Review: Lineage 2 Prelude
by Shelrabbi

The endless grind.

Leveling in Lineage 2 is being heralded in many game reviews as unduly laborious and just plain stupid. People who say this are speaking without thought. If they paused to consider their words, they would say something more like “I’m not a hardcore player and this is a hardcore game.” There is something wrong with harshly criticizing a game simply because it doesn’t taste like your particular brand of sauce. There is something wrong with the amount of time these reviewers have spent playing the game. But rest assured that Lineage 2 has been framed well around the level grind and there is nothing wrong with the time it takes to level. As such, these nonobjective reviews are as irrelevant to your play experience as 3dMark scores are to video card image quality.

Often is the case, however, that exaggerations are based on harsh truths; you won’t see any real rewards in this game for close to 100 hours, which is about how long it takes to reach level 20 and the first profession change (read: reward). You won’t ever meaningfully participate in a castle siege unless you’re associated with a clan. Your clan won’t be able to participate in a castle siege unless its leader has spent 2,080,000 skill points, almost enough to buy every skill from level 1-44 for a Dark Elf Spellhowler. To attain a level 5 clan (the highest level) requires another 3.2 million, all of which he has to earn through the normal XP grind. He’ll also need to spend just shy of 50,000,000 adena. When this game is called hardcore, people aren’t being flip. This is the single most challenging MMO I’ve ever seen including EverQuest.

But once you’ve harvested the rewards you no longer question the amount of effort you exerted in the field. You may question whether you have the desire to put that effort into any game, but if you make the choice to go forward and have the will to stick to that choice (a great amount of will is required) you will never be disappointed at the end of your trek. You will join up with a clan who will attempt to do nothing short of take over the world. Your clan will make enemies and go to war with them. Your clan will pledge fealty to the leaders of other clans (or have other clans pledge fealty to your leader) in an effort to make an alliance strong enough to stand against all who oppose you. You will attack and defend castles along with hundreds of other players simultaneously, the conquerors of which can then levy taxes, control spawn rates and decide who the guards attack for all lands under the castle’s influence. Once Chronicle 1 is implemented you’ll even be able to take and hold Aden castle, the owner of which can levy taxes across the entire continent of Aden.

Unfortunately, no one who has only played a North American localized version of Lineage 2 can give you an experience based description of the high level game play. I can tell you that, even though it took me far longer to reach level 20 then it has in any MMO I’ve played in the last 10 years, I didn’t mind doing it once I got there. After making the profession change to Dark Wizard I now level, gain adena, and gain skill points about 12 times faster then I did before I got level 20. My abilities are more fun, more powerful, and I feel my character is an order of magnitude more capable in any situation then before I flipped the switch. This is the indicator I’m using when I claim that the reward at level 60 is worth the effort. The truth is I could be totally wrong.

The Rating.

Graphics – 8.5

As you’ve no doubt seen or heard by now, the graphics in Lineage 2 are outstanding. The bears look like Ben on crack, the flying imps look like Wado, and the trees look like they’re straight out of my grandparents’ backyard. The environmental realism that the Unreal engine provides is unparalleled in an online world to date. The power of the engine is also impressive though my Nvidia 5700XT was brought to its knees when rendering more then 40 or 50 player characters. This issue is something that is supposed to be addressed in Chronicle 1 but I would wait to see the results before assuming NC Soft has found the fix. Many MMOs have come out in the past promising good frame rates under incredibly high load and not one has delivered. I hope NC Soft is the first.

The difference in image quality with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on, even at only 2x, is incredible. The smoothness of the textures and the way art assets contrast and blend makes Aden feel used and visceral. Without the graphics turned up, however, Lineage 2 begins to have problems. If you turn the character view distance down you end up not being able to see monsters just 20 yards from you. If you happen to walk those 20 yards the monster may attack you before you can even see him. That makes it imperative for accurate gameplay that you keep the view distance up but then lower end systems will have incredibly poor framerates in areas with large groups of players. Newbie areas become slide shows of character progression and if your server is under heavy load you’re just glancing at polaroids.

The actual down-turning of the graphical settings is a bit of a hassle. There are no advanced filtering settings anywhere within L2 which means you have to do your real image VS. performance tweaking outside the game. This would be less of a problem if Lineage 2 didn’t have a nasty memory leak that forces you to reboot every time you logout or suffer horrible hits to your frames. You can, however, change the rest of the standard graphical settings package from inside the game. Shadows, multiple view distance settings, texture levels, all the usuals are in there. The manual has a nice, basic description of how each setting will affect your performance. A check box to automatically reduce all settings comes in handy when going in to town but that kills your view distance and locks it making it impractical while hunting. While I won’t dock points for NC Soft not innovating enough, I find myself unimpressed with the graphical manipulation their options gui allows you.

Of course, all of these problems are promised to be fixed in Chronicle 1.

Gameplay – 9

Lineage 2 has what I call a semi-intuitive interface. The mouse controls, such as walking, attacking and interacting with objects and NPCs, are all very straight forward and exactly what you’d expect. The keyboard interface, however, is woefully inadequate and borderline mysterious. You can’t remap anything on the keyboard or mouse. The default controls have antiquated concepts like using the Function keys (F1-F10) for your quickbar. To switch pages requires alt + a function key. To move using the keyboard requires use of the arrow keys. The chat box can’t be moved from the bottom left corner or expanded horizontally and you only get one. You can’t move your compass either. This is just not an interface that belongs in a game where everything else is done so well.

That said, I haven’t noticed any other glaring problems in the gameplay. In fact, the more I understand how L2 works the more I find myself being impressed. For example, monsters will randomly pause before and while running after you. This makes both kiting and pulling more interesting and challenging without adding guda like flecks to the artificial intelligence routines. On the other end of this is a “monster aggro” timer; if you don’t damage a monster for 60 seconds he takes off. This limits a mage’s ability to kite and use area-of-effect spells on 100 monsters at once without imposing limits on the number of characters (NPC or otherwise) that a single spell blast can hit.

Combat is based on rounds and not twitch, but the visual representation of combat is as accurate as I’ve seen. When you hit something you know you hit it and usually you’ll hit it when your text box says you did. You can queue up a single action which makes things easier without allowing heavy automation mid-combat. There will be no taking showers while your avatar beats up an end boss. You can even queue movement in a particular direction or to a particular spot using the mouse, a serious life saver when you’re kiting and hit a lag spike. Combat feels like it was streamlined to allow you to focus more on killing things and less on the little annoyances that we’re all used to.

I’d call the combat engine a damn good start. I’ve never seen fights between a female dwarf and a giant, blubber-like mass look so sexy, but they lack the level of melee depth in games like Dark Age of Camelot. Hit locations and melee styles would be a nice thing to see in future Chronicles and would place combat in L2 squarely at the top of the heap.

Sound – 9

Conclusion.

Brutally Hardcore would be a good quote I think. Lineage 2 is an unforgiving game and makes no apologies, a laudable stance in the dollar-whipped, weak-willed world of MMO Live Teams. To tell a player in the current MMO climate that if they die they will potentially lose hours of work and items worth millions of adena then tell them they have to die hundreds of times a week to play the game at high levels is not perceived as a recipe for success. NC Soft has put their balls on the chopping block and slid their wallet underneath for support; if the axe falls they’ll take a hit to their pride and their bank account. << Previous Page (Beginning)