Throne and Liberty Review: Very Much A Lineage Successor

A golem lumbers forward, arms slowly swinging by its side as dozens of players swarm around its thick legs. A woman, slight in frame and wielding a staff, transforms into a wolf as she dives into the chaos of the battlefield, closing distance between her and another player. I see her form shift, slamming her greatsword against a man wielding a tome and book. He goes down after a few hits and our group follows suit. I cast healing spells in frantic succession as our guild leader directs us closer to the castle wall.

Our push forward only lasts so long. Within minutes another surge of players pushes forward, a large group now, and we’re overtaken. We lose, we die, we taste defeat. But there’s something exhilarating about it, as Throne & Liberty harkens back to an age of open-world PvP, of coordination and communication between players and tenuous alliances that I sorely missed.

I remember watching footage of Lineage Eternal on YouTube in 2014, excited that NCSOFT would be expanding upon an MMORPG series I had grown to love despite all of its flaws and rough edges. The footage that was shown through the course of Lineage Eternal’s development was more in line with Diablo or its then direct competitor within its own region, Lost Ark. Dungeons would be procedurally generated, character classes were set in stone and harken back to both the original Lineage andLineage II. 

It would simultaneously be familiar and new — something that would appeal to the small pocket of Lineage players that existed in the West and perhaps continued the series success within Korea. However, the project unexpectedly went dark after a series of closed beta tests in 2016. As NCSOFT continued to churn out mobile versions of their MMORPGs that are still relatively active, it seemed like Lineage Eternal was dead.

Yet the game resurfaced as Project TLin 2017. It still seemed like the game would continue to go in the direction of the isometric RPG, only for NCSOFT to reveal more footage down the