Throne and Liberty Review: A Beautiful & Buggy MMORPG Game

I’ve played Throne and Liberty for over 40 hours, and while it’s not a long time to fully get into a game, it’s pretty much what I need to decide if I want to keep playing it or move on with my life. When it comes to TL, it’s arguably one of the most popular MMORPG choices at this moment, and it comes with a massive player base of over 943,000 monthly active players, but is worth your time?

What is Throne and Liberty? A quick overview

Throne and Liberty is a new free-to-play MMORPG game developed by NCSoft, the company behind Lineage, Aion, Guild Wars, and many other popular titles, and Amazon Games. The game is already available for PCs, PlayStation, and Xbox. The game takes place in a fantastical world where players find themselves in epic battles with monsters, humans, and other players, full of different kingdoms and a huge map with lots of valuable resources.

The game offers a blend of traditional MMORPG elements and innovative mechanics. For example, Throne and Liberty features dynamic weather and environmental effects that can impact the gameplay, including the wind affecting the trajectory of arrows and rain extinguishing the fire spells, both of which make the game a bit more realistic.

As with older titles developed by NCSoft, players have many options when it comes to customizing their characters, letting you create something unique and based on your personal taste.

Progression is flexible, with a classless system that enables players to mix and match skills and equipment to create unique builds. Of course, players will have to make the right choice right from the very beginning, as it takes a lot of time to upgrade their skills, weapons, and armor, so choosing the right combination from the ground start will save you lots of time.

Additionally, guilds play a significant role in the game, offering various benefits and opportunities for cooperative gameplay. The game itself tries to promote and emphasize the community’s interaction, improving the overall multiplayer gameplay, but making the lone wolves who want to play all by themselves a bit difficult – more on that later though.

What we liked so far with Throne and Liberty

There are many good things to say about Throne and Liberty, especially after getting used to its interface and all the features and options provided to players. I’d like to start with its beautiful graphics and skill effects that make it even more greater than it already is. If you’re a player coming from Aion or Guild Wars, the graphics improvements are more than welcome.

The world is also huge, and thanks to the vast availability of teleports located in various areas of the map, players can travel through it faster and cooler than ever before – and I say “cooler”, because the teleport effect and smooth transitions are pretty neat, to say the least. Here’s a look:

And in case you’ve wondered: While you could, entering their game’s Dandeons is arguably crucial if you want to complete some of the quests. Dungeons may also reward you with extra resources, while the bosses may drop items that you need. They’re fun, and thanks to the huge amount of active players, there are always parties looking for more people.

When it comes to upgrading, this is where I personally liked Throne And Liberty the most: It gives you the ability to upgrade each one of your skills, armor part, weapon, and even your jewels, helmet, and more. You’ll need a few things of course, as upgrading them requires a few items that you’ll need if you want to maximize their level. It’s fun, to say the least, especially if you’re a new MMORPG player.

What’s even greater is the ability to combine two different weapons, and use their unique skills. Each skill also needs a few tokens for each level up, but you’ll keep getting them as you progress through the main quests. Based on your skills, your character will swap its weapons and use the right one for each skill.

You can also play differently by either choosing to play with the “attack mode” or the “classic mode”, or by using them both. You can switch between these two modes by clicking the V button on your keyboard. Having two modes instead of one just makes the game a whole lot more fun, and learning how to play well with both of these will favor you once you hit level 50.

When it comes to the maps, most of them are well-designed and beautiful to explore, with some expressions (which are basically based on my personal taste). The game is beautiful even from the beginning, something that reminds me of the good old days when we leveled up in Aion’s Ishalgen, which was a beautiful place full of trees and lighting and stuff.

If I were to describe the game, I’d say Throne and Liberty it’s an improved version of the Lineage, Aion, Guild Wars, and Blade and Soul, with extra new and unique features and options, improved graphics, and lots of bugs – which gets us to the next section of this review, with the things that we didn’t really appreciate during our gameplay.

What we didn’t like so far with Throne and Liberty

On the surface, Throne and Liberties has all the right ingredients: a massive world, beautiful graphics and skill effects, intriguing weapon-switching mechanics, and even an open PvP environment with tons of guilds and active players.

The game throws players into elaborate systems that even a seasoned RPG fan would need an instruction manual to understand. With complex guild dynamics and endless tasks that require impressive levels of patience, it’s like the game assumes players would rather be stuck in a long, tedious in-game grind than experiencing, you know… fun. For anyone excited about a quick adventure, the game’s motto seems to be: slow down, way down.

If you’re hoping for combat that breaks the mold, Throne and Liberty will politely disappoint. While the idea of switching from swords to magical staffs sounds like it would bring versatility, most of the time, it’s just pressing a few buttons in a slightly different order. And don’t even get started on the guild requirements; if you’re a lone wolf looking for epic solo quests, this game nudges you into the guild life, complete with intense PvP competitions and massive events.

Just make sure your hardware can keep up, or those big battles might become a slideshow. So, if you’re up for a scenic but slow burn of an MMO with enough grind to make a coffee mill blush, then Throne and Liberty is calling your name.

However, the constant lags, errors, and glitches completely ruin the experience of gamers, and one simple example can be seen in the image above.

Unfortunately, you’ll need a pretty “cool” PC if you want to have a smooth experience, but even so, in areas with lots of people and PvPs, get ready for some serious lagging (and I’ve looked at the system requirements, which my hardware passes). For heavy PvPs, I suggest you adjust your graphics settings accordingly, maybe by lowering some things down.

Throne and Liberty: PC System Requirements

Throne and Liberty’s system requirements for PC users aren’t exactly a big drawback, as the game can be played from a fairly mid-range gaming PC. Unfortunately, even if you exceed those requirements, the game will still be a bit laggy overall.

RAM, as always, plays a crucial role in the smoothness, and your graphics card along with your CPU will do the rest. Nora for example has way better graphics card than me, yet she has 16GB and I have 48GB, and it seems as of this moment that it runs a whole lot smoother on my end. It’s also worth noting that I am using Windows 11, while Nora is using Windows 10.

Throne and Liberty: Reviewed by our authors

Well, when it comes to personal opinions, we both reviewed the game. And sure, we’d love to update our reviews later on describing that some of the issues that we were constantly facing are now fixed, but until then, those are our reviews based on our own experience.

Nora’s Review on Throne and Liberty

I was super excited about the release of Throne and Liberty, but that was until I played the game. Well… let me rephrase this and say ”when I tried to play the game”. My experience was not that smooth and I am still trying to find ways to play without lagging and glitching 70% of the time. Most probably this has to do with my PC and not with the game itself since Panos was able to run the game smoother than me from day one.

From what I’ve seen so far, ’cause trust me I have a lot more to see yet, Throne and Liberty stole my heart. From graphics to music and from storyline to world design, this game offers the best experience from any other game of its kind so far. It’s definitely a game that needs experience since it throws you to a plethora of information from the very beginning and that might be a lot to process for a new starter in the MMORPG world.

The community of Throne and Liberty looks friendly so far instead of other games like AION, whose community was way toxic. So that’s another big plus for me since I don’t cope well with toxicity.

As I said at the beginning, I wasn’t able to spend a lot of time in-game. So expect me to update my review once I check more stuff about this beautiful game.

Panos’s Review on Throne and Liberty

In the beginning, there were way too many new features and mechanisms that I had to learn in order to enjoy the game without constantly looking where’s each button and option. After giving time a bit of time, I started to kill mobs quicker, use my skills better, and understand which upgrade I should make next.

If there’s anything to be said is that Throne and Liberty is not a friendly game for non-MMORPG players, and NCSoft needs to improve the tutorials and help new players by reducing their learning curve from the very beginning. If you give it time though, you’ll be able to enjoy it even further, especially if you’re a MMORPG enthusiast or you’re a fan of the company’s previous titles.

The constant lagging, bugs, and crashes are what’s making me frustrated through the entire gameplay. I do hope that NCSoft is hard at solving these issues, and not leaving them there for an eternity, as we have already seen those for years in Aion (Spoiler alert: There are still there). Thankfully, the more I play Throne and Liberty the more I like it, and I do hope this feeling will remain, but if it won’t, I’ll update my review.

FAQ

Have you played Throne and Liberty? And if so, how was your experience with the gameplay, graphics, and overall performance and stability? Did you experience any problems or issues? And if you haven’t played it yet, what’s stopping you? Let us know in the comments section down below.