Throne and Liberty review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

It’s been a while since I’ve dipped my toes into the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game space, having dropped off of World of Warcraft a long time ago, and skipping over the last couple of expansions for Final Fantasy XIV. However, if you’re a fan of these types of games, you know the itch to play never really goes away, so when the opportunity to check out developer NCSoft’s newest MMORPG Throne and Liberty came around, I decided to jump back in. Overall, I’m happy that I did, as I think Throne and Liberty has a lot of positives going for it, some serious potential for the future, and enough hooks to both the PvE and PvP space to keep people coming back for more.

Developer NCSoft is no stranger to the MMO genre. In fact, Throne and Liberty is built off the bones of one of their more popular series, Lineage. I personally have never played Lineage, but my understanding is that this game was originally intended to be a Lineage sequel, and then was retooled some time ago into the game we have now. Like Lineage, there is a heavy emphasis on PvP in Throne and Liberty, which makes up a chunk of the end-game mechanics. As such, you’ll definitely want to make friends within this world, join up with a guild, and plan on scheduling your life to some degree around that late-game content. Right off the bat some of those ideas aren’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I honestly don’t know how long I’ll stick with it myself, but I still think the execution here is pretty well done for the folks who are into that competitive MMO experience.

There’s also a lot of PvE content that’ll appeal to the rest of us too. Throne and Liberty has a lot of content at launch, with loads of main story quests and side-quests, a huge open world to explore, tons of crafting options, weapon-types that change the class of your character, and more. It has one of the most in-depth character creators around, allowing you to really fine-tune your creations to an incredible degree. The only aspect missing is race types other than humans, which is a little bit of a bummer, but still the character creator is very impressive.

Story-wise I didn’t find myself super engaged with the plot, which is sort of the norm for me and MMO’s, but I certainly didn’t mind it. It’s standard fantasy-fare, with your character thrust into a hero role due to their ability to channel a mysterious power that they can’t quite control. The various cut-scenes are well done, and overall Throne and Liberty is a really beautiful looking game. I also didn’t mind the English VA work, and while nothing stood out as incredible here, the overall package is solid throughout your adventure.

The control scheme is interesting in Throne and Liberty, in that you’ve got two available set-ups if you’re on mouse and keyboard. One is a more traditional MMO set-up, tab to select targets, control camera movement with your mouse, move around using your standard WASD set-up. The other is dubbed as an action control scheme, which puts a crosshair like icon on the screen that will target the nearest enemy, changing the way your camera movement works as well. I didn’t really dig this set-up myself, I think I’m just too stuck on the normal control set-up for this one to work, but I appreciate someone trying to do something new. Also, if you prefer to play with a controller, the PC version supports this and works really well too.

As far as complaints go, I will say the UI is mess. Being a free-to-play game, you expect to see a dearth of menu options for all the optional cosmetics and other items you can purchase, along with various kinds of currency and the shops that you can spend that currency in. However, there are various free-to-play games that manage multiple storefronts, currency and so on fairly well, which makes Throne and Liberty’s menu system stand out as bad even more. There’s just too much packed into the general menu, which takes up a surprisingly large portion of the screen every time you bring it up. And while it helpfully highlights all the options that may have something new for you to check out, it’s not really built to allow you to check out multiple things at once, since everytime you back out of an option it boots you out of the menu altogether instead of simply going back a step or two. Since you have to interact with the menu fairly often, it becomes a tedious experience that really drags the game down a bit. Hopefully this is something that can be adjusted or improved in the future, as it’s easily the worst aspect of the game at the moment.

UI issues aside, I have been enjoying my time with Throne and Liberty, and do plan to play more of it post-review. I’m still not entirely sure the end-game content is going to be for me, but NCSoft seems to be putting out steady updates and has a solid content plan in place so far which seems promising. Even without engaging in the PvP side of things I still feel that I have plenty of other things to do within the world, and provided you’re not just mainlining the story to hit level cap as quickly as possible, you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by how much Throne and Liberty has to offer right out of the gate. Considering it’s free-to-play, I see no reason to not check it out whenever you have a chance.

Note: Amazon Games provided us with a Throne and Liberty Early Access code for review purposes.