Throne And Liberty: First Impressions (Intro and Tutorial)

Another day, another game. Will it never end?

Today's entry in the Big Summer Game Lottery is the long, long awaited Throne and Liberty, the latest spin-off from the Lineage universe, published in the West by Amazon and available for free through Steam. 

The game went into open beta yesterday at six in the evening. Where I live, that is. It was a global launch so it went Live at the same time where you live but your clock said something different. Unless you also live where I live, of course. Are you in my house? You better not be! 

I was eating quiche and watching Pointless at the time (If you ever needed proof of my lack of machismo, which I very much doubt, well there you go.) so I missed the very start but I was in and making my character by seven o' clock.

Steam tells me I played for eighty-five minutes. I'd guess about fifteen of those went on making the character. Could easily have been the whole hour and twenty five and might well have been, had this been an actual launch. For a beta test lasting five days, though, I think even fifteen minutes fiddling with sliders to get the eyebrows just right is probably too much. 

Where's the slider for Windswept?

Here's an idea for a blog. Or a YouTube channel. Or maybe a TikTok... what do they call it on TikTok? A series where you go into character creation in various games and make the same character every time - or try to. Has anyone done that yet? If not, I call dibs.

This time around I actually tried not to make exactly the same character I always make. As you can see from the screenshots, I didn't entirely succeed although I can see the differences. There is a problem with drifting too far from the familiar when creating a character, though, which is that if I make a character that doesn't feel familiar enough, I don't want to play them. 

In this case, I managed to come up with one who felt a little different - more hard-edged around the jaw-line, a little stubborn perhaps - but close enough to what I generally run with that I wouldn't feel uncomfortable playing her. I was particularly pleased with the hairstyle, the kind of fly-away, gamine-inflected, androgynous look you might have seen on the rhythm guitarist in a New Romantic band circa 1984.

Seperated at birth.

And then I played through the tutorial and found I'd basically made the first NPC you meet in the game. Honestly, it was freakishly disturbing how similar they were. They could be sisters, if they were the kind of unnerving siblings who choose to dress alike and do their hair and make-up in the same way.

And of course, my character's "sister" turns out to be the younger, better-looking one. Because of course she does. Oh well. At least I'll know better when the game goes Live in September. Always assuming I'll still be interested in playing it by then.

Finding out whether that's going to happen is kind of the point of joining in on the open beta. I'd say it would generally take more than an hour and a half to decide if I was likely to carry on with the game, although there have been plenty of times where I've made my choice in more like a minute and a half. In the case of Throne and liberty, though, eighty-five minutes has told me pretty much nothing.

You look strangely familiar, old man. Have we met before?

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, the huge majority of time not spent in character creation was taken up with watching melodramatic cut scenes or following an extremely on-rails, narrative-driven tutorial. I know it's pointless to complain about how unoriginal and formulaic these things are and certainly Throne and Liberty doesn't do the whole "introduce the mechanics and set the scene" thing any worse than the rest but coming off the back of one of the better introductions to a game I've seen in quite a while in Once Human, it really did feel like "Oh god, here we go again".

It was interesting to have full cursor control and a clickable hot-bar for a change. The main problem was the hot-bar coming pre-loaded with icons that meant nothing at all. 

Even that might not have been too bad if there'd been some breathing space to go through them all to find out what they did but no chance of that. It's all Go! Go! Go! with people yelling at you about how urgent it all is and things trying to kill you all the time and finally a big boss fight that naturally turns out to be scripted so you lose anyway, at which point you realize there was no hurry and you could have taken your time but now it's too late because the fighting's over and what your hot keys do doesn't matter any more.

At least I didn't have any trouble following the instructions or the plot. Translation at this early stage seems fine, if no better than that, as does the voice acting, although it doesn't give me confidence when the voiceover and the text don't match in the very first cut scene. Either we're Starborn or we're Star Children. Make your mind up!

Every F2P needs a few whales.

Visually, the developers have pulled a clever trick in the introductory sequence, which I'm about to spoil. All the action for a quite a while takes place in a horrible, ugly, red and black hellscape that looks like it was inspired by heavy-metal album covers from the 1980s. It was starting to get on my nerves when everything took a sudden and unexpected turn as my character emerged from the underworld into a vast, open landscape filled with light and color. 

It's a great set-piece moment. There's even a fricken' sky whale taking up most of the field of view. We've moved from Iron Maiden to Magnum with the Rodney Matthews covers. (Is that helping you to picture the scene? No, I thought not.)

From then on the game looks great. I could see a world I was definitely interested in exploring. If only I get there. Which I could not.

The tutorial, as far as I got, takes place in a single-player instance. After about three-quarters of an hour in there, I finally got to the point where it looked as though I was going to be sent into the gameworld proper, the shared space that makes the whole thing an MMORPG. 

This is Helpie. And here was I, thinking post-modernism was dead...

I was standing on top of a cliff with the endearingly geeky NPC my ersatz sister hand had handed me on to a while back, when he asked me to pet his familar on the head. Apparently that was going to make me glide like never before. I'm guessing it's a line that works for him...

It sure didn't work for me. I tried half a dozen times. Mostly the game just hung and then disconnected. Eventually, the cut scene started and I got to see my character throw herself off the cliff and rise up, flying like a superhero with her arms stretched out ahead of her until...

Nothing. Literally nothing. A blank, grey screen. I know there ought to have been more to look at because the voiceover carried on talking, describing things that weren't there. Then, after a minute or two, the server lost conection and dumped me back at login. 

Skip this amazing scene? I don't think so!

I tried once more but the next time I didn't even get off the cliff so I gave up. I'm assuming the servers for the multiplayer part of the game were under such load they'd stopped letting anyone else join. I'd picked one on the US East Coast but my ping had been excellent throughout the instanced part so I'm confident it wasn't anything at my end. 

By then it was time to take Beryl out for her evening walk and when I got back I wanted to play Once Human so that was it for the Throne and Liberty beta for the night. I'll try again today, when everyone's had time to get further into the game and when most of the Americas are still either asleep or at work. 

I feel I owe it to the game to get as far as the starting city, at least. That said, I'm really not feeling the need for yet another MMORPG right now. Maybe by late September, when T&L goes live, I'll be interested. Or maybe when I get into the actual game as opposed to the solo, instanced tutorial, I'll get invested and start counting the days until I can play the game for real. 

Kinda doubting it just now but we'll see...