Throne And Liberty - A Waypoint-And-Click Adventure

Here's the thing about Throne and Liberty. One of the things. The graphics are gorgeous but the world itself really isn't. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Solisium was a beautiful place, once. Not any more. At least that's what the disembodied voice that sounds like a slightly bored student reading to the class from a set text strongly implies. 

The voice starts up each time you open a new waypoint. The camera spins up and around, a swooping spiral to give you an aerial view of the stretch of the map you just revealed. Meanwhile, the unnamed tour guide recites two sentences - it's always exactly two - telling you what you're gawping at and why it looks so bad.

Usually it's because there's been some kind of war. One group of wizards scrapping with another, most likely. Or an attempt at colonization that met heavy resistance from the indigenous occupants. Werewolves, orcs, goblins. Anyone dumb enough to get in the way of progress. Sometimes there's no proximate cause. The land just seems to have been exploited for its natural resources then abandoned.

Actually one of the more attractive views, believe it or not.

I find it hard to think of another MMORPG, survival game or open world RPG I've played that looks so unremittingly bleak. By the time I'd completed my project of opening every accessible waypoint (There was just one I couldn't get to and that only because it's on an island to which access is only given at a point in the storyline I haven't yet reached.) I'd seen nothing but deforestation and desertification on the imperial scale. 

It might have been depressing if I hadn't been feeling so pleased with myself for finding a way to the last waypoint I needed. it was situated high on a butte, right in the middle of a camp filled with very aggressive orcs, something I discovered the hard way. 

I tried the direct approach first. It did not go well. I gave it some thought and decided something more subtle was required. The camp was bordered on the seaward side by some high cliffs. There was a village at the foot of the mountain range. I'd already opened a waypoint there so I ported in and started to clamber up the rocks.

I know you can't see any orcs but I assure you - they are there!

Throne and Liberty lies at some point mid-way between games like Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves, where you're encouraged to use your parkour skills to climb anything you can see and much more movement-restrictive games like Guild Wars or the first version of Final Fantasy XIV, where you couldn't reliably step over a low kerb. 

I wouldn't go so far as to say that in Solisium, if you can see it, you can get to it. There are a fair number of invisble barriers as well as the very obvious visible ones I mentioned in a previous post. By and large, though, I've found that if something looks like you should be able to climb it, you probably can. With some effort. And a lot of bunny-hopping.

It took me a while to work my way right to the top of the crag overlooking the orc encampment but I managed it eventually. And it was fun. Climbing in open world games generally is.

What was more surprising was how nice it all was up there. A liminal space, where nothing happened and no player was expected to be. In contrast to the bleak, blasted wasteland below it was all lush, green alpine valleys, flush with trees, grass as fresh and flat as a well-tended lawn. All it needed was a few birds singing, the sound of distant goat bells and and a log cabin or two to make it the perfect holiday destination.

In retrospect, I realize I should have taken some pictures but at the time I was laser-focused on not falling off or getting stuck. It's quite easy to get stuck in Throne and Liberty, which is presumably why there's a button in the UI to move you to a safe spot when it happens. I've had to use it already and I imagine I'll be using it again soon enough.

Glide down, grab the WP, port out. Easy Peasy.

Once I'd morphed into a hawk and glided down to the final waypoint I was a bit stuck on what to do next. That's the problem with goals. Once you achieve them you have to come up with more.

Since I didn't have any bright ideas, I did what anyone would do in a dull moment and went back to following the plot. Or what passes for one in this game.

Chris Neal at MassivelyOP described the storylines in T&L as "barely connected little adventures", which seems entirely fair, based on what I've seen so far. It's an unusual approach. I believe there is some kind of over-arching narrative concerning some devious organization called the Arkeum and its nefarious plans but as yet those plans, whatever they may be, have remained firmly in the background.

In the foreground of the chapter I completed last night was some kind of Goblin insurrection. I had a quest that asked me to kill a Goblin Shaman so I got started on that and it turned into a whole series of quite interesting escapades involving the little green nuisances. 

There was one part where the whole lot of them attacked a tower and I had to run ahead up the steps setting magic traps to blow the little buggers to bits. That was fun but not so much as when I met a bespectacled researcher who looked not unlike Velma Dinkley from Scooby Doo and who had some similarly cartoonish ideas on how to infiltrate the goblin councils.

Okay, she doesn't really look like Velma. It's just those glasses.

She morphed me into a goblin because that's a thing people can do and I scuttled over to listen to them whooping themselves up for a riot with a lot of speechmaking and dancing. I had to dance, too. I got four new buttons on my hot-bar and everything.

I never figured out how that worked. It was the usual match-the-moves deal but I couldn't figure out the tells. It didn't matter in the end because there was no fail state. I just kept pressing all the buttons and eventually I somehow convinced the gobbos I was one of them. Then they all ran off, leaving their secret plans on the floor for me to grab because now we really were in an episode of Mystery Incorporated.

So, I enjoyed that. I also liked the side-quest, where a blind girl asked me to look at her painting and tell her what I saw. She was concerned because it had been freaking everyone else out. I'm not surprised. It turned out to be a portal to some infernal realm so they were right to be concerned.

The realm was also an instance of some sort but I didn't investigate further. I don't think I'm up to anything much more than basic overland questing right now, for the simple reason that I've intentionally made no effort whatsoever to upgrade any of my skills or gear since I started. I've been running a little experiment to see how far I can go without engaging with any of the progression systems other than simple leveling but I'm afraid it's going to have to stop.

She's not spooky at all, is she?

Level 20 seems to be the cut-off point. Experience comes very quickly in Throne and Liberty. When I returned to questing last night I was Level 12 and when I logged out not much more than ninety minutes later I'd just dinged twenty. 

Allocation of xp seemed unpredictable. For the most part it dripped in steadily and predictably but there were two occesions when I gained a full level for not doing anything much at all, presumably when I completed some quest stage or other. 

At one point I finished a long sequence to find myself a few percent shy of a level and I was delighted to find it was acceptable to go kill a couple of random goblins to make up the difference. How deliciously traditional - and satisfying - that felt. More games should allow players who enjoy it to grind xp grind from killing mobs instead of questing.

I did a bit of both and once again, I found myself having fun. There's nothing very original or special about Throne and Liberty but it does seem to have that old-fashioned MMORPG feel to it, the sense that you can just go out there and do stuff that doesn't particularly matter and it will keep you entertained for a while. 

You can quest, sure, but you don't have to if you're not really feeling it. There are other options. That's a wheel that maybe needed some re-inventing.

One original feature of the game is the perpetual NPC commentary. I kinda like it.

It also helps that no-one's claiming the fate of the world rests on your shoulders or telling you you're the Chosen One. At most you might be one of a whole load of chosen ones but not a particularly special example of the breed. A lot of people have star stuff in them. You're just one of many. You should probably do something with your talent but it doesn't have to be right now, just when you get around to it. That feels liberating, appropriately.

In the end I only stopped because the main questline had just taken me into a solo instance and I was getting my backside handed to me repeatedly by the mobs in the first room. It was apparent that starting gear and skills weren't going to cut it thee so I called it a night.

I still don't think I'll be staying with Throne and Liberty for long. I imagine that soon enough, or more likely all too soon, it'll turn into the regular upgrade grind they all do. That's mostly what I was hoping to avoid by not upgrading anything at all.

Still, the upgrade process in most of these games starts out as enjoyable and achievable. It's only later, when the improvements cease to be significant and the mechanics become both time consuming and costly, that the whole enterprise turns into a chore. I'm hoping it'll be a good while before that happens and until it does I'm quite looking forward to the ride.

Scrub grass, weeds, bare rock, dead trees... this place has it all!

I can definitely say that, when I sit down at my desk and contemplate what game I'd like to play, Throne and Liberty is the one that comes first to mind just now. It's not the best. It's not even my favorite. It's just new and it has that indefinable whatever that calls to me when I see the Play button there on Steam.

I am going to have to do something about gearing up but I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I'm actually looking forward to it. It'll mean reading a lot of tool-tips but I can do that. And then I'm going back in that cave to teach those wizards a lesson. 

Plus, hopefully, make some money. Waypoints stop being free to use at Level 30 and the rate xp comes in in this game, I could easily knock off another ten levels by the end of the day.

After that, who can say. I don't even know what the level cap is. Maybe I'll get there, maybe I won't. I would like to get far enough into the storyline to gain access to that forbidden island, at least. 

It'd be a shame not to open that last waypoint, now I've gotten this far.