In the last edition of Four Winds, I found myself cautiously enjoying Throne and Liberty. The game had its hooks in me. I found an engaging game that’s tailored to my particular taste in MMOs. And you know what? Damn my worries of potential failure! This game finally got me out of my MMO rut, and it shows that the Lineage style of MMO still works in the modern landscape of story-rich MMOs and live service games.
I haven’t felt this excited about an MMO since I first started playing Black Desert Online way back in 2018. It’s been a long while since I’ve found myself actually sitting down and really digesting all of the systems that makes a new game tick. By that, I mean really doing it on my own! Outside of reading up on which archetypes the various weapon combinations in this game are meant for, I challenged myself to avoid YouTube videos and build guides as I leveled through the game. I really wanted to learn the game from just playing it. I really wanted to take ownership of my progress.
After about two weeks, I hit the max level of 50, and I’m happy to say that I did not regret that decision. I enjoyed every minute of learning this game; I loved being able to discover features as they unlocked. Most importantly, that also meant that I wasn’t accidently burning myself out from the game by constantly reading guides or watching videos.
I want to share my experience, so for today’s edition of Four Winds, I’m going to talk about my opening hours with Throne and Liberty starting from character creation to the end of tutorial island.
Character creation
I had only two big goals for Throne of Liberty: have fun and take my time. I don’t usually spend too much time in character creation, but in the spirit of really taking ownership of my experience, I spent 10 minutes creating my character. I timed myself! That’s literally 1000% more time than I usually spend in character creation. I had a simple vision: I wanted nice, full, plump lips. That’s it. So, after picking my desired body type, I went to the lip sliders and flung those bad boys to maximum size. Great start. I usually go black hair, but I wanted to mix it up a bit. I give her wavy red hair to really make her stand out.
I spent the rest of my 10 minutes messing with the body sliders to get her just right. There’s a lot of sliders in the game. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say it falls between Lineage 2 and Black Desert Online.
As I put on my finishing touches and finalized my selections, the game immediately started with a monster ready to strike me down, which leads us nicely into…
The tutorial
No, I have no idea what happened in the tutorial. I skipped all the story beats. I just knew that I must kill. The first few fights introduce auto attacks and the active block mechanic. By default, they’re bound to Q and E respectively. Auto-attacking needs no introduction, but the active defense system is a skill where players can block attacks with. Whenever a shrinking purple circle appears on the screen, a player can block just as the size of the circle matches the size of a second smaller circle for a perfect block. I like the mechanic; it really keeps me on my toes. Because of muscle memory, I rebound those keys to 1 and 4. I don’t know why, but 4 has always been my defensive skill in every MMO I’ve played. I’m glad the game didn’t have some arbitrary reason that prevented me from rebinding any of my keys. More on this later.
The tutorial was pretty straightforward beyond that. It teaches the fundamental concepts that pretty much any veteran MMO player has encounter in one form or the other: the tab targeting system, how to switch between the action camera and the classic view, how to switch weapons, and how to use the active defense system.
It also introduces Throne and Liberty’s own take on the mount system: the ability to shapeshift into three animal forms. This is actually kind of cool. Pressing the shift key while running transformed me into a wolf, jumping off a high cliff and pressing the jump key transformed me into an eagle, and swimming in water transformed me into an otter. I found it intuitive because I don’t even have to stop moving to transform. It’s all seamless, and I don’t understand why some other MMOs still live in the stone age and require players to stand still while they call their mount!
Keep this sentiment in mind as I continue my leveling journey through Throne and Liberty. This game seriously has some stuff that needs to be in every MMO moving forward.
The most important choice in the game
Folks might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned what class I chose during character creation. Well, that’s because it’s not a choice in the character creation system – and that’s what threw me off. When I finished character creation, I was thrown into the game immediately. I actually thought I accidently skipped class choice, so just to be sure, I rolled a second character and very slowly went through character creation just to be sure that I didn’t miss anything. I didn’t.
That’s because in lieu of asking me to choose a class right at the very beginning, the game gave me all the weapon types halfway through the tutorial. It just straight up gave me the stuff too, no strings attached. At first, I thought I could choose only two from the list, but nope. I immediately got a sword and shield, a wand and grimoire, a staff, a longbow, a pair of daggers, and a great sword. Of those six weapons, I had to choose two. Each weapon combination fits a specific class archetype, and I noticed later that each combo actually has a class name too.
For example, using the sword and shield with the wand and grimoire makes me into a templar. Templars are the quintessential tank class. I wanted my gameplay nice and flavorful, so I went with a dagger/wand combo, making me a spellblade. The daggers have fast attack speeds and allow the player to teleport to enemies, while the wand allows for heals and applying damage-over-time conditions on enemies. It was a neat combo, so I opted for it. At that point, I didn’t know where it fell on the tier lists, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to enjoy my game.
The weapon combo is an important choice because it’ll ultimately determine what players will play in the long haul and thus their place in parties. I’d say players should have a weapon combination chosen by the time enemy encounters get difficult or battles are starting to draw out far longer than they need to. The choice is not permanent, but as one player described it in world chat, “It’s not impossible to change weapons, but it can be a hassle.”
I do personally think there’s a little bit of hyperbole at play because I saw some initial reactions to the system as a way to stifle build variety and experimentation, but that’s not really the case. There are plenty of other things to experiment with in terms of builds. Just take a look at all the available builds for the templar combo that I mentioned earlier.
I’d also argue that it’s not really that different from choosing a class right at the beginning of character creation and locking it in forever. In fact, I like this system better because I don’t have to keep starting over! I can easily test out different weapon combo while I am out farming wolves or finishing the early quests. I was always going at a steady pace. And honestly, thank goodness for that because I did eventually switch because I discovered a more fun way to play, and I’ll talk about that as I leave the tutorial island and begin the game in earnest in the next edition of Four Winds.
The four wind tiles in Mahjong open all sorts of winning combinations for players of this ancient game – and the “Asian” MMO subgenre is just as varied as the many rulesets in Mahjong. Join Massively OP’s Carlo Lacsina here in our Four Winds column as he covers the diverse assembly of MMOs imported from the East!
