Throne and Liberty F2P MMO gets open beta July 18 to July 23 | interview

NCSoft cut a deal with Amazon Games to publish its Throne and Liberty free-to-play MMORPG in the West.

Now the time is drawing near, and Amazon Games has showed off the massive-scale combat in a dynamic world. Today, Amazon Games announced that cross-play open beta for Throne and Liberty will be available from July 18 to July 23. The open beta is playable on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S and will be offered to players in North and South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. 

In Throne and Liberty, players are free to explore a world full of depth and verticality, with dynamic geographical and environmental features that change the course of play. Massive-scale player-versus-player (PvP) and player-versus-environment (PvE) combat are fundamental in the game, and players can even tip the odds of battle in their favor by morphing into a defeated boss or triggering powerful environmental effects, like solar eclipses or rainstorms.

The massive battles include dungeon fights and castle sieges in an open world. There are robust social experiences with guild interactions and alliances. There are day and night cycles that change in the dynamic world, with unpredictable weather cycles.

Players can turn into creatures that can fly through the air to take to the sea for rapid travel, or even morph into a defeated boss to turn the tide in battle. You can use grapple points to get onto platforms, and use those to your advantage in combat.

And there are dual weapons that let you customize your playstyle. You can use a sword and shield, longbow, crossbows, greatsword, staff, daggers, or wand and tome.

The game is coming to the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on September 17, 2024. At the Summer Game Fest, I spoke with Amazon Games’ Merv Lee Kwai, head of third-party publishing, and Daniel Lafuente, globalization design manager, about the game’s progress.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: What’s the latest? What status is the game in?

Daniel Lafuente: During this event we’re announcing our open beta test, which is coming on July 18. It’ll last five days. We’re also announcing our launch date, September 17. We’re excited about that. It’s going to be available on PC, Xbox, and PS5. We’ll have cross play between all the platforms from day one. Players will be able to test that cross play functionality during the open beta. It’s free to play.

GamesBeat: How long have you been working on this?

Lafuente: We signed with NC about 18 months ago, February of last year. We were working a bit before that during negotiations. But very actively since then with NCsoft. The game is live right now in Korea, and it has been since December 2023, but for PC only.

It’s a chance for our PC players to invite their friends on console who maybe haven’t been able to enjoy this genre before. It’s a genre that hasn’t been so easily available to console players before in a free-to-play mode. This is an opportunity for them to delve into an MMORPG and see if they like it without facing any barriers to entry. We’re excited about that. Hopefully friends bring other friends into it.

GamesBeat: Has it done well in Korea?

Merv Lee Kwai: I’d say the adoption by the Korean players has hit their expectations. There have been many opportunities to action their feedback. With our testing rounds at AGS, we had a technical test. We had a closed beta. Now we have the upcoming open beta. We’ve had a lot of opportunities to take feedback from the Korean audience, mix it with our feedback from our players and our internal wants as a publisher. Our next iteration is during OBT.

There’s been a lot of feedback coming from the Korean version that has helped us action and improve on Throne and Liberty. When we do the global release, we’ll bring the best possible version of the game to the world.

GamesBeat: Was there anything you maybe learned from other MMOs that have given life to this one?

Kwai: A lot of learnings. Most notably, the operation at scale. Games like Throne and Liberty are incredibly challenging to run at scale as a service with the infrastructure to support it. A lot of learning and improving AGS’s total offering as a publisher to deliver games of this caliber. Also just the active wants of players, what players are seeking in games like Throne and Liberty. We can infer some of that from the other games we operate. It’s helped us mature Throne and Liberty into what it is today.

GamesBeat: What might be appealing about this compared to some of the other games you run? Especially to a western audience.

Lafuente: As Merv touched on, this has been developed for a global audience since day one. That’s a key factor. I’d call out a few supporting features throughout the game. The first is the massive scale. It’s a big open world, designed to have massive scale combat. Castle sieges will have thousands of players participating in a single siege. Other events are going to have hundreds of players, like guild versus guild battles. A lot of massive combat in the game.

We’re able to do this with great tech from NCsoft. That’s allowed this to happen not just on PC, but on console as well. Even console players are going to be able to experience this massive scale and a smooth experience. We’re making sure we have high FPS. That’s something unique about Throne and Liberty.

At its core it has a deep social system. The guild system is very deep, lots of features within the guild system. Shared rewards, lots of activities to do in the guild that give you extra bonuses and benefits. It’s capturing that core MMO feeling of being able to accomplish things with your friends and with groups of players together.

Kwai: The visuals in the game are top notch, very high quality. The world is expansive and seamless. A lot of verticality in the world. Many zones for users to explore and traverse and play with each other.

GamesBeat: I’ve talked to quite a few companies about trying to cram a lot of players into small spaces for things like big battles. What have you reached as far as the limits of possibility there?

Lafuente: The scale of our battles isn’t just a hope. We’ve proven it in the Korean live service game. The castle sieges have crossed the threshold of 1,700 players. It’s a big castle siege, but it’s still a relatively small space. Much smaller than the spaces in battle royale games like Fortnite. I don’t think we’re at a point where we just hope that we can get that many players. The game has shown that it can handle it. It also helps to run some of that AWS infrastructure, for sure.

Kwai: NCsoft’s pedigree at developing games like this, building each franchise – Aion, Blade and Soul – they’ve all operated at scale with these types of mechanics in the game. This is an evolution of that. It starts with their underlying tech, which has always been rock solid. It’s more been a question of how we optimize gameplay to match the tech.

In the Korean version, with some of their sieges, we saw 1,700 players in the same shared space. During our closed beta test we saw upwards of 1,000 players, even in some of the PvE content, operating at 60 frames per second. Very impressive technology. I think we undersell it a bit. It’s definitely bigger than I’ve seen.

GamesBeat: The physics of that–in an MMO battle you can’t play some of the tricks we’ve seen in other large virtual spaces. In big concerts, for example, they can have people colliding through each other, occupying the same space. It seems like you can’t do that in a battle.

Lafuente: It depends on which part of the content you’re playing. In the PvP battles, in the conflict mode, there’s collision between players. That’s an intentional part of the type of combat that we’re looking to have, where in a large castle siege you have to be tactical about how you advance and retreat, things like that. So there is collision in those battles. But in other areas of the world, like inside of towns, there’s no collision. You can see hundreds of players hovering around the crafting agent. It depends where you are in the world.

GamesBeat: There are other companies working on technology in this space. They were trying to come up with shardless worlds, things like that. Do you get there in a more traditional way – tons of shards, but just one castle – or do you have something more like a shardless world, where lots of players occupy the same shard?

Lafuente: Right now the game is set up for individual servers. There’s some aspect of–we will have certain regions, but they’re individual servers right now. I’m probably not the best person to answer the super technical questions around how this is brought to life.

Kwai: Based on the way you frame the topic, it’s a multi-sharded world. It’s not like one mega-server. But that’s important. We considered the population of a realm in the design of the game. NCsoft has put a lot of effort into making sure there’s enough real world ownership, persistent ownership in the world. That’s heavily based on the amount of players who can access that content. It’s intentionally designed around the population cap.

One of the benefits of Throne and Liberty, though, is that we have a global backend. No matter what region or arena we have servers present in, everybody still plays on the same global backend. We can empower people to transfer between servers. It’s a more open, but still sharded model.

GamesBeat: Do you have the ability to communicate across the different shards?

Kwai: Not currently, but the infrastructure technically exists to do it. It’s something we need to explore to see if there’s benefit in doing so. What we’ve seen is that mostly, the social dynamic is very close-knit and contained to a server. There’s little reason to communicate across servers. But the tech is there. It’s something we can explore, and probably should. We just didn’t have it appear as a problem we needed to solve in the moment. The ecosystem is self-contained on each world server.

We notice that a lot of the player communication will happen in Discord or on Reddit, platforms like that. They’re communicating across servers outside of the game. We haven’t yet brought that into the game.

GamesBeat: How much content do you expect to have at launch? Is there a way to describe that?

Lafuente: You have a traditional leveling journey, of course. As you go through an MMO and get into the endgame, there’s so much to do, both in the multiplayer and the solo experience. Things like castle sieges, conquest battles, the guild-versus-guild struggles. There are dynamic events occurring at certain hours of the day, where a certain area on the map turns into a conflict zone where teams of players are battling over resources. There are instanced PvE dungeons, traditional dungeons.

I want to touch on our morphing system, which is the game’s take on a traditional mount system. Rather than summoning a mount and riding on that, this game has a morphing system where the player transforms themselves into the animal that they prefer. There are land animals as well as air and sea. You can fly through the air, swim through the ocean, or run around the world in these different forms. It’s a unique experience. We’ve gotten super positive feedback from the players about it. That’s something we’re really excited about.

GamesBeat: Is there a way to convey why it’s taken so long to convert a game like this for a western audience?

Lafuente: Since we signed it up, we wanted to make sure we reach a certain quality bar that’s going to be there for the global audience of players. Certain aspects have to be dealt with, like localizing the game and preparing the infrastructure and so on. That’s separate from the general quality level of the game. They have their own quality bar, I would say. Those have to be dealt with.

We’ve worked closely with NCsoft, almost as one team. We’re taking feedback from the Korean live service, but also making sure our global players have a chance to give feedback. We’ve had several testing phases with them already, including a technical test and a closed beta. Now we’re reaching the point where we feel we’ve collected enough feedback. We’ve been able to confirm our opinions on our designs, or change them if we need to. We’re getting closer to a place where we’re ready to launch. The key part of that is going to be getting to the quality bar.

GamesBeat: Have you been able to use AI much in translation or localization yet?

Kwai: There’s a strong feature in the game right now that we’re actively working on, where a user can speak in their language of origin and the game dynamically translates into the language of the destination client. If I type something in English and I’m playing with someone who speaks French, it can dynamically change my whisper or my guild chat into French for them to read. That’s an active piece of tech we’re working on right now. We’re trying to make sure it’s in the game for launch. I mention it as an active project, but no promises if we’ll have it for launch. We also have text to speech for accessibility issues, but no real time globalization of voice.

GamesBeat: Did you wind up changing much about the game content in bringing it over from Korea?

Lafuente: The game has evolved over time as a global version. I want to keep stressing that. From the moment we partnered with NCsoft, one of our common goals was that Throne and Liberty would be a global game. Not that there would be a Korean version of the game and a separate western version of the game, but one unified global version.

The changes that have come from global players, the feedback from global players, has been put into the currently live game in Korea. There have been tons of changes since we signed it. It’s been geared toward this global launch and having one version for all of our global players.