Throne and Liberty - The MMO Without Classes

For the majority of MMORPG games, predefined classes are a core concept of the game. Classes are generally chosen at the beginning of the game, during character creation, and cannot be subsequently changed. 

This often causes new players to reroll when they learn more about the game and find out that they like a different class more than the one they originally chose. If you fall into this trap you basically have to start again from scratch.

However predefined classes also tend to make combat more predictable and easier to balance and manage for developers, and are a staple of the genre going back to early RPG games. 

Sometimes a developer emerges who is brave enough to challenge the old ways, and NCSoft is the latest among them. Their new MMORPG, Throne and Liberty, is planned to release later this year, and will not feature any classes.

Rather than being defined by classes, player roles and abilities will be dictated by which weapons the player has equipped, and you are able to equip two of them, swapping between them at will. This system is quite similar to the one used in the Elder Scrolls Online, however in that game you do have a preselected class - the chosen weapons merely augment them with extra skill options on top, whereas in Thrones and Liberty the weapons will completely define your role and abilities. 

In theory this promises much greater freedom for players and does away with the need to reroll new characters, at least for combat reasons. Don't like your ability set? Just try out a new weapon. Need to change up your role to help out your friends? Again, no need to switch to an "alt" character, you can just change your weapon to fulfil that role. 

Connecting the skill sets of different weapons will be an important thing to master in Throne and Liberty for higher level gameplay, as doing so will offer unique offensive and defensive options that allow you to get the most out of your build. 

All of this seems to point to a great deal of flexibility offered to players. Doing away with the need to swap characters to make use of certain class abilities for a raid, dungeon or event should also help players to become really immersed in the character they initially created. 

If NCSoft manage to pull it off and release this system in a polished state, then Throne and Liberty could be one of the biggest challenges so far to the traditional class system in MMO games. 

We hope you enjoyed this article about Throne and Liberty, a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) planned for release in 2023.