Summer Game Fest had a large number of international games present from across genres, and one MMORPG from South Korea brought beautiful cinematics, an expansive character creator, and the fantasy genre to the showcase. At Summer Game Fest Play Days, we got the chance to play around 45-minutes of Throne and Liberty, a fantasy MMORPG developed by NCSOFT and published by Amazon Games. This multiplatform MMO, coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Mac (yes, even Mac IoS), wholeheartedly embraces fantasy elements that any player, regardless of region, will understand and ultimately resonate with. In our hands-on preview, we were able to run through the opening of the story. However, that means we were only able to experience the main questline and not any dungeon or party-finding elements.
A free-to-play MMORPG, Throne and Liberty allows players to freely explore a world full of depth and verticality, experiencing environmental factors like day and night cycles and weather effects that influence the course of play both in PvP and PvE. PvP and PvE battles, including dungeons, guild control points,
and castle sieges in a persistent open world, have been added to create a dynamic and diverse experience to keep the gameplay from getting stale. While I didn’t experience that in my demo, from the trailer and the information given, this element seems to be a critical thing to consider.
That said, while you have options for PvP, PvE combat is fundamental to Throne of Liberty as well. That combat comes from your class, but you can also adjust in battle or run past enemies you don’t want to engage with by shapeshifting and causing environmental effects. One of the interesting things to note here is that shapeshifting later in the game allows players to shapeshift into a defeated boss or trigger powerful environmental effects, like solar eclipses or rainstorms.
The Throne and Liberty hands-on preview gave a quick look at the breadth of combat, the controls for that combat, which include a necessary parry, the shapeshifting traversal system available to players instead of mounts, and the variety of combat you can explore by simply equipping different weapons. The weapons systems are customizable to your playstyle and not beholden to one specific class structure but rather the weapons that you choose. With two weapons available to equip, you can customize your loadout with a sword and shield, longbow, crossbow, greatsword, staff, daggers, or wand and tome. Like any game, exploring what combat style works for you is essential to having a good time. However, it can all be done on one character by simply switching out weapons and not creating alternative characters with different assigned classes.
Outside of the combat and environments, though, the game’s character creation system is extremely robust. The character creator allows you to alter your facial structures fully, from brow depth to cheek width and lips size and shape. The creator also allows you to adjust your body’s height, shoulder, chest, calf, forearm, and more to tailor your body to your preference. By using a brightness slider, you get even more variations of the color options available, which give players the chance not just to pick their skin tone but to pick the undertone as well.
With Thone and Liberty, though, there is a dynamic understanding of skin tone that allows the player to adjust it to exactly the one they want, an experience that is becoming more common sure. Still, with the brightness element, there is an even larger ability to personalize your characters. The Character Creator’s only flaw is how restrained the hair texture types are to choose from, given how detailed the rest of the choices for skin tone, facial structure, and body structure are.
One of the other elements we got to do hands-on with was traversing the vast world vertically as much as on land. The transformation feature doesn’t just work for when you’re looking to do something akin to riding a mount to shorten the time between objectives. In addition to that, your character also has the ability to transform into a bird of prey and glide from heights. This allows the environments to be explored thoroughly and without hesitation.
Overall, it’s clear that Throne and Liberty aims to offer players a vast fantasy world that looks gorgeous. From the cinematics to your individual character moving through the world, the vibrancy of the design is going to give this MMORPG a long runway for takeoff.
Throne and Liberty exact release date is still pending.
