NCSoft Rebrands Project TL As A New IP Called Throne And Liberty

NCSoft’s promised Lineage game won’t have anything in common with other Lineage games except, well… nothing, as the studio revealed in a new dev blog. Project TL, a.k.a Lineage 3 (also Lineage Eternal and Project The Lineage) has been rebranded as Throne and Liberty to reflect the team’s new direction and vision for the game.

Apparently, the game has been revamped and remade so many times that the developers eventually lost sight of their initial vision for the game.

“Throne and Liberty is a project started by Lineage. The original objective of the project was ‘Let’s make the next-generation Lineage.’ […] In the process of development, a lot of the original system and content had to be adapted or removed to follow the current game trends. As a result, the gameplay also gradually became different from the original.”

According to NCSoft, the game had become so different that they decided to write a completely new story for it. They then began to ask themselves, “Should this be called Lineage?”

“So we changed the name to fit the new story. This also reflects the will of the development team to break the shell of Lineage.”

“We went back to the square one and thought hard about what value next-generation PC and console-based MMO games should present,” said Producer Jong-ok Ahn. “We put extra efforts into designing a highly immersive world where players can enjoy new experiences and have fun.”

“We tried multiple things to avoid monotonous field play,” he added. “Even in the same region, the geographical features change depending on the weather while the flow of battle changes according to the wind direction. Over time, players might encounter new mobs. The way and purpose of hunting keep changing accordingly. We worked hard to ensure that the three factors of field, environment and player affect one another. We expect that such an interactive influence will lead to richer possibilities for players.”

Throne and Liberty is also surprisingly set in the same world as another one of NCSoft’s in-development tiles, Project E.

“They also share the same gravitational and ecological characteristics as well as magical and fantasy origins,” revealed the devs. “However, because the continents are different, the characteristics of each civilization and history are also different. Important events that happened on the same planet are interpreted and progressed in completely different ways in the two games, so players can have fun beyond expectation.”

The team has yet to announce a release date for Throne and Liberty although last month’s announcement points to a full release sometime in the second half of 2022. In the meantime, you can take a gander at the new trailers below.