Throne Alone

I'm forced to admit I'm having a lot more fun in Throne and Liberty than I expected. The reasons why are both complicated and contradictory. 

Looked at from the outside, it very much seems like a game that wouldn't do a lot for me. For a start, it's strongly biased towards grouping with a meta-game that's built for guilds. There's a clear expectation that you'll not only be willing to party up for dungeons but that you'll want to become part of a larger organization and engage in all kinds of competitive events so you can prove your worth both on the map and on a series of league tables

The whole game is designed to enforce both competition and co-operation in a way that appears to leave little room for individuals. Even open-world events, of which there are many, come not just with a running commentary like a sportscast but with scorecards throughout to let everyone know who's winning and who's won. 

Even if you don't make the top ten and have your name blasted all across the map, there's still no escaping the performance review: at the end you get a personal report telling you exactly where you placed in the table. I came 83rd in the event I did earlier today although it didn't say out of how many.

There's also a fairly heavy emphasis on non-consensual PvP. Outside of the safe areas like towns and villages, the world is divided into Peace and Conflict zones. In the former you can't be attacked by other players but in the latter anyone of any level can attack you without warning or penalty. 

Which area is under which condition changes all the time, so you can't just avoid certain locations. You have to pay attention to what state they're in as you travel to and through them.

The main story quest also does that annoying thing where it switches from solo to group as it goes along.  I currently have two quests that started solo but reached a point where the questgiver warned me I'd better gather some friends before carrying on. For one I'll need to go into a private instance, for the other a public dungeon.

The final stage of another longish questline that had up to that point been soloable ended with a demand that I kill world boss twice my level. Not on my own, obviously, but even so...

All of this is the exact kind of thing I always say I don't enjoy. So why am I still playing, let alone having a pretty good time?

I was wondering that, too. It seems odd, doesn't it? Counter-intuitive, for sure. Paradoxical, even. 

I had a think about it and I'm alarmed to say I suspect it might be down to intelligent design. No, not that kind. The kind where someone thought about how players might feel when they run up against these kinds of barriers and made an effort to mitigate the worst of the effects for those whose preferences might lie elsewhere.

Take that Level 40 world boss, for example. He's on a fixed schedule as are all the open world events. You can see the times of all of them on a drop-down menu attached to the mini-map. You can click on each entry to port to the nearest waypoint. 

It also tells you whether the event is Peace or Conflict and as far as I can see there's a non-PvP version of all of them. Interestingly, the reverse doesn't appear to be true so PvE players are actually better-served.

Unfortunately for me, the timings for the Peaceful versions of the boss I needed weren't ideal. I'd either have had to stay up to midnight or else wait until tomorrow morning. As I was pondering my options the three o'clock Conflict version popped very close to where I was standing, sending a massive column of red light into the sky. I thought why not? and morphed into my glide form to go give it a try.

And it was fine. I got ganked within seconds of landing and ganked again almost as soon as I got back but the respawn was barely ten seconds away and there was no penalty of any kind for getting killed so it was barely an inconvenience. 

On my second death I realised the event hadn't officially started yet. We were still in the five-minute "Come and get it" phase and the main reason I'd been killed was that everyone was standing around with nothing better to do than take pot-shots at late-comers.

I held off coming back a third time until the whistle went and this time everyone was too focused on the boss to bother with me. I found a nice spot at range and plinked arrows into him for a couple of minutes while his massive health pool slowly whittled away. Then I got in someone's way and got killed again.

As I respawned I saw I was part of a never-ending stream of resurrected players all throwing themselves off the cliff and turning into birds to fly back for another round. Dying and coming back was clearly all part of the process so I forgot about trying to avoid it and just let it happen. 

I got killed twice by the boss's massive AE and a few more times by other players. At the rate his health was dropping, it looked like the whole thing might take ten minutes or so. The event can run for almost an hour before he despawns so that seemed reasonable but around the fifty per cent mark another world event finished and a bunch of people from that one came across to join in on our guy, which just about doubled the speed we were killing him.

I died to some player with a lot of XXXs in their name when the boss was around 10% health so I just lay there and waited. By the forest of tombstones all around it looked like planty of other people had the same idea. 

When the final blow was struck a window popped up telling me I'd successfully participated in the event and my quest auto-completed too. I released and checked my inventory, where I found the rewards for the event, which were generous, given I'd done next to nothing. 

All things considered it was a productive and enjoyable experience. The fact that I'd been killed multiple times by other players seemed wholly immaterial. I've been killed far more frequently by mobs countless times, doing similar events in Guild Wars 2. Once you stop thinking of other players as anything different from mobs, it really makes no difference whether the event is flagged for PvP or not.

I'd been sitting on another quest for an open-world event, the wolf-killing one, for a few sessions and today I finished that, too. It was peaceful (Not for the wolves, obviously.) but highly competitive and it could have been a pain if it hadn't once again been for the thoughtful design. The event is scored by tallying the tails of wolves you've killed and miraculously every wolf has exactly as many tails as the number of people who helped to kill it. 

It's amazing how unstressful a competitive event becomes when the competition only relates to the final score not the contribution. If I'd wanted to make the cut to have my name up there on the leaderboard then I'd have had to make a very considerable effort but to notch up the required tails to finish the quest was simplicity itself. 

Similarly, those solo story quests that morph into "Group required"? There's a trick the game has to get around the problems and resentment that would normally cause. Every chapter comes with a flow-chart (Literally.) that shows you which sub-quest leads to which and the central narrative throughline, at least as far as I've gotten, remains solo throughout. 

Completing that gets you the achievement and reward for the chapter and marks it done. All the other sub-quests are listed as "Appendix" quests, making them optional in terms of the main storyline. To date, all the group quests have been appendices.

Inclusivity is all over Throne and Liberty, even when looks like the opposite. Take making a guild, for
example. One person can do it in about five seconds.

I usually try to make a solo guild in any game that allows it, which is by no means all of them. T&L does. I was quite surprised by that. I was expecting a game with such a focus on guild play to put some kind of protective fence around it but there's none. It could scarcely be easier.

There's no requirement whatsoever for making a guild other than having to reach Level 7, the same level you need to be to join one. No money changes hands, you don't need to have any members other than yourself, you don't even need to speak to an NPC. All you do is open the Guild window in the UI and click on Create Guild. That's it.

You are supposed to design your guild emblem at this point but I somehow managed to click straight through that part so my guild presumably has some random design or the default or no emblem at all. I don't know which because I haven't even worked out where you can see guild emblems yet.

Guild names are limited to fifteen characters, which is really short. One letter shorter than the name I usually go with, in fact. Luckily I have an even shorter version to fall back on in cases like this.

I was assuming that making the guild would be the end of my involvement with the feature. I mostly only do it to stop people sending me random invites, which is what happens if you have the temerity to run around unguilded in most games. It's rare for solo guilds to be able to do much in MMORPGs for obvious reasons. That turns out not to be the case here, or not exactly. 

It seems my one-person guild can attempt everything a larger guild can try. There don't seem to be any restrictions. It's just very unlikely I'd have the patience to make much progress. I should, however, be able to get the guild to Level 2, which is when we (That's the Guild Leader "We" I'm using there. It's very much like the royal "We" and entirely appropriate, as I'm sure you'll agree.) get our own "base" or Guild Hall as every other game would call it.

Level 2 seems extremely generous for such a sought-after prestige perk. Even more generous is the amount of effort required or rather the lack of it. There are a few ways to level the guild up but the basic option is Guild Contracts. These give Guild Xp and at Level 1 a guild only has access to one kind of contract - Territory.

Territory Contracts just ask you to kill regular overland mobs in a specific region, something that's very easily combined with questing or world events. I tested it this afternoon. Killing boars, spiders and goblins seemed to give something like one point of Guild XP for every two kills, although it wasn't quite as precise as that. There may be a random element or some sort of variation related to the level or difficulty of the mob.

Whatever the specific mechanics, it takes just 700 points to level the guild up, a target that feels very comfortably within the reach of a single player, playing normally. I've already notched up ten per cent of the requirement since I created the guild and that's in just a couple of hours of play.

Put all of this together and it forms a picture of a game where the intent is to allow players of all persuasions to play in the way they feel suits them best without having to feel they're missing out. Obviously everything is going to be far easier if you have (Or make.) friends - it always is in MMORPGs - but there seem to be refreshingly few hard locks on content to keep loners from making at least some progress on most fronts.

I'm sure this won't last forever. MMORPG endgames almost always cleave towards more formal, organized, structured group content. It also only affects the kind of activities a single player could reasonably expect to succeed at, like finishing the storyline. 

Other parts of the game are likely to remain forever locked to organized groups. I believe a big part of the game revolves around taking and holding territory.  No-one would expect a solo guild to do well at that. Or to do it at all, probably. I'm not sure if there are raids but if there are I don't imagine anyone's going to be soloing those, either.

It's also an unfortunate truth that almost all MMORPGs, regardless of whether they paint themselves as solo-friendly or not, very quickly turn into grindfests of one kind or another. That's certainly going to stop most solo or very small guilds from leveling up too far. The xp required ratchets quickly to make leveling a guild without the numbers expected untenable for most.

The key in that last sentence, though, is "for most". With no hard lock, if you're determined (Or delusional.) enough to want to try, there's nothing actually preventing you from trying. Good luck with that.

And indeed all of this may yet prove to be the provenance of the lower levels alone. It's entirely possible that as my character level goes up I'll find more and more of the game closed to me through requirements I can't or won't meet while playing alone. If so, it will just put Throne and Liberty into the same box as most of the other MMORPGs I've played. I nearly always hit a wall in the end.

The point is, I thought the wall would be present from the start and it's not, something I find very refreshing and not a little endearing. I still think I won't be staying with the game for long but I'm already thinking that, when I do move on, it will be with fond thoughts and good memories of the short time I spent there. 

I certainly didn't expect that a week ago.