NCsoft has finally emerged from its promotional slumber on the Throne & Liberty front to announce that the next Korean beta test will begin on May 24th and run through May 30th, following a signup event May 2nd through May 14.
“We thought that the game needed to be seen in a new light, which is why we decided to do a beta test,” the studio says as the video swoops through vistas and battles and devs call the playerbase the “final piece” of the fun puzzle. “The Beta Test in May will only be available to players residing in South Korea.”
Readers will recall that this game has been in development for a decade with plenty of false starts, do-overs, and even renames along the way since the year it was first introduced to the world as Lineage Eternal. The February test phase was meant to be its final one, and the studio had told investors the game would launch in the west during the first half of 2023, which will be almost past by the time this last-minute new test runs.
While no formal delay has been announced, there’s plenty of reason to doubt it, as Amazon, the game’s western publisher, has announced absolutely nothing and no tests have run at all in the west yet. And just a week ago, Korean media reported there’d been a “fierce debate” inside NCsoft HQ over the launch, which is rumored to have been delayed to October but will supposedly be a global simultaneous release.
NCsoft told Korean press that it will address the game’s roadmap in its Q1 earnings call, which should be roughly the second week of May (in the middle of the application period but before the actual test).
