Lineage 2

Beta tester Richard Clifford evaluates this newly launched MMORPG.

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I’m a relative newcomer to the whole massive online role-playing game. It was the release of Star Wars Galaxies late last year that presented a universe too alluring to resist. During the two months I was with the game, I played an overweight Mon Calamari called Racharde LeCrepe, and despite not even being able to kill butterflies without having to sit down I had delusions of becoming a kung-fu fighter/chef in the vein of Casey Ryback. I also moonlighted as a dancing wookie, called Ferrago no less, and put on a few ad-hoc firework displays as a Zabrak artisan. Part of what kept me entertained in Galaxies was the sheer variety of roles you could assume and the way they all interacted in the world. This struck me as the main reason for a game to be massively multiplayer. The skill system did lack a certain focus and direction, realistically any game that allows you specialise in entrees is perhaps spreading itself a bit thin.

Fast forward now to Lineage II – The Chaotic Chronicle, whose predecessor was a massive hit in the Korean market with over a million subscribers. I recently played it throughout the open beta as a dwarf, and in comparison to Galaxies it is singularly focused on combat. Everything is about combat. From the moment you enter the game you hit stuff, and you’ll keep on hitting stuff over and over again. There is no diversion from this path and predictably for this genre it is one that is endless. With this in mind it was somewhat bemusing to find a game that has a welcoming and pleasant beginning with a clear end game system in mind, yet for the intervening steps there exists a vacuum of entertainment.

Before getting your feet wet you have to choose one of the five races, human, night elf, dark elf, orc and dwarf. Dwarves can only be fighters but they also have the option to craft items. Other races have the choice between a fighter and a magician class. As far as customisation goes it is fairly limited in scope. Obviously you can decide to be male or female. There are a few different faces to choose between and some hairstyles. Your height and build aren’t adjustable though. The trade off with this is that the animations for each race are particularly well done with distinctive styles for each. And armour and is tailored to fit for each race so that you don’t end up with that awkward ‘one suit fits all’ mannequin quality. In theory this limited amount customisation also helps reduce network lag as you have less information about each player to transmit.

The game has a very slick and simplistic interface. An inventory window allows you to equip/un-equip armour, weapons and jewellery as well as use any healing potions or escape scrolls. The standard quick key bar, used with the function keys, lets you customise which actions you commonly use, like attack or rest. You can cycle through different sets of these for any situation, though in this case one list tends to be more than enough. Movement in the game operates in an interesting way, rather than moving with the cursor keys, though that is an option, you simply click on the ground and your character will run to that spot. The pathing system doesn’t negotiate corners very well, and getting in and out of buildings in towns can be problematic so is best accomplished with the cursor keys. The majority of the time it works really well and when wandering through the large impressive landscape you can click off into the distance and then casually swing the camera around to enjoy the sights.

Powered by the Unreal engine the game looks quite stunning, and it’s scalable for many different systems. The size of what has been created is genuinely impressive. There are three main islands in the game; one for humans; one for dwarves and orcs; and the main island that is where the elven races start. The main island also contains the various castles and towns. If you wanted to walk from one side to the other of the main island it would take you a good twenty minutes, it’s quite vast.

As you progress outward from your starting point the monsters get progressively harder. You can always tell how difficult a monster is relative to your own level by the colour of its name, with blue being easy, white equal and red very hard. Some monsters attack without provocation but most do not, particularly at the early stages. You get experience and skill points depending on the difficulty of the monster you kill, and naturally fighting the right level for the best progression becomes the order of the day. Experience points are for going up levels. Skill points let you gain and upgrade a few specific skills for your class. At certain levels you have to decide which path you want your character to take which specifies which skills you can get next. The number of skills is limited though and nothing that fundamentally alters the hack and slash game play.

Dwarves are the only race that can craft items. Instead of the usual game mechanic whereby you have to churn out lots and lots of items to gain experience in crafting, Lineage is all about acquiring recipes and materials. Everything you kill has a chance of dropping some type of resource, like animal skin or coal, and dwarves gain a special ability to sweep a dead corpse for extra stuff. In order to make an item you first have to find the recipe that is also dropped from monsters. So there is no failing to craft an item and wasting resources. It would be great except for one small problem; it’s nigh on impossible to actually make anything. Assuming you actually have the recipe, finding the right monster for a particular resource is a case of trial and error and to make an item of any real value requires a ton of resources. For example say a sword might require 100 units of coal and 100 units of iron. Given the drop rates of the resources that means you’ll have to kill at bare minimum 300 monsters and probably more in the region of 500. It just takes forever and a day to get these things.