Choose My Adventure: Throne & Liberty’s endgame blends genuine fun with intense social requirements

One could be forgiven for thinking that headline was written by somebody who just discovered MMORPGs can be grindy, but I promise that’s not the case here. What I am going to remark on, however, is the depths with which Throne and Liberty takes this grindset mindset – and how much it seems hardwired to force players into guilds to get things done.

As always, I want (or need, frankly) to point out that I’m not here to review this game in totality, particularly since I didn’t do more than get past some of the first layers of endgame in T&L. I am not rendering final judgment. What I’m doing is sharing my experiences in that initial scratching, and those experiences are varied to say the least.

I’ll start with the Halloween event that’s happening; I took part in just the seasonal dungeon (I damn sure wasn’t about to spend money on the cosmetics – or anything else in this game). Once again, the instanced content of T&L continues to be full of delightful surprises, and this instance was also sprinkled with a whole lot of Halloween charm.

It also was remarkably sweaty from a mechanics standpoint, with one-shot exploding enemies and a pretty dense final boss fight. At least this one allowed you to get back into the fight after death, which is not something that happens in other dungeons in this game. It also has some similar reward lockouts, forcing me to earn candy corn currency to use to open the final rewards chest. It kind of sucks but it’s also not wholly unexpected considering currency requirements are also needed to open chests in regular dungeons too.

Speaking of regular dungeons, I did follow the polls’ will and tried out my first level 50 dungeon, which involved a slightly modified version of the level 20 dungeon I ran before. The map itself looked the same, and the final boss was basically a recolored version of the original, but the pathing and fight mechs were quite a bit different. The final fight against Karnix in particular had a whole lot of dance steps required to pass through. It wasn’t quite as severe as any of the raids I’ve done in other games, but it was precise enough that any major deviation from strategy would end in a wipe.

This incidentally brings me to what could arguably be an encapsulation of T&L’s community mindset. During my first run at Karnix, the party leader asked if anyone didn’t know the fight. When I admitted to being brand-new, the leader gave instructions about the battle while another party member bemoaned the fact that I didn’t take the 10 minutes to watch five two-minute videos that broke down every level 50 dungeon in the game. “I learn by dying and trying again,” I replied.

Guess which player stuck around until we learned and got the clear and guess which one bailed after one wipe.

Victorious yet slightly dejected, I moved on to the other poll choice of doing weekly missions, which as it turns out, is definitely not a misnomer: These weekly missions absolutely seem to demand seven days’ worth of gameplay commitment to complete assuming that I even broke up my activity. And not every reward would be available to me anyway since there were some that were guild-specific and others that were PvP-specific. Still others demanded that I adhere to the schedule of world events that pop up at appointed hours.

It was at this point that I felt like some research was indeed necessary, but not to read guides on the dungeons – rather to figure out just what the hell the gear progression path is. As it turns out, in doing the level 50 dungeon runs I did, I was jumping the gun. What conventional wisdom recommended was that I do a bunch of contract missions, enough that I can either afford a goodie bag that might reward epic (aka purple letter) gear or enough that I can specifically select a purple weapon.

The perception of needing to play this game on the daily, as well as the concern that players demanded I be an expert despite just being at level 50, was not helped when I was idly flipping through the guild postings for my server. Almost all of them had hard play requirements. Many of them expect members to join in on specific guild events. I saw guilds advertising themselves with threats about kicking players for being inactive for at least three days or as many as seven. PvP was all but a hard requirement. Some of them demanded gear score checks.

For all intents and purposes, whether it was by drawn lines in the sand by the playerbase or because I didn’t have the time to set aside to this one game, I was being told to leave. It was Lost Ark all over again on both communal and mechanical fronts.

What frustrates me more about this realization (or presumption, depending on one’s take) is the fact that Throne and Liberty is a fun game. I really like the dense boss fights and dungeons. I think the open world dungeons are a fun thing when they’re not FFA PvP blenders. And I don’t mind a slow walk up to character power through repeated activities if they’re a bit more lenient.

This endgame is not lenient. It seems to demand full commitment in order to get the most out of it. It appears to require that you join a guild of people if you want to experience as much as you can. Its players will be disappointed if you haven’t read the freaking manual or watched the video. I either need to make friends and make time for all of T&L, or I need to uninstall the game and move on.

But I don’t really want to do that. Maybe I’ll make friends. But more likely I’ll just uninstall and follow the signs that guide me away from an MMORPG that seems to encourage the mentality of people who put deep personal worth on one’s ability to press buttons in a video game. Either way, I’m ending up a bit more frustrated than I expected, yet also more determined to try. This game needs healers, and I think I’m getting pretty good at it.

I want to repeat again that I don’t intend to be The Last True Word on Throne and Liberty, and I continue to encourage you all to keep eyes on Carlo’s Four Winds column for some deeper impressions on this one. But for the time being, we’re moving on to Yeehaw Skyrim, aka Red Dead Online. So that means it’s time to ask about what activities to zero in on out in this wild and dusty trail.

 Loading ...

Polling will wrap up at the top of November – that’s the 1st – at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT time. Until then, I’m going to wrestle with this MMORPG a bit more. Primarily because I guess I’m self-flagellating.

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.