Played on:
Windows
It's hard to argue that the MMORPG market isn't saturated. Many games have lost subscribers, including the big-name ones that have been hyped to huge degrees. Still, publishers keep pushing these games out because of the huge profit margins that the successful MMORPGs have. NCSoft was only known for working in Korea before, but they are now hitting the rest of the world with two MMORPGs that launched simultaneously: City of Heroes by Cryptic Studios and Lineage 2 by NCSoft Korea.
L2 is a sequel to a game most people in the rest of the world haven't even played; the first game is a huge hit across cybercafes throughout Korea. This one has plenty of changes, though, like an impressive 3D engine, all-new art, and a siege system. Combine this with the first one's fairly simplistic gameplay and open PvP system, and we have Lineage 2. But most MMORPGs fail to deliver everything that's promised - at least not at first - and sadly, this game is no exception.
You might be surprised to find out that Lineage 2 uses the Unreal engine. NCSoft has taken Epic's excellent game engine and added a dynamic loading system so that the whole game runs in a seamless world. They've also done some work to the network code so that hundreds of players can interact simultaneously in one area. The beautiful pixel-shaded water causes a major hit on frame rates, but it can be turned off if you like.
Lineage 2 got plenty of beta testing in the Asian market, so it is relatively bug-free in its release form here. It will even run fairly well on older computers if you turn the detail all the way down, but I wouldn't really try it on a machine under 1GHz with 256MB of memory.
I'd also like to sound off on NCSoft's online purchase system. You don't really get any great deals here, but you can buy Lineage 2 on PlayNC for the full retail price (currently $49.99) and start downloading immediately. You get no box, manual, or even CDs, but you can always re-download when you want. Many would scoff at this sort of purchase method, but I really like the convenience of buying from home and merely hahttp://www.atomicgamer.com/admin/articleAdmin.phpving to wait for the download to finish.
The first couple days of release saw some issues on the servers where players had trouble getting into the game. Those issues are still lingering on a few weeks later, with one or two servers becoming occasionally congested.
L2 sports a prety barebones interface system. You can set up hotkeys for various abilities and functions (like attacking a monster, picking up nearby loot, etc.), and there is a tabbed chat window that allows you to switch between which channel you talk in. Other than that, though, this game is missing some pretty basic stuff that's become the norm in MMORPGs. You can't split chat across multiple windows, and you can't even configure your controls.
The game also just about forces you to use their single Diablo-style control scheme where you click on a piece of ground to run there - or click on an enemy to start attacking it. While the game does try and supply walk forward/back/left/right keys, they're sloppily implemented and almost unusable in my opinion. The terrible first person mode is even worse - I would have much preferred some well-designed "true" first- and third-person control schemes.
It's obvious right from the start that Lineage 2's character design is based heavily on Japanese anime. The playable characters look excellent, but there are very few options to customize how you look. There are several hair styles and a couple of face styles and skin colors for each race, and that's about it. One thing that I do like is that fighters and spellcasters do have different character models, even inside the same race.
The world of Aden is large and includes many types of environments, although anyone who's played a few MMORPGs probably won't see any real surprises here. It's mostly open, seamless, and includes quite a few landmarks for you to see. Monsters freely roam around with very few static spawn points, although they generally stay in their own areas most of the time.
Some of the game's monsters are made up of some excellent skins and models; they really show off the detail in the game. Special effects are also quite flashy, but not so huge that they get in the way of seeing the action. There's no doubt in my mind that L2 is one of the best looking massive multiplayer games on the market now.
Lineage 2 plays in a fairly similar way to not only the first game, but to the more simple online RPGs like Diablo 2. Not only is the control scheme fairly similar, but the combat starts out very easy-to-handle as well. Despite that, this is the most brutal and most potentially frustrating MMORPG that I've ever seen. Killing monsters isn't exactly tough, but it's other aspects of the game that will leave players asking why they're still bothering.
Anyone who has played Everquest for a while knows that reaching the highest level will take the average player months of 8-hours-per-day sessions to achieve. Lineage 2 actually takes longer than this, and it does this with a "soft cap" system where the experience slows down so much that most players will never see the game's highest level. Of course, some will achieve that anyway, but it will take them a matter of months just to finish the game's last few levels.
