Next week will see NCSoft’s Throne and Liberty finally get its Western release after a rocky start in Korea last year. But the live service game has seemingly matured over the past few months. The developer is clearly listening to its community - player numbers have almost doubled in South Korea since the game’s lukewarm reception way back in December 2023. Almost a year later and it’s seen many new additions that will arrive in the form of a launch update, including a streamlined leveling process, new lifestyle paths (fishing and cooking, yes please), as well as a new 3v3 Arena among other chan
In many ways, **Throne and Liberty plays like a typical MMO ** . Players explore a variety of different fantasy environments, fighting a variety of different monsters with a variety of different class-specific abilities. There’s an extensive main quest, side activities like crafting and fishing, multiplayer dungeons, competitive player-versus-player matches, and everything else you’ve come to expect from the genre. It has a handful of unique ideas, but they don’t always go far enough to carry an otherwise generic
Depending on the rarity level of your item, it will require different rarities of Growthstones. Here are all the Growthstones and which corresponding rarities they are used for. We have included the "Weapon" style growthstones, but the same goes for each item t
These will naturally be a pressing question for anyone who might want to try out Throne and Liberty. ‘Pay-to-win’ is a term often thrown about by players, and it’s probably a term used frequently in Amazon’s head offices, too. Pay-to-win is a spectrum . You could place Diablo Immortal very high on the pay-to-win scale, whereas a game like League of Legends has plenty of microtransactions but no pay-to-win elements at all. Throne and Liberty definitely falls on the much lighter side of things. Most purchasable items are cosme
"Everything about Throne & Liberty, from day one, was built with, I would say, the right word is 'massive'," Lafuente says. "Massive scale, everything about it, the world, the buildings, everything. And the tech being built is going to allow things like the castle sieges that have thousands of players participating in a castle siege. That's not an exaggeration, that's already something that has been seen in the Korean life service is thousands of players participating in this castle siege. That's probably the biggest event that we have. And then there'll be other things that have hundreds of players, going down even to guild vs guild battles, which will be more along the 50 v 50, 60. v 60 type of range. Scale is a big part of what we expect in Throne & Liberty, particularly when it comes to PvP battl
"I have a long history with Korean MMOs," Lee Kwai tells me. "There are certain expectations around classes based on that legacy. It's important to strike a delicate balance. But when you're fighting one v one, or one v six, or 50 versus 50, or 200 versus 200, the abilities are used in many different ways and the strategies of combat change drastically. And one thing that mage classes are known for is area attacks, so during combat like sieges or massive battles there's usually strategies that arise based on how to coordinate magic attacks, and that's where they really get a lot of that reputati
And there are a handful of good aspects to Throne and Liberty , but in their present state, they don’t do enough to elevate it __ over similar games in the genre. ** Most MMO players are pretty entrenched in their favorite games. When a new title comes along, it has to offer something special enough to draw players away from their current obsessions. This one just __ doesn't do that, at least not yet. Throne and Liberty ** __ lays a solid foundation, but it still has a long way to
At Summer Game Fest earlier this month I played two of Amazon's MMOs, New World: Aeternum and Throne & Liberty , having previously dabbled in their other MMO Lost Ark , while the company has also announced, cancelled, and re-announced anew a Lord of the Rings MMO. This isn't all Amazon publishes ( Blue Protocol is on the way, Crucible was scrapped, it picked up Tomb Raider recently too), but it’s definitely a trend. So when I sat down with Daniel Lafuente and Merv Lee Kwai from Amazon to discuss Throne and Liberty story guide & Liberty, this trend was on my mind. Though, apparently, not on the
It definitely boosted the otherwise pretty bland combat with an extra layer of excitement, but you have to go through a lot of PvE grinding to get to the point where you can be competitive in PvP. It is, however, possible to skip much of this grinding by spending premium currency to purchase upgrade materials at the in-game Auction House, which has me concerned about long-term balance . A prominent guild led by a few big spenders could easily dominate an entire ser
The above chart can be seen in-game when hovering over the '?' beside the Equipment Upgrade Rate . This means you have a 40 percent chance to gain 25 percent of the item's exp growth bar, a 30 percent chance to gain 30 percent of the growth bar, and so
