Throne and Liberty: Amazon’s new MMO has a release date and an open beta

Throne and Liberty is the new free-to-play South Korean MMO being developed by NCSoft for publishers Amazon Games. It is… Continue reading Throne and Liberty: Amazon’s new MMO has a release date and an open beta

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Throne and Liberty is the new free-to-play South Korean MMO being developed by NCSoft for publishers Amazon Games. It is due to launch on September 17 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with an open beta running for five days in July.

The beta test will open at 10 am PT (5 pm UTC) on July 18 and will run until 10 am PT (5 pm UTC) on July 23.

Players in Europe, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan can participate in the beta test by simply downloading the beta build from the game’s page on Steam or the PlayStation or Xbox stores.

An important note on the Throne and Liberty website reminds players that progress from the beta will not carry over to the full release of the game, so don’t get too invested in your beta characters.

What is Throne and Liberty?

Throne and Liberty is a free-to-play MMO set in the newly created world of Solisium. According to the game’s website, it will heavily focus around guild-based combat, encouraging players to work together to achieve large scale goals: “Engage in thrilling battles against dozens to thousands of other players and fantastic creatures in group battles and massive Castle Sieges.”

One factor that will potentially set Throne and Liberty apart is that players do not have to commit to a specific class at character creation and cut themselves off from the majority of combat styles. Instead, the weapon a player is wielding will determine their move set.

What about New World, Amazon’s other MMO?

It is probably safe to say that Amazon needs Throne and Liberty to be a success to make up for the disappointing post-launch performance of New World.

New World launched in 2021 with an all-time player peak of over 900k players, but that declined rapidly. Now averaging peaks of around 5,000 simultaneous players, fans feel cheated by the lack of bug fixes and post-launch support, aside from highly-priced DLCs.

While the game’s Steam reviews never got above ‘Mixed’, recent reviews are firmly in the ‘Overwhelmingly negative’ category and look set to stay there, with players describing bugs and glitches severe enough that entire characters have been erased from existence.

New World was not free-to-play, so the monetization strategy has allowed it to fall by the wayside after launch, but Throne and Liberty follows a different strategy, which will perhaps force Amazon Games and NCSoft into better post-launch support.

Featured image credit: Amazon Games/NCSoft

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