It is official - Lineage II servers have been live for a few hours now.  We have switched the status of this game from "Beta" to "Final" and we now hope that all people who are playing this game will submit fair and honest reviews at MMORPG.COM!

We wish NCSoft great success with their new release and look forward to covering this exciting product!

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- MMORPG.COM Staff -

Hello Fellow Gamers,

 

I was involved in the closed and open beta's of Lineage II. As with every game I have experienced, L2 had both positive and negative aspects. First off, the graphics in this game are the most advanced I have experienced thus far. The various tree and shrub models were enough to breathe life into an amazging landscape. The architecture of buildings, castles, and dungeons were incredible. Character models, while limited in customization, were fluid in movement and attack graphic. The emotes left something to be desired. Although the graphics were amazing, with optimum settings, lag was a serious issue, but only in massivly populated areas. Going into town was usually a neccesary annoyance. Large groups of people would set up personal stores in the towns. This had the effect of causing massive lag when you were merely trying to sell your gathered loot items or training with your class master.

The quest system was enjoyable. I personally completed several of the lower level quests and was pleased with the reward. The time you spend questing is not spent for some less than exciting item with limited usefulness. As a matter of fact, your characters career choice was directly tied to a quest at 20th and 40th level. I found this to give a sense of accomplishment upon completion.

The crafting system was a drawback in my opinion. Only Dwarves are allowed to craft items in L2. Even those dwarves who chose to give the crafting system a try found it to be extremely difficult. In addition to the components for the crafted items, you had to acquire the pattern or recipe. Many of the items needed for crafting were drop items only. I heard many dwarves say that it was as expensive to craft items as it was to just buy them from a merchant. Which leads me into the next thing I want to discuss. This game is extremely money driven.

The nicer weapons and armor are usually way out of the casual players price range. A long sword for example, cost 160,000 adena (or gold). The average mob dropped between 90 to 136 adena, and not every mob dropped loot. There would be periods where I would kill up to 10 mobs with no adena drops. Don't get overly discouraged though. It is possible to raise enough cash to buy the items you want, and usually other players are selling them for a few thousand under merchant prices.

Player killing was addressed in an interesting way. Most die hard player killers hated it, and they will tell you that there was no benefit to being a player killer. This is not entirely true. It was possible to duel in the game. If some one attacked you, you had a fair chance of defending yourself or running back to safety. If you decided to fight, both parties' names would turn purple. In this way, neither person gained negative karma. If someone attacked you, and you stood there and let them kill you, they would gain negative karma and their name would become red. The more karma you gained, the darker your name would be. This allowed other players to attack the PK without penalty to themselves. I read one post where the PK thought this was unfair. I think its extremely fair. If you kill a player, and become an outlaw, there is a price on your head. Any red named PK I saw get close to me, I immediately launched a preemptive attack. After all, how do I know you won't attack me? Now, when you get killed by a PK, you lose experience. When you kill a PK, you don't gain any experience, but they lose some. I felt this was a fair and balanced way to deal with the issue. On the topic of benefits to being a player killer, the higher your negative karma, the greater chance you had of loot drops on mobs you killed. I don't know if any PK's actually got to test this aspect of the game, because the community seemed to police PK's extremely well. I have to admit, I actually started to feel sorry for them towards the end of beta.

There was a map and compass in the game so getting lost was not an issue. Exploring the different towns and areas was enjoyable. Many of the mobs do resemble other mobs of similar ilk in other areas, but there were enough different mobs to keep me interested during my 60 days of play.

The game interface, mouse driven, took some getting use too. Being an old EQ and DAOC player, this was a challenge for me to adapt too. It didn't take me too long to adjust however, and I gave the different interface a chance. After becoming proficient with it, I found it to be rather fluid. I could change weapons with a simple click and attack, special attack, run, sit, loot, all on the hot key bar.  Don't give up on the game just because you aren't used to the interface. Give it a chance and get proficient with it before you judge.

Character customization was extremely limited. First you picked your race, Elf, Dark Elf, Human, Dwarf, or Orc. Second, you picked your gender, male or female. After that, you were limited from two to four hair choices, two face choices, and two hair color choices. The graphics are impressive enough to allow you to look beyond these limitations, but it is a little annoying that just about everyone looks exactly alike.

Overall, I enjoyed the game experience. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best, I would score Lineage II as an eight. I would recommend this game to a first time gamer or even a gamer who is looking for a different experience. Pick it up and give it a try.

 

Grym Goblinsbane

 I have to agree with Grym, his review does justice to the game. The new patch (25MB) can be downloaded using the same beta client.

Only Time will Tell where the Wulf has Thread

an odd spot to put a review. But good work.

I haven't played L2, but from what you describe on PvP it'll be interesting to see how it does. What you describe is a non-PvP solution, sure you can attack someone but if you do your more or less done. You might feel that's a fair system, but it's counter productive to PvP (witch I assume is what you want). I could run long on this but I won't.

Since L1 was a open PvP game, it'll be interesting to see how well L2 does.

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