned earlier: Nowadays, these are often split across multiple versions of the game world in other games to preserve performance.
What I found particularly impressive was:
- I hardly had any noticeable performance issues on the first night; the frame rate was almost constantly at the set frame rate limit of 60 frames per second despite maximum graphics settings and a resolution of 2560 x 1440.
- The flood of characters extended not only through large areas of the city yesterday evening but also through the surrounding quest areas. I encountered a large mass of player characters everywhere. Today, in the morning or early afternoon, significantly fewer interested players are online, and they have spread out a bit more – still, there is something happening everywhere.
- Although player characters and NPCs were everywhere, I found it always easy to orient myself, find desired quest givers, interact with them, and complete quest objectives (even for kill quests). I have not noticed any bottlenecks so far (my character is level 14).
The open beta trailer presents the early access packages of Throne and Liberty:
What do I like very much about it? I like the style of the game world and the quality of the graphics. There have already been some great panoramas to admire. With the shapeshifting (running fast as a cat, flying as an eagle, and swimming as an otter is possible from the start) and the grappling hook, my character feels wonderfully mobile. Exploring is fun!
Furthermore, I currently like the presentation of the story sequences and dialogues; the previous missions are sufficiently varied not to become boring, and I generally enjoy the fluid transition between my dagger and bow attacks.
What don’t I like so much? However, you can notice that the combat system has been revised and now represents a compromise between action and tab-targeting. Specialists in these areas, like WoW (tab-target) or Black Desert (action), are simply noticeably easier to control, more controlled, and more comprehensible.
For me, Throne and Liberty is also another example that many Asian MMORPG studios are unable to create beautiful, tidy, and well-structured user interfaces and menus. Many areas appear cluttered and/or look ugly.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have little respect for free-to-play models with in-game shops, battle pass systems, and numerous currencies. All of this usually comes at the expense of game design and fun. Throne and Liberty is certainly not the worst representative of its kind, but, unsurprisingly, it relies on the usual free-to-play systems.
All in all, I currently have a strong desire to continue playing and exploring the actually exciting content such as guild raids, world boss battles, or – unfortunately only at release – castle sieges.
What is the community’s first impression? On Reddit, there is already a discussion with almost 200 comments. There, too, combat experience, controls, and the user interface are criticized. However, there are also beta testers who are enjoying the battles. The controller controls are said to feel better than mouse and keyboard controls.
- skrukketiss69 writes (via Reddit): “I played for about 15 minutes, and that was enough to lose every shred of interest I might have had. The gameplay was just super slow.”
- usernamaghhh sums up (via Reddit): “It’s just hard to look at the UI.”
- TheMuffingtonPost raves (via Reddit): “The game is damn beautiful, truly an impressive spectacle, and the presentation of everything is top-notch.”
- Yetti2Quick recommends a controller (via Reddit): “Combat feels great with a controller.”
Have you already played the open beta of Throne and Liberty? What is your first impression? What do you like, and what not so much? Share it in the comments! If you’re looking for more information about the new MMORPG from NCSoft and Amazon Games, check this out: Throne and Liberty – Everything important about release, classes, gameplay, open beta, payment model, early access, platforms
