The endgame progression is often a failed balancing act between tedious grinding, pay-to-progress elements, and frustrating luck factors in Asian MMORPGs. However, Throne and Liberty manages this tightrope walk much better than many competitors, at least according to MeinMMO editor Karsten Scholz.
In fact, I should be leveling my new character in New World Aeternum or playing the demo of a potential highlight from the remaining gaming year 2024 in every spare minute. However, I keep catching myself thinking of “just quickly” starting Throne and Liberty.
The next world boss will spawn soon, my Amitoi crew is already waiting for the next expedition, I want to invest my accumulated Abyss Contract or Dimension Contract tokens or stock up with daily offers from merchants.
The fact that the endgame of Throne and Liberty in general and character progression in particular continues to motivate me and regularly draws me to the servers—more than it did in all past Asian MMORPGs—has, of course, reasons that I want to explore in the following.
The launch trailer for Throne and Liberty:
Fortunately, luck plays only a small role
Let’s take Lost Ark as a comparison, which I consider a great free-to-play MMORPG, but one that always loses me after a while in the endgame. The main reason lies in how character development fundamentally functions there:
- You earn a gear setup and upgrade it until you eventually reach the next gear level. Then the new set is upgraded.
- Normally, you don’t farm new gear, but upgrade materials.
- The upgrade process can fail (which causes you to lose the invested upgrade materials). The higher the item level, the more complicated it becomes to perform successful upgrades.
- There is a kind of “bad-luck protection” that increases the chance of success through failures, but frustration due to bad luck in upgrading is a constant companion in Lost Ark’s endgame.
Throne and Liberty also has a comprehensive upgrade system for equipment and skills, but the developers have so far refrained from assigning too large and thus frustrating a role to luck.
- Those who want to upgrade items or skills or craft certain items cannot fail, but can achieve considerable successes (for example, cooking yields buff food that lasts longer; upgrading equipment offers more progress). This motivates.
- You currently need the most luck to get the perfect traits on a weapon. However, if you simply want three fully upgraded traits on your items, you can also work towards that without failures.
- While luck plays a role in boss loot, Throne and Liberty offers alternative ways to obtain dungeon loot that just won’t drop (like specifically farming dungeon tokens for purchasing equipment chests).
Rewarding Tasks
In general, I appreciate that Throne and Liberty offers me various ways to gradually upgrade my equipment from green to blue to epic—through crafting, lithography, dungeons, world bosses, the auction house, chests for abyss currency, chests for dimensional essences, chests for dimensional soul shards, or through the selection chests of merchants.
It helps my motivation immensely that every farming run yields something meaningful. Didn’t get the hoped-for loot in the dungeon or from the world boss? Then special resistance medals or soul shards reward you.
Farming rounds in the abyss dungeons feel particularly rewarding. You simply drop by the corresponding open-world area with multiple contract sheets, look for a group, and in half an hour you already head home with a good amount of abyss currency, blessing bags, Sollant, contract coins, and loot.
Dungeon and world boss runs are usually quick to do. If there isn’t enough time to find comrades, you dive into the contracts of the open world or events while keeping an eye out for mystical orbs or portals. There’s plenty to do without being overwhelmed by a mass of mandatory tasks.
Through the mastered activities, you can often work on several opportunities at once to improve your equipment, and since even small farming rounds contribute a noticeable and predictable amount, the grind—at least for me—feels much less like work than in, for example, Lost Ark.
On top of all this, Throne and Liberty does not just revolve around upgrade materials, but also around the switching of equipment and weapons. For me, the latter simply feels more rewarding, especially when the outfits and peacekeepers look as great as in the new MMORPG from NCSoft and Amazon Games. You don’t need cosmetics to look good.
What do you think? Does the character progression of Throne and Liberty motivate you, or can you name another Asian MMORPG that has managed to keep you motivated and engaged longer? Share it in the comments!
What do I need to know about Throne and Liberty? Throne and Liberty was released on October 1, 2024, for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5. There is crossplay between platforms. The MMORPG aims to finance itself through an in-game shop, battle pass, and real money currencies. You can find everything else in our extensive overview: Everything important about classes, release, crossplay, gameplay, payment model, early access, platforms of Throne and Liberty.
