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.

Throne And Liberty Doesn't Have Housing. And Yet It Kinda Does...

It's a rare MMORPG that tries to get by without player housing these days. What was once seen as a niche feature most games could easily do without has become almost de rigeur for any game expecting to be taken seriously.

Guild Wars 2, one of the last major hold-outs, finally cracked and added housing this summer. World of Warcraft may be able to get away with going without after the dabacle that was Garrisons, but even the not-so-big gorilla looks increasingly out of touch, insisting players may think they want somewhere to hang their hats after a long day's adventuring but really they don't.

With the feature now so well-established as a standard fit and especially with extensive and elaborate player housing in the form of base building forming part of the minimum viable product spec for Survival games, the upstart hybrid currently chowing down on the MMORPG genre's lunch, any new entrant to the increasingly blurred marketplace is taking a big risk ignoring house and home. 

Throne and Liberty is different. It was originally conceived as the third in the hugely successful Lineage series and is still referred to in some quarters as Lineage 3, even though the project was long ago "re-purposed" by NCSoft to be something else entirely. The Lineage games do not have player housing so perhaps it's no surprise that T&L doesn't, either.

Except, as I discovered last night, it kinda-sorta does...

There was a flurry of excitement earlier this year when the developers announced in a livestream that various "Life Skills" would be coming to the game. These turned out to be fishing and cooking, both of which are in the current version that's just launched in the West. 

I got my first bamboo fishing rod last night, when I reached a certain point in the storyline and I think I may also have been told something by some NPC about cooking but as yet I have neither cooked nor fished.

A few commentators, having watched that stream, also got very excited about what they thought was going to be the addition of player housing to the game. They were wrong, sadly. 

What was added to the Korean version back in the summer and which was included in the game at launch in the West, was Amitoi housing. Or, to be more specific, an Amitoi house.

I have to confess at this point that I'm somewhat vague on what an Amitoi actually is. From observation in game I can see they're fanciful creatures that both look and behave a little like Palworld's Pals or Once Human's Deviants. 

Like those, they're collectible and have different skills, powers or abilities. I'm less clear on how you acquire them. So far I've seen three and I own two.

The first, the appropriately named Helpie, appears in the introduction and stays for the Tutorial, before leaving in a dramatic and rather emotional clifftop scene. I was sorry to see Helpie go but almost immediately afterwards I realised I'd acquired a replacement in the shape of Forest Sapling Grover, who looks like a knitted treant. 

Grover heals me so long as I have piles of leaves that have to be purchesed from an NPC. At least, that's the only way I know how to get them so far. I probably need to do some research on that because the healing is significant.

I also have a corpulent penguin called Vagabond Percy. He was given to me by another, much bigger penguin called Pro Adventurer Percy, who stands about in the town of Kastleton as though three foot tall penguins wearing woolen armor were a completely normal sight there, which by all the available evidence they seem to be.

In common with most - conceivably all - Korean, Japanese and Chinese games I've played, the boundaries that would mark the dividing line in a Western game between content intended for adults and that meant for children are thin to non-existent. Why shouldn't a penguin be a professional adventure? 

Whether it's rational or reasonable it's a fact and I can prove it because last night I sent Vagabond Percy out on a mission. What was added in that summer update wasn't just housing for penguins and other plushes, it was a whole mission system whereby Amitoi could go adventuring on their own.

I've had the quest to set it up for a while but I'd been ignoring it because to begin I needed to go to "The Amitoi House" and I didn't know where it was. I tried looking on the map but I couldn't see it. There was no quest marker for it and no sign of it as an icon or a named location.

In the end I went to Google, where I learned I was far from alone in not being able to find the blasted place. It transpires that the Amitoi House is accessible only from the UI and in the most nit-pickingly hard-to-spot part of it at that.

If anyone's looking for the door to the Amitoi House here's where to find it: 

That little circle shows a picture of your current Amitoi and when you mouse over it an even tinier icon of a house appears in the top right corner. Okay, circles don't have corners but you get what I'm saying. I'd have used a screenshot that showed the icon itself but obviously it never shows up on a regular shot and the game is down for maintenance now, as it seems to be just about every morrning.

It would be helpful if something in the game told you about this extremely obscure means of access but as far as I can recall nothing ever does. I hadn't even noticed the circle let alone seen it was wearing a house for a hat.

Once I knew where to look it was all very straightforward. A click teleports you into what has to be one of the cosiest private rooms I've ever seen in any game. It's delightful. It makes that inn room you get in Final Fantasy XIV look like a dockland flophouse by comparison.

I spent a while wandering around looking at the fixtures and fittings and soaking up the considerable ambience. There's not a lot you can do there although the potential is immediately apparent. There's a collectible book to pick up and there's also a very impressive record of your exploits so far in the form of a journal you can open to watch replays of all the cutscenes in the chapters you've finished.

It also has a door that doesn't work. Only it's not just that it doesn't work - it tells you it doesn't work. That suggests that one day it might work, although where it might go if it did remains a mystery.

The main attraction, though, is the Amitoi Expedition Map. Click on that and a whole interface appears from which you can pick a selection of missions on which to send your various Amitoi. For rewards, naturally.

It was an easy choice for me. So far I have one mission and one amitoi to do it. You can't send the Amitoi you're partnered with so it was all down to Percy the Penguin. 

I did get to decide how long he was going to be off adventuring and since I was going to bed right after I gave him the full eight hours, the longest adventure on offer. Longer runs mean better rewards.

With that done, I sat by the fire and logged out. It felt much better than logging out in a city street or somewhere in the countryside as I'd been doing up to then. 

I have mentioned a few times before that I always try to leave my characters somewhere sheltered and safe when I log out. So far in Throne and Liberty that's meant sharing an awning or a hut with an NPC. I'm a lot happier now, knowing I can leave Califa comfortably tucked up in a cozy, book-lined room, settled on a soft cushion in front of a roaring fire. It would be a lot better still if I could move the furniture around and add a few things of my own but it's a big improvement over sleeping rough, that's for sure.

So, it's definitely not player housing but it's not nothing either. And there's more. As I was playing last night I happened to notice a guild vendor standing around in a village so I went to see what sort of things you can buy as a guild member. I'm probably going to post something specifically about guilds in the game so I won't pre-empt that but I'll just mention that, through something the vendor said, I now realize guilds get a "base" of some kind.

That piqued my curiosity so I opened the Guild window in the UI and there I found, to my considerable surprise, that guilds get access to a base at Guild Level 2. Even I ought to be able to get that far.

Once again, the base isn't proper housing. You can't even decorate it in the half-assed fashion GW2 uses for Guild Halls. Still, it is a personal instance with some functionality. I'll save any further commentary for when and if I get one of my own but for now I'll just say that I have a new goal and if I meet it, Califa will have a choice of places to spend her free time, when I'm not calling on her services.

Pretty sure she's going to live in the Amitoi House anyway, though. I mean, I would, if I could. Wouldn't you?

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.

Seeing Solisium - One DC At A Time

I've been playing Throne and Liberty more than I expected and less than I'd like. 

After Helpie went home (That's them departing in a burst of light up above.) I gave up on following the quests and started racing around the map in wolf form, trying to open all the waypoints. It turned out to be much more fun than questing. Unfortunately, the whole thing is horribly unstable still in spite of all the patches and hot fixes so I keep getting disconnected and dumped to desktop. I won't really know how much fun the game can be until that stops.

Another annoying factor are the barriers. I've run into several. They show up as shimmering walls of force that block the way. 

I'm not sure whether they mark areas that aren't in the game yet or whether you have to be a certain level or have reached a specific stage in the storyline. There's no useful information in game to tell you, although when I arrived at the bridge in the screenshot above, I overheard a conversation between a guard and a merchant trying to cross that suggested political unrest or possibly military action had led to the gates being closed.

Travel in general is pleasing. There's no stamina or other drain to stop you running at wolf speed all the time. Better yet, as an otter you can swim forever, a very welcome change from all those games where you run out of breath and start to drown before you've swum the length of a kiddie's paddling pool.

Flying is the exception. It takes stamina to rise, making flight mostly a long, downhill glide. At least you don't fall out of the air when you run out of puff. I've seen worse.

Once you get away from the places you're supposed to be, where everything's happening and everyone is milling about getting under each others' feet, the world feels surprisingly empty. Not empty of interest - there's a lot to see just about everwhere- just empty of life.

I spent maybe an hour between disconnects, exploring the extensive shoreline and the deep ravines and river valleys. I saw shipwrecks and towers along the sand, platforms and rope bridges between the high rock stacks. I saw doors in the cliffs and statues among the scrub. What I didn't see were animals or monsters or people.

And then suddeny I didn't see anything at all because the fog rolled in. I vaguely knew there were weather effects in the game - winds that could blow you off your feet - but I'd heard nothing about the thick fog that makes it all but impossible to see where you're going.

I remain to be convinced of the gameplay value of weather effects that impede vision or movement. Leaving aside the obvious inconvenience to the player, it seems unlikely a culture whose least members are able to change shape at will would put up with not being able to see clearly in fog or darkness. Maybe there's a bat-form waiting to be discovered.

There's no sign of it in the wilds but in the more populated regions, Solisium has a serious litter problem. Everywhere you go there are pieces of paper lying about. I've played plenty of games that use this kind of incidental, incremental storytelling but I struggle to think of one with the sheer number of collectable texts Throne and Liberty employs.

I've been trying to read them all but the quality is variable. Some are quite interesting. Some are clearly designed only to be stored, not studied. Whenever I come across systems like this in a game I find myself wondering about the designer or developer who had to sit in an office coming up with all this stuff. Sometimes you can feel the glee as the unknown writer relishes the chance to let their imagination rip; sometimes you feel the dead weight of another endless afternoon spent on a thankless, meaningless chore.

My current plan consists of trying pick up as many pieces of paper as possible while unlocking every waypoint in all the areas I can reach. It's something I often used to do in games just for the fun of it. It's been too long since I ignored the demands of nagging NPCs in favor of just getting out there and seeing the world.

For that alone, Throne and Liberty has been worth it so far. If Amazon or NCSoft or whoever's responsible can fix the damn servers so I can stay online for more than half an hour at a time, I'll be happy to play a little longer. I still don't think it's going to be a lot longer but who knows? 

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. 

I seem to be saying that a lot these days.

Friday's (Fail To) Grab Bag

  No nonsense. Just get on with it. Mostly games this time. A little music at the end.

Hope You Like Our New Lack Of Direction

I'm about ready to call the Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt revamp a bust. I have more than a hundred and sixty hours in the game since it went into Early Access, thirty-five hours since the new version arrived, benched my old character and mandated a re-start. 

It's the same game.

I suspected as much almost from the start but last night I beat the fourth boss to win access to the fifth "storied" realm and found myself back on the exact same path I was traveling months ago. There's Nellie Bly, standing on top of a spur of rock next to a decommissioned portal, explaining you'll never get to Nightingale so you might as well help her fix the machine so you can go to somewhere else, a place she's found called The Watch.

I was honestly hoping never to see The Watch again. It's where the old game ran into the buffers of a half-assed, unfinished "end game", in which a solo rpg morphed clumsily into a lobby MMO with no point or purpose. I was dearly hoping that would be the part of the game they'd fixed because it really, really needed it, whereas most of the parts they have changed didn't need it anything like as much but it looks like all the effort has gone into the crafting tidy-up. That and those so-called "stories", absolutely none of which I noticed as I followed a series of repetitive tasks and battled a series of tedious bosses.

All of which makes it sound like I don't like the game, which isn't the case. My feeling is quite the opposite. I like Nightingale a lot, which is why I've played it for all those hours. I liked the original and I like the new version well enough, too. 

It was nice to come back for a second run and enjoy a slight variation over the first few sessions but much though I enjoyed the hunt for parts to fix Nellie's portal and all the side-quests that spring up along the way when I did them earlier this year, I don't particularly want to do them all again just now. I think I may have to give Nightingale a rest for a while. 

I'd still recommend the game to anyone who likes base-building rpgs with light survival trappings and who hasn't already tried it. It looks good, plays quite smoothly and the crafting and building are more than decent. It's very much an Early Access title in the sense that it isn't finished yet but what's there is sound and solid. 

If you're waiting until it is finished before jumping in, though, I wouldn't advise it. It's far from clear the whether the developers have any clear vision of what they want the finished game to look like and it seems less likely all the time that they'd have the resources to get there even if they did. Might as well play it now if you're going to play it at all. It might not be there later.

 

You've Lost Me Now

Off the back of that, I'd like to talk about something I've mentioned before: Steam Achievements. They can be quite instructive on the health of a game, especially taken in combination with Steam charts. 

Before Realms Rebuilt, Nightingale had just a few hundred players by Steam's count. That jumped to six thousand on the update but after a couple of weeks peak concurrency is down by a third and slowly falling. Still, it's a clear and definite improvement. 

The achievements tell a different tale. I have four post-revamp achievements. Each of them is for beating a boss and gaining access to the next Realm. The percentage of players who've managed any of them is tiny but that's because it's calculated against all the players who have the game in their Steam Library, not against those playing right now. 

Most people who ever played Nightingale no longer play, so the low numbers are to be expected. What's telling is the relative numbers that have completed each of those four Achievements. Since they were only added with the update and since they each represent completion of a mandatory step to progress through the storyline, the achievements record the degree to which that much-hyped new narrative approach has persuaded people.

The result is not encouraging. At time of writing, just over 9% of players completed all the tutorial
quests in the Abeyance realm but only half of those managed to get to the end of the Realm that followed, Sylvan's Cradle. By the end of the third realm, Welkin's Reach, the numbers had almost halved again and less than two percent have made it past the fourth realm, Magwytch Marshes. 

That is a serious problem for the new direction. If the story was compelling, it wouldn't be shedding almost half of its audience at the end of every chapter. Perhaps if there actually was a story, that would help. Maybe they should think about adding one. 

 

Meet New People. Then Kill Them.

For all its narrative shortcomings, Nightingale is doing a very much better job of holding my attention than Throne and Liberty. When I was posting about the new game yesterday, I was quite keen to get back to it and play some more. When I did, though, I found myself losing interest much sooner than I expected.

I did some more quests. They were okay, no more than that. Still, I was having a reasonably amusing time, running about doing things for people I didn't know or care about, which they could have been doing for themselves. 

The place was very busy and the server was struggling a little. I remember thinking a couple of times that I'd probably be having more fun if I waited until the crowds had moved on. Then I got disconnected and dumped to desktop, which I have to admit did break the flow and temper my enthusiasm a little.

Still, I came back to try again. A quest took me to the edge of the area I'd opened and on a whim I carried on to see what might be over the next hill. A lot fewer people, as it turned out, which felt better, so I kept going. 

I did some enjoyable exploring. The game sure is pretty to look at. I started searching for teleport stones to add to my map, it always being handy to have them opened before you need them for questing. That took me through a number of dangerous areas but nothing seemed to run as fast as my wolf travel form and aggro drops fast so I just kept running and everything was fine.

Until I ran past a player and they killed me, that is.

They were doing one of the many open-world events designed for guilds. These are everywhere and they seem to be highly competitive. A guild ranking of some sort gets broadcast when they end. 

The events also turn the area where they take place into a non-consensual PvP zone. I was well aware of that - it's clearly flagged - but I figured anyone doing the events would be too busy with their own stuff to bother with someone just passing through. 

Yeah, nope.

Being ganked as I ran past a guy looting a wagon marked my first and so far only death in Throne and Liberty. I stopped being bothered by being ganked sometime around 2002, so I just respawned and got on with it but once again it put a dent in my momentum. I decided to avoid the conflict zones and go around the coast but there wasn't to much to see down on the beach and when Beryl came bounding in looking for attention I was very happy to stop and give her some.

At the moment I don't feel especially motivated to log back in. It all seems a bit pointless when there are so many other games I'd rather play. Still, it is the new hotness, until the next new hotness comes along, so I imagine I'll give it another go. I don't think it'll be staying in the rotation for long, though. 

 

Alien Invasions 

What might take its place is X-Com. Or X-Com 2. I've been moaning on about wanting a good, turn-based, tactical RPG with a focus on team combat since I finished Solasta and decided I was too mean to stump up for Baldur's Gate 3. 

I've read so much about how good the X-Com series is that when I saw these two were on offer on Steam for 90% and 95% off it seemed silly not to buy them, so I did. I had a momentary feeling of dread that I might already have them in my Amazon Prime collection but no, I don't. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they turned up there in a month or two but that's a risk you have to take when you buy anything.

My question now is whether I should play them chronologically or whether the second is a significant improvement on the first, in which case maybe I should start there. I think there's some narrative continuity but I have no idea if the story is actually important. I mostly just want to do the fights. 

And now for the audio-visual section of our presentation... 

In A Dream, All In A Dream

That's Dreamworld. I read about it on MMOBomb and was surprised I hadn't heard about it before. It describes itself as "a groundbreaking Sandbox MMO, where all players create together in a single infinite world " but the part that interests me is the AI integration, which "allows players to generate their own 3D models in-game using a text prompt".

The game is running a "public test" next week and all you need to do is ask for access through Steam, which I have done. I'm very curious to see how those AI tools work. I did try another game in development that purported to use something similar and it did not impress but this one looks a lot more sophisticated. It'll be interesting to see how it works - or doesn't. 

Cue Outro

Can't have a grab bag with no music. And what sort of music do we like around here? Well, let's see. Among other things, we like smart, intelligent indie bands, we like cover versions, we like Lana del Rey. Put them all together and what have you got?

Say Yes To Heaven - Fontaines D.C.
(Original Lana del Rey)

Not the most obvious choice, is it? I see they're not dressing like EMF any more, either. Maybe Liam got to them. He does that. It's his gift.

Past, Present and Future

Thinking of Lana, which I pretty much always am, I watched a couple of old interviews recently, from back when she was Lizzie Grant. They're like music all in themselves. I thought I'd share just one really short clip...

"I just wanna do something I can be the best at."

Mission accomplished, then.

Throne And Liberty - First Impressions - Of A Kind...

Before we begin, just in case you came here from Google Search looking for some kind of useful information about the game, I do apologize. That's not really what we do here...

After an extremely lengthy and repetitive installation process that seemed to go on forever, I finally got in and played some Throne and Liberty last night. Just over three hours of it, according to Steam, although it didn't feel that long, which might mean I enjoyed myself.

On the other hand it, it might just be that I was zipping through the parts I'd already done back in open beta at such a pace it felt like a lot less time had passed than the clock would have showed. Shown... Shewn...?

Hang on... what's the past participle of "To show"? Let me ask Gemini...

Well, there you go. I get these moments of existential doubt sometimes. Doesn't everyone? How fortunate we are that our AI overlords allies are here to help. 

Although I'm not quite sure I like the way it's corrected my capitalization. That seems a bit cocky. Reminds me of Dirk Bogarde in "The Servant". Not a good sign.

Popular game is popular.

Well, this isn't going the way I thought it would. Shall we see if we can get it back on track? Or shall we just sit here talking to ourselves in the second person plural like some kind of experimental novel?

Does anyone really enjoy experimental novels? The kind that come in a box with all the pages loose so you can read them in any order? Or ones where the author has managed a hundred thousand words without once using the letter "e"?  

I know a couple of people who claim to read that sort of thing for pleasure but I can't stick them, myself. The novels, that is, not the people who like them. Although...

I'm all for being pretentious but there are limits. I was reading Stuart Lee in the bathroom a few minutes ago and he described Tarka the Otter as an experimental novel for adults that Puffin repackaged as a children's book in the 1970s, which goes a long way to explaining why I gave up on the damn thing when I tried to read it in my teens.

Speaking of otters, I think you can be one in Throne and Liberty. There are "travel forms" you can morph into, "morph" being the verb employed in the game for the process which, in keeping with all such events in every game, is never explained. It's just magic, I suppose.

I have three travel forms so far: wolf for running, hawk for flying and otter. (Or at least something that looks like an otter although, for reasons that also go unexplained, it appears to be wearing a hat.) I'm guessing the otter is for swimming but since I haven't been in the water yet I can't say for sure.

If you'd just switch the lights on, we could appreciate the stitching.

I like travel forms as a rule. I think my first experience with them must have been in EverQuest, where druids get a spell that lets them change into wolves. Being a wolf in Norrath confers a number of advantages besides letting you run faster. 

I mean, that's a given, given the name of the iconic spell: Spirit of Wolf aka SoW or more often "Can I get a SoW?", the cry so frequently heard in any public space where crowds gather in preparation for adventure, but being a wolf in EQ also makes some people like you more. And others less but swings/roundabouts.

When I get back to Throne and Liberty (I'd have used the name of the world where it takes place there, if I'd known what it was. I wonder if Gemini knows?

Okay, come on! You have to admit it. That's useful. I know I could have googled it to get the same result but isn't it neater to ask a straight question and get a straight answer? Of course it would be better if the answer was right...¹)

I left a sentence hanging up there, didn't I? I haven't forgotten. I'll start that part over. 

When I get back to Arcion (See? That's better, isn't it?) I'll have to see if I can't find some water to jump in so I can try the otter-form out. I wonder how many travel forms there are in the game? Not nearly as many as there are in AdventureQuest 3D, I bet. There are dozens of them there.

I think I look pretty badass. But then, I would...

So, anyway, other than running around as a wolf, which is always fun, what else did I find to do in Arcion? (Now I know what the place is called you can bet I'm going to make the most of it.)

Mostly questing so far, as you'd expect. I haven't really bothered to read up much about T&L but I have a general idea from things I've heard that it's a very group-oriented game. Unsurprisingly, that restriction has yet to get in my way. It's early days. I'm still getting tutorial tips.

Before I could begin, of course, I had to make a character. That was fun. I do like character creation. It's a game in itself these days, isn't it?

Hold that thought. I have to stop now and drive to another city to drop off Mrs. Bhagpuss's annual accounts at the accountants, which makes it sound way more grand than it really is. Then we're going to give Beryl a walk and maybe have lunch - it's a beautiful day - so I'm going to have to pick this up when I get back. 

Maybe I'll be in a less self-indulgent mood then. I'll probably read this back and delete most of it so you'll only be reading this if you're in a different timeline, one where that didn't happen.

And I'm back. Had a lovely walk, saw some impressive goats, ate a very large ice-cream. Good times.

We're all still here so I guess I didn't split the timeline. Always a consideration. Also I read the above back and it seemed pretty spry so I'm gonna carry on. Where was I? Oh yes...

So I made a character and almost fell into the same trap as last time. Nearly ended up with someone who looks like the first cousin of the first NPC you meet, which would be a bit like wearing the same frock to a party. Embarrassing!

I'd love to say I remembered and caught myself in time but in fact it was only when I got into the game and the person in question came running up that it all came back to me. Fortunately, I'd already gone for a goth-gamine-tomboy look just very slightly askew from my norm so it all worked out fine.

After that I sped through the tutorials as fast as possible. It's amazing how it comes back to you. If you'd asked me ahead of time to recap my adventures in open beta I would have stared at you blankly but every step and most of the dialog drifted up from somewhere, just a beat ahead, as I clicked through for the second time.

It took me more than an hour and a half to get back to where I left off last time, which was the bit where you have to make bait to lure wolves for the annual wolf-killing competition and then get the wolf-bits to make the trophy you get for killing the most wolves (Except, as it turns out, you don't, because they stopped giving them out years ago.).

I felt a bit odd, running through packs of wolves as a wolf, killing them and stealing their teeth, but that's the way of things in magic-land.

Last time I did it, I stopped after I'd made the bait and gotten a drunken dwarf with a really unconvincing accent (Although not, for once, a Scottish one - or at least I hope that's not what it's meant to be.) to make me a couple of fake trophies. It seemed fair enough for the trophies to be fakes since I hadn't even entered the competition, let alone won it.

A dwarf with Imposter Syndrome. That's new.

It was around there, somewhere, that I felt things were getting a little meta but I hadn't seen anything yet. At the risk of spoilers, although it's one of the first quests in the game so it's probably exempt in under the ten-minute rule (Which I just made up so don't bother googling it. Or asking an AI.) the quest carries on for a fair old while, bringing in hallucinations, visions, time-travel and who knows what-all else until it turns out you're the mysterious hero who saved all those children a decade ago. 

Or something. Don't look at me. I didn't write it. I could barely follow it.

It's all quite confusing and honestly not really as bad as I'm making it sound. It was fine. By the standards of MMORPG questing, that is. Which, let's not kid ourselves, are not all that high.

I'm extremely wary of raising expectations that are bound to be disappointed but the quality of both writing and voice acting in Wuthering Waves have spoiled me for these kinds of quests. I think I would have been moderately impressed with this one a couple of years ago and I still think it's more than decent for the genre but standards have risen.

Or my tastes have changed. Or both. 

I don't think there's much doubt about the voice acting, though. It is not great. At least, not in these early stages. Maybe it improves later. That happens, sometimes.

It's not actually bad. Just not very engaging. If I had to guess I'd say it was a lack of direction more than any fault of the actors themselves.

Down in one! Down in one!

There are exceptions. I liked Chris, Dave's pal. He was good. The voice actor seemed to be having some fun and putting the effort in, which is more than I could say for some of them. 

I was predisposed towards him just because he was called Chris, though, to be fair. I liked there being two nobles called Dave and Chris. (Dave wasn't as convincing.) It made a nice change from all the Lord Evertrues, Ragnar Bloodswords and Lentensip Fentonworps we usually run into in these things. 

That quest chain itself was quite long. I think it probably took me the best part of an hour. By the time I
finished it (Plus all the other tutorial tasks.) I was Level 12. 

It mostly involved a lot of running around, plenty of chatter and a good deal of fighting. All the fighting was easy even though I had no idea what any of my abilities did. I could have stopped and read the tool tips but I wanted to get on. Anyway, button-mashing seemed to be more than up to the task.

Apart from the two tutorials showing me how to craft and upgrade weapons and armor, I made absolutely no effort to improve myself from the moment I stepped into the world. I kept getting messages telling me I had new abilities or I could upgrade the old ones but I didn't bother. 

I made a nice hat and a sword and then annoyingly I got another hat as a quest reward. Other than that, when I dinged 12 I was still wearing the same clothes I started with.

I'm guessing at some point I'll have to buckle down and make sense of what looks like a very fussy and over-complicated gear-and-skill system but so long as I can get away with not bothering, that's what I plan to do. I find it unlikely that I'll stick with Throne and Liberty for long, especially if those rumors about needing to guild and group up are true, but I'm not done yet. I had fun last night, though, and I'm quite keen to carry on and have some more today.

If nothing else, the world is extremely pretty to look at and I quite like the character I'm playing, which is always key. Whether that will be enough to hold my attention for more than a few sessions I somewhat doubt. As I keep complaining, if complaining is the right word, which it's not, there's a lot going on in gaming just now. T&L is going to have to dig some pretty sharp claws in to hang on to my custom and the no money at all it's worth. 

I doubt it can but I'm going to expose myself a little longer to give it the chance. It seems like the polite thing to do. They are giving the game away for free, after all. It would be rude not to play it for a while.

^{1. [The actual name of the world in Throne and Liberty is Solisium.]↩}1.