Lineage 2 Mini-Review

I didn't like it.



Okay, that was maybe a bit TOO mini. :) Lets get into the details:

Two weeks ago I wrote of Horizons, that it is a game full of good ideas, marred by a bad graphics engine. Lineage 2 (L2) is just the opposite: The graphics engine is good, delivering crisp graphics without lag. But the game is full of bad ideas. The ultimate bad idea, and L2's claim to fame, is unrestricted PvP. You can attack your fellow players anywhere, at any time. That will give you bad karma, and you shouldn't do it right next to a guard. But the karma thing is easy to repair, the guards and blood pixies only protect a very small area, so if griefing and player killing is your thing, Lineage 2 is a paradise. On the other hand, if you object to losing xp and possibly even items to any random passerby killing you with one blow, because he is 10 levels higher than you and you are resting from a combat, L2 is not so much fun any more.

Lineage 2 has at least the option to create non-PvP servers, even if none existed during beta. So how does the game look if you remove PvP? Still not very attractive. Well, speaking of attractive, the character model of the female dark elf will probably attract some male players, she looks like an actress in a bad porn movie. The character models of all races are pretty enough. Unfortunately the developers decided to give each of them a unique running style. The dark elves run with their upper bodies bent forward to a nearly horizontal position, the orcs run like zombies, with their upper bodies totally stiff. The only really well animated race are the dwarves. Combat animations are usually good. So aside from those minor niggles about character animation, the graphics are one of the good points of Lineage 2.

The other good points are combat and quests. Nothing innovative here, but solid execution. Combat is fast, which is a definitive plus. Other than that, combat is the usual mix of an auto-attack with the occasional special attack thrown in. Quests are likewise pretty much standard, you talk to a NPC, he sends you off to kill 40 wolves, you return and get a reward. No animations in the quests storytelling like in FFXI, but a few of the stories are actually funny. The NPC asking you to kill the 40 wolves is Little Red Riding Hood, now clearly demented from being the only survivor of the wolf eating her family, and speaking with her dead grandmother. Quests have a minimum level, which is a good idea, so you don't try to go on a dragon-killing quest at low levels. Another nice touch is a NPC guide for new players, telling them what mobs they can kill at their level, and pointing out the first two NPC that give quests.

All this monster killing and questing leads to you gaining experience and leveling up. At least at the start you level up fast enough. But these are actually just pseudo-levels. Your hitpoints and other stats go up, but you do not get the opportunity to make any decision regarding your character development. Only after you gained level 5 to 7, are you able to buy the first skill with the skill points you gain in parallel to xp. Spellcasters start with 1 or 2 spells, and get their first new spell at level 7. At the start there are only 2 character classes, fighter or spellcaster, and only at level 20 can you specialize into one of two or three subdivisions. Many levels later there is another subdivision, so you are moving up some sort of character classes tree. All in all character development is unsatisfying, because there are very few decisions to make, and development is very slow.

This impression of being a very slow game continues when looking at tradeskills. Only dwarves can create items, being able to gain the first trade skill at level 5. But gaining that skill means spending all the skill points you accumulated up to then, and allows you only to create level 1 items. The only way to gain resources is to kill monsters. Yes, not only hides, but also things like ore or coal are monster drops. And unless you specialize your dwarf into a special resource collector class at level 20, these resources are rather rare drops. As example, my dwarf leveled up to level 6 before he had enough skill points for the craft item skill. From all the mobs he killed up to then he had found only 2 resources. And for making a level 1 leather tunic he needed first a recipe (another rare drop), and then 44 resources. I never managed to get as far in the beta to make even a single item.

Of course you can speed that up by buying resources from other players. At which point you notice that the last 4 years of MMORPG game economy development have went unnoticed by Lineage 2. There is no such thing as an auction house or bazaar in Lineage 2. To sell something to another player, you have to be online. You can set up a "shop" for either buying or selling, by setting a price to the items in your inventory. Then you presumably go afk while your character sits in the middle of the village with a shop sign over his head, hoping for passerbyes buying your wares. If you aren't afk, you can do like many others and spam the shout channel with your Want-to-sell and Want-to-buy offers. The whole tradeskill and player economy is badly implemented and not much fun.

Lineage 2 is a very slow game. At the lower levels you can not do much, not even leave your starting island, as you can't afford the price of a ticket for a boat or teleport. Progressing isn't much fun in itself, the developers obviously hope that the rewards of reaching the higher levels will keep you motivated. And of course at higher levels you can more easily kill other players. This game is targeted at a group of hard core players, of which there seem to be many in the games country of origin, South Korea. In the United States the appeal of this will be limited to a much smaller group, and the usually more casual European players will probably not be interested at all.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:46 AM Permanent Link