What's Next for Throne and Liberty?

 Throne and Liberty's global beta is a few days past now and while I am not settled on whether I am playing at launch I am still following along with the updates on the Korean version as they will be changes that are present at the global launch.  There looks to be a few big changes coming: they are adding some life skills such as cooking/fishing and adding skill customization.  Let's take a look and talk about each.

Skill Customization

 First I found this video helpful to understand the changes coming to skills:

 One of my complaints (for lack of a better word) about Throne was that combat, especially the skills, felt overly complex and thus sort of mushed together with little identity.  The weapon skills, before this system change, were already doing three, four, or more things just by themselves.  I felt like this was too much and too complicated and forced the system into a stationary tab target combat experience where you spend more time looking at cooldowns on your hotbar than engaging in the combat.

 The skill customization in the video seems to address some of that.  The fireball example featured allowed the player to customize the skill so it could be cast while moving.  I wanted to pause and focus on that one because that feels like something that should just be part of the combat system.  I should be able to move in combat!  It should be the exception rather than the rule that you get rooted in place when activating a skill.

 So it's great to see them adding this ability to customize the skills but if there are too many of these "this should just be part of the normal skill / combat" then this is not the right direction.  Again the skills are already too complex and players get too many to use at once which is fostering the static feeling of combat.  Yes there is a lot of options in combat and now there will be even more variety in those options but that still doesn't address why combat feels off for so many players.

 There was also some feedback in the community about "why didn't we get this in the global beta version so that we could test it?".  I do agree it'd have been better to test with this system to make a better launch day decision since this will be in at launch.

Cooking and Fishing

 Next a look at cooking and fishing.

 Nothing major here.  Cooking is pretty straight forward.  I did like the way the visuals work with actually cooking.  I am not sure I liked that there was a random chance for a better result.  The better food will be the "best in slot" food of the game so I expect a glut of food that isn't that desired.  As the first true "crafting" profession in the game though it's at least a start!

 Fishing looked simple and straight forward which is good for me.  I like to fish in my games!