AGS posted some details regarding the closed technical test that was held recently for Throne and Liberty. All of that statistical data is not what garnered my attention though. What did was the name of the franchise lead who is in charge of Throne and Liberty for AGS; Merv Lee Kwai (pictured below).
Kwai was originally the producer for the western version of Wizardry Online which Sony Online Entertainment was the official publisher for in NA/EU (the original Wizardry franchise; the turn based game from Sir-Tech, is what got me into RPG’s in the first place). The game was online in the west for only a short time from January 2013-July 2014 (so he didn’t have what you would call a lot of experience overseeing a substantial game up to that point). Shortly after that, Kwai jumped to Trion Worlds, where he took over as executive producer for ArcheAge (taking over post-launch for Victoria Voss who moved on to working on securing the publishing rights for Devilian in the west). At Trion, Kwai was best known as Khrolan or Khro for short and occasionally as Merv (where there were also accusations of unethical in-game favoritism on his part in terms of providing some players inside information that gave certain players/guilds an advantage; and no, I am not referring to this one which he dispelled by noting all of that info would be released publicly).
And we all know how ArcheAge devolved from 2014-2019 under Trion (while he was the executive producer), and then 2019-2021 under Gamigo (where Kwai was one of the few Trion holdovers where he became an SVP that oversaw ALL of Gamigo’s library; a library which didn’t fare well especially after Kakao Games took over the publishing rights for the western ArcheAge IP). I have an Incompetence label/tag that along with the Gamigo one, which highlights my distrust of Kwai in this sort of lead role (which I noted about early on when ArcheAge Unchained was first revealed).
He made an incredible pitch for ArcheAge Unchained (“no tricks, no traps”; I remained on the sideline until the very last minute before I decided to give it a chance (eschewing my own “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” take). Once Unchained launched, he disappeared from livestreams and even his own social media presence. In retrospect, it was a clever PR/marketing campaign to hoist a Premium version of ArcheAge that was being readied for eventual release in KR (and didn’t last very long since that version got merged into the original business model server quickly), onto the western base as a test market. The version did do fairly well at launch (requiring at least 6 servers for each region), but bled players once questionable changes began making its way into the Archepasses.
So when I see him being the lead person behind the western version of Throne and Liberty, a whole bunch of red flags just went up because I know this is one of the KMMO’s that is trying to target ArcheAge players (and we have someone with a long history with the ArcheAge franchise who is now overseeing this title for AGS). Throne and Liberty was already far down on my list of anticipated games; this aspect just puts it 6-feet underground as far as I’m concerned.
