Amazon Discuss Throne & Liberty Development And Its Future Beyond MMO Games

Amazon Games and NCSOFT announced yesterday that their fantasy MMO Throne and Liberty will finally be playable in the West. Set for its worldwide release on 17th September, the free-to-play MMORPG will also have an open beta coming to PC and consoles from 18th July to 23rd July.

Players residing in Korea have already had the chance to get to grips with Throne and Liberty since last year and this year’s Summer Game Fest, it was the first time the title could be played in the West. Ahead of its full release in only a few months, Amazon Games talked about its development process with Throne and Liberty and also that its portfolio will be adventuring outside of MMOs in the future.

Speaking in an interview with The Gamer, Daniel Lafuente, and Merv Lee Kwai from Amazon discuss what they have learned from launching Throne and Liberty and also how they want to broaden their horizons outside the MMO genre they have become known for. One thing Lafuente wants people to know is that Amazon sets a high standard when it comes to bringing their games to the forefront, but also that there’s much more to the company than spinning out MMO games.

“There’s definitely a quality bar that we strive for in the titles that we’re bringing to market,” Lafuente explains. “And it just so happens that we have MMOs right now, but our portfolio intends to be broad over the next couple of years. Maybe you’ve heard the news about the Tomb Raider game. It’s not just MMOs that we’re bringing to market. It does happen to be the focus of the moment, but we have broad ambitions.” Amazon has a handful of games in its pipeline as it’s also working on a Lord of the Rings MMO and the next Tomb Raider game, not to mention its live-action Tomb Raider show coming to Prime too.

Discussing Throne and Liberty’s development and lessons learned from their previous games, like Lost Ark and New World, Lafuente says that they aren’t afraid to dive head-on into demanding titles on a big scale, so they can create a solid “infrastructure” and “framework”. “Running games at this size and scale is very difficult, mostly because of the games as a service and the operational components.” Lafuente continues “And I think we’re setting ourselves up for success by starting with these more challenging titles and then creating an infrastructure and a framework to support any of the other games we bring to market.”

Talking more about Throne and Liberty’s development process and its all-around experience, Lafuente said that right from the start, bigger was better when it came to its scale, and this was mostly to accommodate how many players the game can hold while they run around battling at once.

“Everything about Throne & Liberty, from day one, was built with, I would say, the right word is ‘massive’. Massive scale, everything about it, the world, the buildings, everything. And the tech being built is going to allow things like the castle sieges that have thousands of players participating in a castle siege.” says Lafuente. That’s not an exaggeration, that’s already something that has been seen in the Korean life service is thousands of players participating in this castle siege. That’s probably the biggest event that we have. And then there’ll be other things that have hundreds of players, going down even to guild vs guild battles, which will be more along the 50 v 50, 60. v 60 type of range. Scale is a big part of what we expect in Throne & Liberty, particularly when it comes to PvP battles.”

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