Choose My Adventure: Throne and Liberty continues to both intrigue and concern

I appreciate that reading that summary about my current feelings regarding Throne and Liberty comes off as conflicting, but that’s primarily because I continue to feel conflicted much as I did when I checked the game out ahead of early access. Something about this game is both hooking me and making me leery all at once and I’m not sure why.

So for this month’s Choose My Adventure, I’m kind of hoping to maybe explore that a little bit, all the while gleaning the fun out of this new MMORPG. And I am going to say that there is some fun to be had here. Starting off with fishing.

Yes, fishing. That most glorious of MMO side activities. It’s fairly well-represented here in the world of Solisium, with a fairly simple minigame involving making sure you keep trying to move the hooked fish left and right in order to tire it out without also causing your line to snap. It’s taken a bit of time to get used to, but practice has made perfect, and the in-game fish all look really lovely.

Of course fishing wasn’t the only thing I did. I also picked up where I left off when last I was playing this game for OPTV, which mostly involved my trying to complete every single zone activity in the related adventure log.

This started off with me entering a public dungeon, but the moment I crossed the threshold, I was two-shot by another player. Assuming I was in a PvP only area, I elected to ignore it and move on to something else, but a day later when I entered that same delve, I was able to run alongside others instead of in opposition of them. As it turns out, MOP’s Carlo determined that entering this location at night made it FFA PvP (but no loot, thankfully), while entering it in the day was co-op. And there was no UI indication for any of it. So that seemed like an odd omission… until I was told about this by a UI popup at level 30, anyway.

After a while and further questing, I was at a point that I had to earn another level or two before the next major quest step would begin. This offered me a little bit of freedom of choice, so I took advantage how I could with the variety of side activities this game offers; most of what I did to pass the time and raise my level involved taking up contracts (aka mini-missions) and hopping into co-op dungeons.

I have to say that while the first co-op dungeon isn’t exactly a challenging affair, it does give me some hope for later ones down the line. A lot of the fights were against some fairly standard (if slightly beefed-up in the HP department) trash mobs, but the bosses at least had a couple of neat little mechanical things going on for them. Also, as it turns out, healing in this game isn’t too bad. I’ve got only a couple of healing skills, but they seemed to be enough to get the job done.

As for the contracts, those were some fairly basic kill-10s, though doing them was still extremely valuable not only in the XP department but in specific materials. And this kind of leads me in to my one concern that keeps nipping at the back of my mind. The materials I need to improve my gear and my skills are beginning to feel a bit thin as I progress. I don’t feel quite starved yet, but there also seems to be a much more shallow pool of them to draw from. Certain item crafts kind of help, as do quest rewards or battle pass goodies, but there still continues to be this sensation that leaner times are coming.

Eventually I was at the point that I could ignore those needs for a few moments more and continue on to my next main quest. The storylines that weave along in T&L continue to seem like barely connected little adventures, so there’s no sense of narrative cohesion, but it’s at least pretty fun anyway. Being allowed to blip past conversation segments to have the narrator summarize what was said has helped in my enjoyment immensely, though I still make it a point to watch regular cutscenes. In the case of the musical number I experienced, I’m glad I made that choice.

As for combat, I haven’t changed my position; combat is a bit less involved than I would like but not quite so passive as to make me feel as if I’m playing a mobile auto-battler. Progression remarks also continue to hold true as well: The game has way too many character advancement paths, and now chasing skill levels for my chosen weapon types is another layer on top of an already stacked parfait of number-boosting rigmarole. I guess the only thing that’s changed here is that I’m beginning to expect it more and am ready for all of the growth stuff.

All in all, I am having a pretty good time when I’m allowed to. Despite the lingering sense of material doom I keep feeling, the actual gameplay of T&L has moments of enjoyment all as I begin to grow more confident and competent in my chosen pair of weapons and selected skills. This combo of mage staff and magic wand has effectively turned me into a green DPS. Or a healer who can throw out big beefy fireballs.

So now that I’m level 30 at the time of this writing, I’m once more at a bit of a pause to level up in order to get to the next story portion. So, as I mentioned earlier, that means there are choices. And choices mean poll choices.

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As usual, polling will close up at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, October 11th. Until then, I’m probably going to once again hit the pause button here until I see how polling works out. Or maybe I’ll do some more fishing.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.