Throne And Liberty: More First Impressions

It took a long time and a lot of work but I finally managed to get off the starter island, out of the solo instance and into Throne and Liberty for real. The issue turned out not to be with the server after all but with my installation which, despite Steam telling me it had validated and repaired it, was still corrupted in some way.

In the end I uninstalled the whole thing and downloaded it again, this time on an external SSD and since then I've had no problems at all. I was able to pat Lunar-O, the little stone golem, on the head and start the very long cut-scene that ended with my arrival in the port city of Kastleton alongside hundreds of other players, most of whom were standing around motionless and each of whom had, for some inexplicable reason, a small, grey lozenge floating over their head.

Kastleton. And about flaming time!

I'm going to take this opportunity to complain yet again about the default settings in so many MMORPGs. I understand why developers feel the need to flag up absolutely everything any new player might conceivably need to find or know. I also understand that many, quite possibly most, players prefer to have practical, game-mechanic-related information instantly available, in natural line of sight, while they play.

But it looks fricken' terrible! When you've made what may very well be the best-looking game in the genre we're likely to see this year, why ruin any good first impression it's likely to make by cluttering the entire screen with crap? It would be really nice, just for once, to be able to log into a new MMORPG without having to go immediately into Settings to switch it all off.

Speaking of Settings - and game mechanics for that matter - Throne and Liberty is a prime example of why traditional MMORPGs remain a relatively niche genre. Yes, I know millions of people play them but billions of people play video games. There's no MMORPG equivalent of Candy Crush or Fortnite or even Call of Duty and for good reason.

There are literally dozens of separate items of information on this one screen...

Wilhelm's recently posted on Raph Koster's latest pronouncements on his Stars Reach project. Raph very clearly wants to target a much broader demographic than the PC-based MMORPG crowd and he's identified the kind of complexity and clutter I'm talking about as one of the key problems in doing so. 

Mostly he seems to be talking about having fewer buttons to press but he also mentions choosing "elegance over visual cruft". I really hope by that he also means the kind of thing I'm talking about here, most specifically all those words and symbols hanging over NPCs and players' heads, but also floating damage numbers and similar aesthetic horrors. 

There's an interesting discussion thread following the post, in which I made some rather cynical comments about Stars Reach obviously being designed as a mobile game first and foremost. On reflection, I'm not at all sure that's a bad thing. 

Oh, great. Something else to learn.

Most of the games I've played on PC recently and really enjoyed have either been mobile ports or were developed as cross-platform titles to be released on both PC and Mobile. Those games play more fluidly and feel more natural than the new, PC-native MMORPGs I've tried this year, first Tarisland and now Throne and Liberty.

Heartless Gamer, in Wilhelm's comment thread, says of the current beta "There is so much going on in the T&L interface and I spend more time in the UI than the world. " I can't help but agree with him. It's a trope of MMORPGs in general but in this one it's off the scale. 

The menus are vast and numerous and even the relatively few game mechanics I've been introduced to so far are offputting in their complexity. When a tutorial prompt has to lead you through half a dozen separate button presses just to show you how to use an upgrade item, there has to be something wrong in the basic design.

No wonder everyone's standing around looking dazed.

That said, I also recognize there's a great desire for exactly this kind of "depth" in systems among the subset of players who flock to games like this. Most of the Chinese, Korean and Japanese imports I've played have positively revelled in the complexity of their systems and mechanics. It's clearly something the audience they're addressing either wants or expects or both. Western-made MMORPGs might be a little less fussy but surely not by much.

Throne and Liberty is very much that game. It feels weirdly old-fashioned, almost nostalgic. It's very comfortable and familiar, to use another of Raph's buzz-words. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't played an MMORPG in a couple of years and this is the first new one I've seen in that time that I've thought might be worth mentioning to her. I did think about Tarisland but, ironically, that one feels almost too old-fashioned. 

Throne and Liberty looks modern but feels quite the opposite. It also has the considerable advantage of a very much better English translation than we've been used to seeing. With the caveat that translations all too often deteriorate the further into the game you get, this one so far has been pretty much flawless. 

By that, I'm not saying the prose is great. It's not. It's perfectly fine by MMORPG standards but that's really not a high bar. What I mean is that everything reads as though it's been written by a fluent speaker of English, not someone with a basic understanding and access to Google Translate.

It's hard to say why this is something worth mentioning. It really shouldn't be. If there's one thing most MMORPGs have in common it's that they expect players to read a lot of text. It's a shockingly text-heavy genre, what with all the endless questing, the eternally evolving narrative and the aforementioned deep and complex systems, each with its own extensive notation and instruction. 

On top of all that there's also, quite frequently, a vast amount of in-game collectable lore in the form of diary pages, journals, letters and notes scattered far and wide across the landscape. Throne and Liberty leans hard into the found social history trope right from the start with papers glowing purple all over the place, just begging to picked up and read. 

It's easy to forget, as you skim-read or simply skip another page filled with inconsequential trivia, that someone had to come into work every day, sit down at their desk and write all this stuff. You'd think they'd at least want it to be reproduced in the game in a comprehensible, recognizeable form. We all know most players are going to nope right past it but surely the people creating all that imaginary history have to believe it's going to be of genuine interest to someone or why even bother? If it was worth taking the trouble to write it and put it into the game, why wouldn't the translation merit the same degree of care and attention?

In T&L, that professional courtesy does appear to have been paid. And it makes sense that it has because the whole game looks like a labor of love, at least by the creatives on the team. The world is stunningly visualised. I haven't been this taken aback by the sheer attention to detail in a game's visuals since Black Desert, which shows how hard it it is to push that kind of graphical boundary forward any further.

Can't help but feel I'm over-dressed for the climate.

I said at the time that the villages and countryside in BDO looked like parts of Mediterranean Europe I'd visited. So does Throne and Liberty. It's not just the architecture, although some of that looks like it's been taken from photographs. It's the texture of the roads and paths, the way the plants grow up between the cobbles, the convincing realisation of aridity and dessication in a land that sees far more sun than rain.

This looks very much like one of those games I might end up playing for a while mostly because it feels like being on holiday. That happens more than you might imagine and accounts for some of my affection for a number of MMORPGs that, in objective gameplay terms, probably weren't all that good.

I remember when it was all fields around here...

Whether the gameplay in T&L is good or not I can't really say. After almost four hours I've barely seen any yet. All I've done is follow some very directive instructions, almost all of which involve going from one NPC to another, listening to what they have to say, doing what they tell me, then being passed along to the next in line to do something extremely similar.

There has been a small amount of trivial combat but I still have no clue what any of the abilities on my hot bars do because button mashing works every time. At some point, presumably, I'll run up against something that requires some basic understanding of the character I'm playing and her abilities but that time has not yet arrived.

If this was a launch, I would very definitely be carrying on until I reached the moment when I'd have to make a decision on whether to invest the time and effort required to learn how to play. It's often surprising how long that can take and in some games it never seems to come at all. 

Adventure awaits!

However long that's likely to be for Throne and Liberty, I don't see much percentage for me in getting anywhere close during a five day beta. I'll be doing all of this again, when the game goes live in a couple of months because, in case it hasn't been clear, I've been enjoying myself quite a lot so far. The game looks good, reads well, feels comfortable. What, as they say, is there not to like?

For that reason, I don't think I'll be pressing very much further ahead for now. With launch so near that would seem both a waste of energy and also a slight risk. Why make the real thing feel any less fresh than it needs to be?

Still, I probably won't entirely be able to resist the temptation to have a bit more of a poke around so this might not be the last time I write about it. For now I'll just say Throne and Liberty has made a good first impression and I definitely want to see more and leave it that. If anything worth writing about comes up before the beta ends, so be it. If not, everyone meet back here in September and we'll do it again for real.