by NCsoft

Member Reviews: Review Lineage II Yourself!

Pros
•  major updates in the form of Chronicles 
•  beautiful graphics
•  nice beginning tutorial   
•  Castle Sieges
•  uber monster
•  focus on clans

Cons
•  extremely limited character customization 
•  laggy in crowded areas
•  sluggish controls  
•  time investment is too high to get to the good stuff  
•  lacks strong hook to get you excited about the game early    

The Bottom Line - Hardcore gamers should enjoy all the content directed towards them, but casual and even regular gamers will be turned off by the game's very slow pace. 

Link: Official Site

Review

Let's say someone asked you whether Lineage  or EverQuest had more subscribers worldwide. If you replied "What is Lineage?" you would not be in the minority if you lived in the United States. Surprisingly, Lineage hammered EverQuest in terms of subscribers due its enormous popularity in Korea. However, Lineage did not make a great impact when it finally made it to the U.S. in 2001.

Now, the sequel is being released in the U.S. from the start with vastly improved graphics. This game is truly beautiful to behold and you can see that beauty as early as the log-in screen believe it or not. You are instantly greeted with a lush scene that almost feels like a real paradise. The beautiful graphics do not decline one bit in the actual game either. However, you will run across my first complaint with this game not more than few seconds after that gorgeous log-in screen. For such an amazing looking game, you have very little control over what your character looks like. For example, I created an Orc and I saw dozens of carbon copies of myself walking around villages. Not exactly a way to go about getting people interested in their online avatars. 

Moving back to getting started in the game, Lineage 2 does a good job of walking you through all the steps of learning the basics of the game. You are assigned a few mundane tasks and you carry them out with hints along the way. When doing these tasks you will notice that your character moves rather awkwardly. Maybe the best way to describe it would be like a hunchback. In addition, the interface feels a little awkward as well since you have to click on an NPC or monster twice to do anything.   

In the game itself, you will notice a very vibrant world that is usually fairly busy. It is in the real busy areas that you will experience significant amounts of lag. A few times I was even booted off the server because it got so bad. Once you get past this lag, you will start hunting with training weapons and SLOWLY gain levels and money. I was somewhat amazed at how expensive all the equipment was even after gaining 4 or 5 levels. Thus, you will need to spend an enormous amount of time in Lineage 2 if you want to do anything worthwhile in the game. In fact, this is one of the slowest paced MMORPGs that I have played yet. 

However, Lineage 2 does have a lot to offer MMORPGers besides just great looking graphics. Look for massive updates known as Chronicles on a regular basis to provide a nice steady supply of new content. The first Chronicle finally delivered one of the more hyped features of Lineage 2, Castle Sieges. Castle Sieges can occur on 5 castles and you must make appointments for them. Unlike other massively multiplayer games such as Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online, and PlanetSide, these high profile events are performed by player-created clans instead of preset factions.

Although special events like Castle Sieges garner more attention, the feature that interested me the most was having one ultimate monster, Antharas the Land Dragon. Yes, millions of video and PC games have had an ultimate end boss in the past but I like the fact that its being done in a high profile way on a MMORPG. Besides, players that have spent enough time to get strong enough to face this monster deserve to have one clearly definable uber confrontation. Due to this extremely high time investment, Lineage 2 will only likely appeal to the hardcore gamer.

Game Ogre's Rating (out of 10):

8.75

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