Leading up to the release of Throne and Liberty, I was not particularly enthusiastic about the game’s prospects on a whole. The reasons for this are pretty clear: The game had been languishing in development hell for ages, had changed titles and concepts (at one point this was going to be Lineage III), and it was being published by Amazon, which had yet to have a published title that (in my view) was actually good. It didn’t look to be offering much of note, and so I was really unclear as to why people would look forward to the game, and I said as much.
But y’all know that I am also up-front when things turn out to prove me wrong, and this is definitely a case where going into 2025, to my surprise, I’m actually curious to see where the game goes over the next year. It’s not really because I want to play it (I’ve got plenty on my plate at the moment), but because it seems to actually have some legs in terms of player interest and might, at long last, fulfill a goal that NCsoft has been chasing for decades now: American crossover success.
Now, at first glance that claim seems ludicrous. NCsoft has had several indisputably successful games in America, including both Guild Wars 2 and City of Heroes. And that’s true. Some of that is no doubt a result of the company’s having a sheer volume-based approach to its American-developed titles, but the fact is that clearly that strategy worked, and its litany of unsuccessful and moderately successful games are propped up by very, very successful ones.
However, there is definitely a sense that there’s something different between NCsoft’s “native” titles and its published ones from American studios. Oh, the company is not going to be sad to take financial success from GW2 by any means, and the Lineage franchise remains extremely profitable in South Korea. But looking at the company’s history, you get a sense that there has been a chase for a South Korean title that would get over as a crossover hit.
Lineage II didn’t make it, so the company went back to the drawing board and created Aion as a game that was very specifically talked up at the time as being designed to appeal to both Korean and American preferences. And Aion wasn’t a flop! But it wasn’t a huge crossover hit across cultures.
From an industry side, it looks as if NCsoft’s internal development culture keeps releasing American-made games and getting good reception out of them, but you can understand how it might feel like being a band people only notice for the covers. So I have this suspicion that NCsoft has been chasing… not legitimacy, exactly, but the sense that its own project was really getting over worldwide.
And to my surprise, Throne and Liberty seems to have done that. The game has definitely dropped in players from its launch, but it has done so in a gradual fashion. I wouldn’t describe the game as a runaway hit, but it looks very much like a new MMORPG in the early part of its life cycle. And unlike a lot of other brand-new titles, it’s not mired in bugs and getting attention because it’s something new (you know, Amazon’s usual product profile). There are issues, but they’re the standard new-game-facing-growing-pains issues.
In other words, as we keep saying that online games are a marathon instead of a sprint, we’re looking at what feels like the rarest of all birds here: a game that comes off the starting gate with a strong start ready to pace itself for a marathon, at least globally.
Now, you might have noticed that I already said that I’m not really watching it with interest on the basis of playing it. That is a true statement. But I think that really also explains why I’m going to be so interested over the next several months. Because the game has weathered its launch and now has to face the real challenge of a new MMORPG in convincing its existing players to keep playing while convincing its non-players that it might be a good idea to give it a try.
This is a tricky prospect because the two groups do not necessarily want the same thing. Existing players have stuck with the game for a while, but you want to make sure that they both feel that the commitment has been worth the investment and that they don’t want to drop the game because something new came out this week. That means not just improving balance but offering high-level players new stuff to do, keeping the gameplay loop fun and rewarding, and forging your own identity.
By contrast, your non-players either don’t know your game exists or they specifically have other things they want to play. In other words, you’re not going to convince The Elder Scrolls Online players to come play your game because it’s not The Elder Scrolls Online. That’s the problem. Your existing players like that it isn’t; your hypothetical players who are in Tamriel wish it were.
“Wait a second,” you ask, “why did you pick a comparison game that just nuked its own content schedule?” Because that’s actually where I think T&L has room to grow. This past year saw several MMO sunsets, and there’s space to scoop up those players still; even games that didn’t sunset did sometimes make some boneheaded choices, such as killing their entire content schedule. Throne and Liberty could make inroads there by targeting that playerbase specifically.
It’s too early to be sure, of course. The game has only been out here for a couple of months, and it’s still possible for it to sink into a fine-but-not-exceptional playerbase, just as Aion and Blade and Soul did after their big launches settled down. We already have a hard time evaluating its overall player counts because it is spread across multiple platforms, albeit with crossplay. It’s possible that this really was a game that launched strong because it was something new in a year that mostly offered expansions to existing games. If you don’t have an MMO home or wanted a fresh start, the new place feels like a place to take a spin.
The prospect that it could start to catch some real tailwinds, though, remains present. And so I’m very curious to see what happens next. Maybe nothing does happen next; maybe that initial momentum fizzles away. But I have a hunch it’s well-positioned to take advantage of that, and so I’m going to be paying close attention to it over this year. And if my paying attention to it winds up killing it stone dead (as has happened before), well, it’s not like I’m playing it, right?
Yes, I know I still need to write up a column on a bad speech from the Game Awards, but it’s literally the day after the new year, and I felt like writing something more optimistic and forward-looking than dunking on Swen Vincke’s well-intentioned but nonsensical claptrap. Next week, hold your horses.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
