Throne and Liberty’s KR Producer posted an announcement on the official website regarding major changes being made to the game after less than stellar feedback from the recent KR closed beta test. Basically, they intend to remove the auto play and auto combat (Astral Hunting) system. Mind you, what existed in this recent CBT, was designed heavily around the Astral Hunting system. Removing it means guess what? An underlying core design overhaul that will more than likely, cause significant delays to its release.
Back in August, they announced (via their financial earnings conference call), that the game was going to be delayed (thus pushing the launch schedule for KR and AGS’ western release back by several quarters) in order to make adjustments to the combat system to make that more dynamic (but they were still evaluating the Astral Hunting system). With this latest announcement that it is going to be removed, I’m expecting NC’s next earnings conference call will have them confirming a much longer delay. I’ve been saying this for awhile now ever since the game was initially called Lineage Eternal; they might as well stick a fork in it. I also called it with Project TL (not falling for the hype) and then when it was rebranded (yet again) to Throne and Liberty (that it would be a fools errand to hype up this game).
Each design iteration has shown they really have lost any vision they had for the game. Lineage Eternal was supposed to be their follow up to Lineage II (and to supercede Lineage III and all of the drama that occurred with that when part of the development team left NCsoft to form what became Bluehole, and utilized portions of Lineage III to create TERA). And that title (Lineage Eternal) initially played off the Diablo III announcement in 2008 (where several Korean studios were cooking up Diablo-inspired MMO-ARPG versions with Devilian, Lineage Eternal, and Elite Lords of Alliance being some of the earlier projects. Smilegate RPG teased their initial trailer for Lost Ark back at G-STAR 2014, but also started development work around this same 2009 timeframe. Webzen threw their hat into this ring a little bit later with MU Legend).
I was highly skeptical when NC put out a teaser for the “directors preview” of Throne and Liberty in December 2022 where a few days later, they published the full cut. And it was uninspiring and underwhelming with a bunch of lifeless talking heads reading off a script. And they weren’t initially going to even do the usual sort of CBT marketing either, instead choosing to do an in-house limited scripted playthrough (which they called, “Final Test for All”) where players who won an invite, would only get to play what NC chose for them to get access to at their R&D headquarters. And the feedback from even that limited scripted play testing, was bad enough where NC had no choice but to do an actual closed beta test (which like the 2016 Lineage Eternal CBT, had less than stellar feedback).
With the KR CBT back in May, some of the players hypothesized the design was intentional by NC in order to cater to hardcore Lineage players. That was something I found to be completely asinine because no major company (especially one that is a publicly traded one like NC on the KOSPI) is going to spend this much amount of resources creating a game that has gorgeous 2023 high fidelity graphics with 90’s style grinding as its core game play loop. The graphics team did a phenomenal job with Throne and Liberty’s game world. The issue are the actual game designers; like so many other studios, the excellent graphics ends up getting marginalized by really poor designs/systems. And in the case of this title (spanning all of its iterations and rebrandings), every team (except the initial Lineage Eternal one) has been throwing darts blindfolded to see what sticks.
I think what is mindboggling is how Lineage has its defined universe which each of these different development teams that have taken stabs at over the years, have managed to miss the mark so widely on. You would think every designer, would be a lot more cognizant about what has worked and what has failed across their industry (and to try not to keep making the same mistakes over and over again). Yet, this is what they are managing to do quite well to where they keep topping themselves when it comes to incompetence in game design. From my point of view, it seems like a lot of the talent and brain trust that NC once had (the ones who designed the earlier Lineage titles, Aion, Blade & Soul) when it came to PC MMORPG’s, has been greatly diminished. It wouldn’t even surprise me if this ends up going dark for awhile with another future rebrand.
