A brilliant start to a familiar tale kicks off Amazon’s new MMORPG and our Throne & Liberty Review.
After years of trying, Amazon has finally nailed it? A big-budget AAA MMO with an epic scope, a grand tale, and plenty of reasons to play. Throne & Liberty unlocked for free-to-play adventurers on 1 October 2024. Featuring a gorgeous and seemingly endless horizon to explore and some noticeably attractive characters, the land of Solisium is instantly inviting, but cool graphics don’t make a great game. After the disappointment of Blue Protocol, and my middling response to New World’s Aeternum update, I was unsurprised to find another world on the brink of disaster.
Developed by NCSoft and published globally by Amazon, Throne & Liberty follows a familiar path for the Korean gaming giant and Twitch owners. Much like Lost Ark, this adventure is a port of a distinct type of online fantasy game. It melds in-game idiosyncrasies and design choices from the original Korean release with the experience and investment that both companies can bring to this desktop battle. For those who haven’t heard the name, NCSoft is the studio behind Lineage, Aion, and Blade & Soul. Amazon is still growing as a game studio but has the likes of New World, Lost Ark, and King of Meat to its name. The back of this box promises another fantasy MMO, with a dark evil lingering on the horizon. A realm is in peril, and you are a fated saviour, born of the stars, and probably the only one that can wield the power to see off this threat. Pretty standard for a Korean MMO.
More of the Same
Expect plenty of this familiar refrain from Throne & Liberty right from the very first frames. Like almost every NCSoft epic, there’s an opening scene, an active tutorial, and an epic sweeping set of credits before rolling a character proper. Even the character creator feels familiar to me. Just like Black Desert or Blade & Soul expect to see a myriad of sliders, toggles, buttons, and color pickers. With only human frames on offer character customization isn’t likely to result in an ugly Orc. Still, if you’re anything like me then iris sizes, chin width, cheekbone sliders, and the like will chew up a ridiculous amount of time.
Observant readers might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned a class customization in the character creator, since Throne & Liberty binds abilities to weapons. While this certainly isn’t a new concept, it’s welcome for newbies stepping into Solisium.
A Whole New World
The world of Solisium awaits once you’re finished burning hours in the character creation, and it’s utterly stunning. While the player character is a great indication of what to expect, the Unreal 4-powered overworld is a wonderful welcome. A cliffside settlement stretches out towards a land at war, the sun gleams through a violet treeline, and a bustling enclave plays host to you. Beyond the safety of those first gates, the town of Kastleton and Golden Rye Pastures stretch out into an almost seamless expanse, filled with rolling hills, abandoned ruins, spooky forests, and the sort of detail that would be applauded in any other genre. The smallest detail from the cats you can pet right up to the cloud scraping cliffs makes exploring a simple joy. Characters continue to look just as detailed in the open world as they do in the creation screen. Skill animations are a flashy addition and blaze across the screen in a haze of purple fire. All this can be yours if you’re able to crank up the graphics. Despite the option to turn things up, even a mid-range graphics card has a ton of ways to tweak the experience. Wide support for AMD FSR2, NVIDIA DLSS & Reflex, and even Intel XeSS upscaling options ensure that Throne & Liberty won’t ever look like a muddy mess and frames are well-paced in the busiest of mass encounters.
My own experience with a 7900XT easily maxed out every graphical option and didn’t seem to dip below the 60FPS limit I left on. I’ve also had the opportunity to put a party together using an RTX 3070 and GeForce Now at similarly solid frame rates. It’s a welcome benefit of a mature game from an experienced developer, meaning performance shouldn’t be any sort of issue, whatever your platform of choice.
Swing The Sword Your Way
Much like the other systems, I’ve got plenty of good things to say about early combat and control systems, mostly. Control systems are generally intuitive, with combat falling somewhere between a traditional tab-target MMO and the action combat of New World. Whether you pick from an action or classic mode, I can’t shake the feeling that combat was supposed to be a much more static affair. While the movement is free-form, combat tends to feel very channelled. I can’t swing a sword where I like and miss, for example. Some default key bind choices also make it obvious this isn’t drawing from the Guild Wars 2 design philosophy. Combat ends up feeling fluid but not fast, and setup takes some wrangling. It’s odd to feel that combat and movement are almost there but not quite. Especially from a developer who brought us the high-octane fisticuffs of Blade & Soul. Thankfully, there’s plenty of choice in how you swing that sword.
Despite my initial ambivalence to the combat controls, there’s a lot of flexibility early on. A total of seven weapons are immediately available to equip. A main and secondary weapon will be on your person at all times, with every option unlocking a range of base skills. Rather than tie these skills to a class system, Throne & Liberty leaves these confined to a weapon. Need a tank? If you have the stats then pick up a shield and remember to block. It’s a welcome way to start the game, giving players an option to pick their path and make use of the mighty two character slots that appear on the login screen, although this flexibility starts to unwind itself a little later on.
Go Bash Some Goblins
Early entries in a rather predictable questline ensue promptly. Navigating a serene-looking coastline, you’ll explore ships, visit a lighthouse, bash some wolves, and bash some more Goblins. Quests pop up in a pretty consistent on-screen tracker, the local merchants are introduced, waypoints are unlocked, and you bash some more generic MMO wildlife. It’s all pretty unassuming, but somehow Throne & Liberty implements the initial opening levels with so much finesse that the whole thing is surprisingly enjoyable. There’s no doubt that a grind awaits. There’s so much NCSoft in this game that it’s inevitable, but there are indications it might not be a soulless slog.
Navigation in and around the world is instantly accessible. The idea of morphing into your mount, instead of having to go unlock, buy, trade, or capture the thing is so simple and yet changes up the monotony of trudging between new frontiers. Verticality is even freshened up, adding a grappling hook as a standard issue. Players looking to skip the stairs can whip up cliffsides like a medieval Spiderman and even break out into a glide once they’ve got altitude. Best of all, lucky players will be able to turn themselves into an otter and go swimming, because why not. None of this intrinsically changes gameplay much but seems to understand that familiar systems at least need to be presented in a new and unique way, and I can’t get enough of the animal morphs.
Much like the navigation, narrative, and content presentation is key during the opening chapters of Throine & Liberty. It’s tempting to indulge the in-game lore as far as “blah blah Star Child, blah blah big shiny deer.” Thankfully NPC voice acting is extensive and really rather well pieced together. An actual narrator keeps you on track between mainline quests and cut scenes are common enough that you won’t get lost.
Other side quests, crafting introductions, PvE open world events, PvP open world events, and a variety of dungeons unlock. Dungeons aside, because I’ll cover them along with other instanced content in part 2, open-world events provide another way to keep early leads varied. Boss battles, timed spawns, kill and collect quests, and more all take the basic side quest and lean into dynamic event systems, making content feel like a natural discovery. PvP is another matter and can ruin the flow of leveling, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have that opinion if I wasn’t playing catch up while trying to take review notes. The power disparity that appears when flitting through open-world PvPvE boss events begins to peel back the cover and uncover early worries.
Beneath the beautiful backdrops, Throne & Liberty is still an NCSoft title at its core. An early look at skill leveling and gearing reveals a wealth of enchantment, leveling, traits, and more. While both publisher and developer should be applauded for adding an action combat component, streamlining character stats, fantastic presentation, and ditching character classes there’s obvious evidence of old-school progression systems. Gear refinement and leveling are the most egregious of these systems. Almost immediately you’ll find gear leveling and enchantment, which can end in varying degrees of success. Sure, it’s not as punishing as I remember Aion being. Still, the complexity and depth here opens up the potential for a long grind ahead and diminishing returns that are abnormal in a modern MMO.
These design choices pair with an unexpected range of bugs. Grouping problems, disconnections, targeting issues, and a camera that just kept locking up are jsut a few of the oddities. It all makes Throne & Liberty a mixed bag right away. A visually stunning welcome to an inviting, if tropey, narrative experience starts to fray at the edges as you delve further in. For new players, just enjoy the ride. It’s free to play and available now. Keep an eye here to find out if I remain impressed during dungeon runs and the long grind ahead and if Throne & Liberty is king of the castle. You can play for free on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox right now, find out more on the official website.
