Throne & Liberty is the best-looking MMO around

Amazon Games' next MMO, Throne & Liberty, mixes Games of Thrones aesthetics with a beautifully realized world

MMOs are back. World of Warcraft might be underwhelming some players, but the likes of Genshin Impact, Lost Ark, and Final Fantasy XIV have proven that MMOs are here to stay, and players are more ravenous than ever for an adventure they can share with thousands of others simultaneously. Just with those titles alone it’s a busy space, and yet Throne & Liberty is here to throw its hat into the ring, and does so by attempting to set a new bar for fidelity in open-world F2P MMOs.

It’s clear throughout the demo that Throne & Liberty is strikingly beautiful. There’s an initial “Breath of the Wild” moment, where your player character pushes open some doors to emerge from a dark cave for the first time, and you’re given a cinematic sweep over the landscape, with a giant tree sprouting cherry blossoms in the distance.

In cutscenes characters animate shockingly well, with expressive faces and gentle life-like movements – it’s subtle, but characters don’t give the impression of stiff NPCs and that lends the world that little bit of believability. And it is fairly grounded, blending a familiar medieval fantasy vibe with “New World” era sailors surprisingly well. It feels aesthetically closer to Game of Thrones rather than Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV.

Combat in Throne & Liberty is engaging :: Amazon Games / NCSoft

I didn’t even blink an eye when a dwarf-like bloke transformed into a giant golem to spin the gears of a castle gate, swinging it open – that’s how adjusted I am to swords and a healthy dose of sorcery. But what I didn’t expect was that transformations would become a key part of gameplay and exploration too. You can sprint across the land pretty much from the start of the game by transforming into a swift wolf. Instead of leveling for hours and grinding gold in order to mount up and traverse the land, in Throne & Liberty you are the mount.

Want to descend a cliff? Transform into a majestic bird on the way down – a unique take on the paraglider mechanic that has become a staple of open-world titles in the last few years. Controlling a different creature in order to travel fast across the world is, frankly, far more exciting than jumping on a mount, and I’m eager to see what other transformations the game has in store for players.

Transforming into animals is great fun :: Amazon Games / NCSoft

Elsewhere, the game mostly sticks to a traditional MMO formula – nicely detailed hub cities filled with quest givers and optional objectives, cooldown-based combat, and so on. That’s not to say it’s all the same as what you’ve seen before, mind. There’s a nice real-time element to combat where you’re prompted to use a counter before getting hit by certain moves, and success will negate damage while dealing some back. It’s a small early-game feature that will surely evolve as your array of moves does, but fighting real people is far more interesting than fighting monsters.

Guilds will be a huge part of Throne & Liberty, and guild battles will bring dozens of players together for a fight. Guilds will initially be around 50 to 70 players in size, and guilds will wage war for control over castles in the Throne & Liberty landscape. When it was described to me it sounded vaguely reminiscent of Planetside 2 – an almost never-ending battle for supremacy over a landscape – and that’s certainly no bad things for Throne & Liberty to adopt.

The environments in Throne & Liberty are a standout highlight / Amazon Games

To be frank, nothing I saw myself of Throne & Liberty blew me away, but the overall package is undeniably solid. It’ll be F2P, release on Steam and modern consoles, has some great visuals, and the promise of large-scale multiplayer encounters is very exciting. The only thing Throne & Liberty really needs to do is stand out in the market.

You can sign up to test Throne & Liberty now via the official Throne & Liberty website.