| Throne and Liberty | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay & Story | Release Date | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Throne and Liberty is an MMO where your class is dependent on the weapons you equip. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Throne and Liberty Review Overview
What is Throne and Liberty?
In Throne and Liberty, players are thrust into the world of Solisium, where an ancient evil known as Kazar, the Wraith of Conquest, threatens the land. To stand against this powerful enemy, you and your fellow adventurers must seek out the fragments of the legendary Star of Sylaveth, whose power is the key to turning the tide of war.
Throne and Liberty features:
⚫︎ Free Class System; change your class by the weapons you equip
⚫︎ Shapeshifting mechanic
⚫︎ Open world exploration
⚫︎ Dungeon raids and bosses
⚫︎ Cosmetic purchases
⚫︎ Rotating events
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Throne and Liberty's gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 PlayStation |
 Xbox |
 Steam |
 Amazon |
| Price | Free-To-Play | ||
Throne and Liberty Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Matching Weapons Is Practical and Fun Vibrant, Threateningly Beautiful Visuals |
Character Permanence? What’s That? Payoff For The Grind Is Way Too Late Audiovisual Issues |
Throne and Liberty Overall Score - 72/100
Throne and Liberty is an attempt at a unique MMO that succeeds late in the game. That is, if you can get to that point. Unfortunately, the onboarding process, which the game calls its main story, takes just enough time to make you contemplate dropping it at certain points. It’s also lacking any compelling reasons to get you immersed in its lore. Then again, the game is very, very pretty, make no mistake.
Throne and Liberty Story - 5/10
Throne and Liberty touts the all-too-common story that severely lacks any object permanence aside from its major plot devices. This creates a very real disconnect between you, playing as the character in Throne and Liberty’s world, and the world around you due to the absence of long-lasting personal connections with its inhabitants.
Throne and Liberty Gameplay - 7/10
For the most part, Throne and Liberty is your run-of-the-mill, everyday MMO. It has weapon and skill upgrades, stat distributions, a ton of grinding, and the dull slog through the extensive tutorial called the main campaign. Though it does make up for it somewhat with a rather unique and quite seamless weapon matching system for character builds, the possibilities aren’t as varied as you might think.
Throne and Liberty Visuals - 9/10
Well, what can I say? The game looks very pretty, with beautiful models for every character and enemy, amazing landscapes, and great visual effects. Even though much of the awesome gear can only be obtained either right towards the end or through in-game purchases, the intermediate equipment also looks pretty nice. However, the game could use a lot of work with its UI, and the story cutscenes’ mediocrity almost hurts.
Throne and Liberty Audio - 7/10
While the game has all the parts necessary for a very immersive and engaging audio experience, it unfortunately manages to trip over itself right before crossing the finish line. This can be heard through the extremely jarring, seemingly random occurrences of voiced dialogue switching between the painfully average, default English option to the much better Korean. The audio feedback for combat also lacks a lot of punch, even if the foundation for a much better experience is already there.
Throne and Liberty Value for Money - 8/10
Considering that you create your own character from scratch and weapons from grinding in Throne and Liberty, the only way for them to monetize the game is through selling cosmetics and materials either directly or using battle passes. Yes, the former is something nice to have, but they’re not absolutely necessary to have, and most of the materials they sell are things you can grind for anyway. The Lucent, which serves as the game’s premium currency, you purchase with real money can also be obtained through events, anyway.
Throne and Liberty Review: A Very Pretty Slog
If there is one genre of games I’ve invested more time in than MOBAs like DOTA2 and Eternal Return (give me my six thousand hours back), it’s MMOs. My total playtime with Phantasy Star Online 2 alone in the JP servers clocks in at about eight thousand hours; add in the several thousands more between the original Ragnarok Online, World of WarCraft, MU, and Black Desert Online, and one could say that I’ve spent way too much time on games that I eventually left for the less-than-appetizing garden of mobile games.
That said, if there’s one thing that remains the same across all of these titles is the grind that comes along with the genre. The amount varies between titles, sure; for example, the real grind in Phantasy Star Online 2 is waiting for the right raid to open every three or so hours. But I was open to it regardless of what the experience entailed so long as it was reasonable and rewarding; something I can’t say for Throne and Liberty.
Let’s get this out of the way first: Throne and Liberty can be considered as a narratively-driven MMO. In terms that MMO players might understand, it’s a Theme Park MMO where you are led from one place to another as you grow progressively stronger via the required story quest line. Now, that in itself isn’t a bad thing. Phantasy Star Online 2 was also a Theme Park MMO, and the original Rangarok Online had elements of it as well. But what made the experience such a slog wasn’t how the quest objectives were almost always just a laundry list of chores or how impressionable your intermediate equipment are; it’s the story.
Long story short (laugh, please), Throne and Liberty’s story exists only as a formality. For what, you might ask? In a way, you can consider its main storyline as just an extended tutorial that spans multiple hours of your precious life. Through it, the game introduces its many mechanics and features such as equipment crafting, upgrading, shapeshifting, and the like. That in itself isn’t an issue. Many MMOs pull the same thing to varying success. Sure, some mechanics take way too long before you can gain access to it, but one could always argue that one’s valuation of their own time differs from person to person.
But that does not excuse the story’s blatant lack of object permanence, particularly with regards to its many named characters. It’s at a point where you can forget trying to take notes of who you meet in your journey—you’ll probably never see them again. What’s the point of giving them names, then? They might as well be nameless, faceless caricatures. The game never gives you the opportunity to develop any connection to the world through its inhabitants, severely hamstringing the immersion you could have achieved otherwise.
This is a big problem for Throne and Liberty because the game only really starts near the end of the storyline. There’s practically no need to grind, run dungeons, or socialize with random strangers at the start. In other words, it doesn’t give you the MMO experience until you’re more than a few hours in.
Thankfully, though, there is a rather compelling reason to push through. That is, the game is extremely pretty. Not only does its combat allow you to enjoy your character’s appearance at a much closer distance than most MMOs, its level designs are considerate for its beautiful landscapes. That is, the areas aren’t filled to the brim with enemies that make the ground look like a writhing mass from above. It lends itself a natural-looking scenery that’s captivating to witness, but threatening to engage with.
And speaking of engaging, Throne and Liberty’s combat can be nicely summed up as an attempt at novelty. It uses very familiar RPG mechanics such as gear crafting, upgrading, stat allocations and the like whilst also flaunting a decently unique system of specialization.
In Throne and Liberty, your kit is heavily influenced by the combination of weapons you equip. There are two weapons per class, namely, the sword and shield, the broadsword, the bow, the crossbow, the staff, and the wand. Each weapon has a certain playstyle that their weapon-exclusive skills support, such as the broadsword being good at dealing area damage at melee range while the bow excelling at dealing long-ranged damage while remaining stationary.
To specialize your character, you must match two weapons together in a way that somehow compliments their strengths or covers their weaknesses. This can result in wildly different builds that function distinctly from another player, even if the only visible distinction is a different second weapon. It’s a great mechanic that’s only further enhanced by skill specializations, allowing you to modify how certain abilities function.
Overall, though, the end result of these features still fall quite short of what one could expect from a new MMO. It also fails to address the tiresome slog you’ll be forced into just to unlock everything. Yes, the game does become good later on, but you’ll have to work to get to that point.
Pros of Throne and Liberty
| Things Throne and Liberty Got Right |
|---|
|
Matching Weapons Is Practical and Fun Vibrant, Threateningly Beautiful Visuals |
Matching Weapons Is Practical and Fun
The way character builds work in Throne and Liberty can be condensed into two basic parts: allocation and matching. Allocation is something practically anybody who has ever played an MMO or an RPG can understand. Simply put, you allocate resources into certain aspects of your character such as materials to upgrade gear and skills, or experience to level-up the character itself.
Throne and Liberty’s main gimmick, however, is its weapon matching system. By equipping two different weapons, you gain access to their weapon skills and corresponding status scaling. For example, equipping a broadsword and a crossbow allows you to be a balanced fighter capable of dealing with groups of enemies and bosses with decent results, while equipping a bow with a wand creates a build that’s great as a ranged support unit using buffs and complimentary damage.
What’s even better is how weapon skills don’t affect your loadout. Like, you can maintain ranged pressure with a crossbow even when you use a self-buffing skill that requires you to pull out your sword. In those instances, your character will only momentarily change weapons to cast the skill before switching back to your previously-equipped weapon. This makes the entire experience seamless and unintrusive.
Now, if only they get rid of the error prompt that stops you from using a skill or attacking if you’re out of range. I’d rather miss my attacks than be told that I can’t use certain skills.
Vibrantly Threatening Visuals
Unlike other open world MMOs that like to completely fill certain sections of the map with copious amounts of enemies for you to grind through, Throne and Liberty is much less liberal with the matter. Here, you can actually appreciate the landscape without seeing the ground writhe with several dozen mobs just itching to get blown up by an area-of-effect attack. It creates beautiful views that still retain an air of danger; a kind of balance that’s more natural than what other games can pull off.
Cons of Throne and Liberty
| Things That Throne and Liberty Can Improve |
|---|
|
Character Permanence? What’s That? Payoff For The Grind Is Way Too Late Audiovisual Issues |
Character Permanence? What’s That?
What is it with some games nowadays thinking that it’s perfectly fine to just keep on introducing characters left and right, only for the vast majority of them to be never seen again unless you have very specific side quests that require you to go back to where they’re generally located? Not only does this mean that almost everybody aside from the protagonist can be considered as “extras,” but this also sacrifices the many possible developments your character can experience by having various, long-lasting connections.
Being an open world MMO doesn’t really excuse this behavior considering that there are some games that have managed to pull this off rather well.
The fact that every character you interact with in the game has a name just makes their fleeting existences that much more disappointing. Yes, there are recurring characters, but they’re so few and far in between that you’ll have trouble keeping the ones you meet on the road in your mind because you’re going to, by default, expect them to cease existing after that point. What ends up happening is that whenever you do meet a character for the second time, you’ll often just go “who are you again?” without any means of expressing it in-game… which is probably even sadder, really.
Payoff For The Grind Is Way Too Late
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of grinding involved in Throne and Liberty. I mean, that’s how most MMOs retain engagement aside from their social features, right? You spend five, six hours in a single area trying to get the rare loot or materials to craft some nice-looking armor or weapon to show off to your peers; it’s the kind of joy any gamer willing to sacrifice a bit of their waking hours every day are all too familiar with.
Now, that said, for most MMOs, that kind of grind can be started early on with decent enough payoff. For example, in Phantasy Star Online 2, joining just a few of the regular raids will earn you enough experience to get into the mid-game, even during its early days. By then, you can already start farming for materials to build your ultimate weapon much later on. The same cannot be said for Throne and Liberty, though.
Ironically enough, the fact that you can preview some late-game items early on is a double-edged sword for the game. Since you already know that you’ll be swapping your items out later on, it makes grinding for low or mid-tier equipment very unappealing. Hence, not only will you lack any sense of attachment to your gear (since they all look bland even in a vacuum) for the vast majority of your time trying to finish the required main quests, you will also only be able to start the grind for all the pretty armors and weapons at a point where many players would have already lost interest in the game in general.
Audiovisual Issues
The problems with Throne and Liberty aren't limited to its narrative and investment aspects. Perhaps the most glaring and obvious one you’ll run into quite early into the game is its terrible localization, especially if you’re using the English voices. Included in the laundry list of faults are mismatched text to voiced dialogue, seemingly random and jarring switching between English and Korean voice acting, and just really awkward voice acting quality.
Then, you have the UI; a messy, well, mess of an interface that, by default, uses images and a font size so small you need to squint, an inconvenient skill cooldown display, tutorial messages that pop up in the middle of your activities instead of before you do it, and all sorts of other issues. Some of these even translate into quality of life problems, such as how cumbersome it is to find the sources of certain crafting materials or how much of a hassle trying to navigate the map can become due to how similarly-colored the markers for the main and side quests are.
Or maybe I’m just colorblind.
Is Throne and Liberty Worth It?
If you can last until the late game.
Throne and Liberty requires the kind of time investment that doesn’t pay off until much later into the game. If you ever get there, though, then the rewards are decently abundant, with flashy skills, big damage numbers, and beautiful cosmetics. Before that point, though, you’ll have to settle with its extremely dull-looking equipment, uncompelling storytelling, and bothersome quests.
| Digital Storefronts | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| PlayStation |
Xbox |
Steam |
Amazon |
| Price | Free-To-Play | ||
Throne and Liberty FAQ
Is Throne and Liberty free?
Yes, the game will be free-to-play once it releases.
Is Throne and Liberty pay-to-win?
Although you can earn materials through purchases of the battle pass, the game provides enough of its premium currency in events that you can purchase it without spending real money after some saving up.
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Throne and Liberty Product Information
 | |
| Title | Throne and Liberty |
|---|---|
| Release Date | October 1, 2024 |
| Developer | NCSOFT |
| Publisher | NCSOFT, Amazon Games |
| Supported Platforms | PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam) |
| Genre | MMORPG |
| Number of Players | 1, Online Co-Op (2-70), Online Multiplayer (2-1000) |
| Rating | ESRB Teen |
| Official Website | Throne and Liberty Official Website |
