Throne and Liberty’s Beta Is Fun But Doesn’t Do Enough to Stand Out

ign.com:

I’ve done my time in major MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft, but outside of that I’ve only dabbled in the various other forms this subgenre can take. So when I say that Throne and Liberty isn’t quite rising to my past experiences with massively multiplayer dungeon-diving, loot-grinding, and boss-slaying, it’s an opinion coming largely from a “normie.” That said, both FF14 and WoW have big expansions launching the same year as this, NCSOFTs Guild Wars 2 follow up, and though its world is beautiful and its combat grows into a compelling and active ballet of skill interactions, the largely boring story and repetitive quest design I experienced in my 10 or so hours with the Open Beta makes me worried for Throne and Liberty’s chances at unseating the kings of the genre.

It is a great-looking game, though. The character creator lets you customize your avatar with some commendable levels of detail. And no matter what you put together, the end result will look fantastic, and shows no signs of the sort of player character uncanny valley that some games suffer from, where the overall quality of your PC is lower than the handcrafted NPCs from the developers. The world is pretty stunning, too. Once you see the huge flying whale for the first time, you’ll go quite a few hours before you see something that majestic again, but the environments you’ll travel through on your journey are rich in color and detail. I really loved the swampy forest overrun by spiders and the colorful plains with giant wild birds that are Definitely Not Chocobos. Even better, all of this runs remarkably smoothly. Becoming your own mount and morphing into a wild cat to sprint through cities or fast traveling from location to location loads lightning fast and in real time no matter how many people are on screen.

You’re going to do quite a lot of traveling from place to place, guided around by a completely unremarkable story about magically blessed youngsters growing into warriors of destiny,