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I opened up The Lineage 2 packaging with a great deal of anticipation. This is the game with the bad reputation. I hear Joan Jett singing <i> “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation” </i> in my head while I open the unremarkable box and the two CD’s. I started the install, made note of the time and sat back expecting it to be long. It was. The patches took hours. It took about four and a half hours over two days to get it installed and configured. I had to update my version of Direct X to 9.0 c using a Direct X diagnostic.
I enjoy playing games as magic users. My favorite spells are usually lightening and fireballs. So at the character selection screen I chose a dark elf mystic. Lots of elves. Way too many elves for my taste. Elves are an automatic -.5. There are five different races which are humans, elves, dark elves, orcs, and dwarves. In character creation you can pick between very few faces and hair styles. It is limited. The character classes are fighter or mystic.
I like the sexy dark and gothic look of my character. But whoa, this is an adult fun game. The dark elf woman is ‘dressed’ in a variety of belts that look like they were hanging from the ceiling of a bondage boutique clothing store. The dark characters run around in a bent over submissive posture that leaves nothing to the imagination.
I instruct my game avatar to walk everywhere. She adopts a more dignified posture. With which to walk into walls, and get stuck in the gothic architecture, Why do I always end up swimming (and drowning) in these games?
The graphics are one thing. And the art is another. It looks as though two different teams worked on this game. The characters are very detailed. They are servile and depressive looking. The backgrounds look very dull. But the buildings are well done and full of unexpected lovely touches. The graphics are a somber blend of bland bleak unimaginative non textures of mossy gray green. There are no distinguishable plants. There are non descript trees. The rocks are climbable, and you can fall off cliffs. I fall far and often in this game.
It is good to finally see a game that embraces the colors of night fall. It is dark and the twilight is lit by a rising full moon. Another song comes to mind “because the night…”. I miss the much easier controls of Guild Wars which I had been playing earlier in the day. Not for the last time.
It looks like it was painted with water colors. Rather than rendered and realistic with millions of sharpened pixels. I cranked up the resolution from default to get better water effects. I have to deduct a bit for the way that the graphics are uncohesive instead of uniform. The game will make up for it in other ways. There are the fluttering turquoise Bloody Pixies. They serve no purpose but to twinkle with chimes and color.
What some American critics don’t get is that this is a sort of art of a type that we saw in the 1990’s from Boris Vallejo. It is fantasy art. The dark demeaning world is another realm entirely. It doesn’t objectify women. It objectifies alien females on another world that has different values from ours. To wish to censor something like this production of an artfully sinful paradise is to censor the very premise of “what if?”.
Sound
The best thing about this game is the sound design. It has creepy background music for the dark elven lands. It booms and bangs, The sounds of war echo in the distance. Is it cannons or balliste? Clashes can be heard from far off. A wide variety of bird song tracks are used along with different insects that flutter and buzz. The bird calls change with the terrain. Realistic sounds of the ocean and shore birds are featured near the outskirts of the rather limited map. But it was pleasant to perch my avatar there and watch the virtual water and hear the sounds of the sea when it was too hot to go out. At dusk there are night sounds of crickets and om chanting emanates eerily from behind the dark elven temple. Out hunting there are the wind chimes and bells that tinkle when you near a Bloody Pixie. The Imps make weird clicky noises. The game makes a great screen saver to mellow out with in between hunts.
Game-play
Day seven. Once again I am out walking and taking out goblins, wolves, bats and orcs. I’ve learned to hide from other players behind large tree trunks. Or inside rock formations. I tried out the expensive teleporter from the dark elven city. At the school of dark arts fell into the maze trap over and over until I clicked my way out of it. this apparently made the sadistic game god happy, because I was rewarded with a percussion and drum riff.
I have to take my time playing this game. And writing the review. My character is toddling around wearing high heeled boots and bondage harnesses. There is alot of walking to be done in this game. It will take a long time to get around. My character teeters and jiggles along.
I enjoy art. I enjoy body art. Big busted art models look attractive and chic. I still remember the uproar caused by Marilyn Monroe, Raquel Welch, Linda Carter, Jacqueline Bisset, Bo Derek, Madonna and Pamela Anderson. This all too shall pass. We bought all the products and services these ladies had to offer, and promptly ignored the moralisms. Burlesque and fetishism are part of all entertainment genres. I don’t find nudity intimidating. I don’t mind adult themes. I have no kids at my house though. I never went the model wife and kids route. I wanted to have a good time. And I did.
But no matter how much yoga I do, or Tae-Bo I work out with, I still would never feel comfortable in a BDSM outfit hunting wolves and chasing after orcs. I have worn chain maille though - but that is another story. So on the third and fourth day I continued to lurch around attempting the arduous process of leveling up in this game. Imagine Vegas show girls out hurtling little tornados at raccoons …
I feel as though I could easily play this game for the 90 days I signed up for. It is a wench of a game and it revels in it. I read the book. I still have no clue. I read many message boards and watched trailers from the game. It is something about elves … oh hell. The whole atmosphere of this game reminds me of the Drow Underdark world of the Forgotten Realms series. It does seem to be heavily influenced by those stories.
The quest problem is there is no mission log. You get up to 100 slots for skills, actions and spells. The quest system is terrible. You can’t tell which NPCs have quests. The quests they offer most of the time was beyond my level. So there is plenty of useless running around and pointlessly looking at chat windows.
Guild Wars ruined me. The prettier younger sister of Lineage 2 is where all the glaring flaws are made up for. I can see things in Lineage 2 that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t played Guild Wars first. Many things that went wrong in L2 are right in GW. The two differ in their approach to MMOG gaming. They offer totally different ways to play online. Guild wars is designed for safe easy, and fun game-play. It is a gorgeous world and it is fast enough to compare to a console game with all the depth of a game that is in a persistent server world.
L2 forces you to take your time and spend several days and many hours going through each step forward in the game. It may take you a month to accomplish anything. You can’t play this game alone either. It is designed where player vs player killing is about all that there is to do. Players have to group up and clan. Then they attack large targets such a castles and dragons together. Lineage 2 is more of a siege war game than a mission oriented game.
L2 and City of Heros (CoH) came out at about the same time last year and they both had successful launches apparently. NC Soft has several successful and diverse offerings for every level of gamer and for every audience. Lineage 2 is NC Soft’s naughty goth child. A very bad boy or girl. The net is rife with complaints about this game. It is not for everyone. But even with all of this going on it still doesn’t make it a bad game.
<i>”It’s too hard.”</i> It’s intentional. The game is largely a time waster while you enjoy the art and music. Doing the same tasks over and over.
<i> The PK’ers are mean.”</i>
In this game you don’t play against critters and monsters, you play against people.
<i> Gold is to hard to get.</i>
Yeah it is isn’t it? This is one harsh alternate reality isn’t it?
Gold prices are extraordinarily high for equipment. Level one swords, armor or clothing are costly. You won’t have a full set of gear until you reach at least level 10. Healing recovery is slow but I have a self heal ability, leveling up is legendarily slow. When you can find quests that are right for your level they are also long and boring. You have no choice but to do the “Farming”. I had to kill 50 Ashen Wolves to start with. Then there were no quests for several levels above me. so I had to just go and kill those raccoon dogs and work my way up.
There’s been a problem with bots in this game. Probably because of the class struggle with the gold being so hard to acquire in this game. The worst thing about Lineage II are players who “farm” items to sell for money on eBay with bots. They will also steal your kills and if you get in their way, sometimes they wont think twice about killing you too. How could this get any worse? Some players input macros on their characters so they become bots.
Lineage II may turn off casual players who like to quest, and explore alone or in small parties. Other players may attack you for no reason. Death penalties are very high and you can be knocked down several levels. There is nothing to stop your character from being stalked since the characters are maintained on individual servers. That is another improvement that came in Guild Wars.
It does have a unique PVP system based on Karma. Players who kill other players are flagged in red. Red players can be killed by any other player in the game. Purple is used for players who hit but don’t kill other players or players who defend themselves against a purple player’s attacks. They claim sections of the world for their farming and PK anyone who attempts to hunt there.
When I ran into other hunters, I would casually turn on my heel and begin to hunt in another direction. Deliberately picking out easy prey that I could take down with one shot so that I don’t look like easy prey myself. And if I happen to find extra gold on the ground carelessly left by other hunters I might grab a pile or two as I surreptitiously sneak away with out open conflict.
This game is interesting and a bit bizzare. Different character classes will have different impressions of the game of course. The graphics are a mixed up melange. The sound is exceptional and the gameplay is mediocre and not fun. There are problems with chat, and just about all social aspects of the game. It is good in theory and there does need to be something for every taste in MMOG’s. Given its good points, and over looking some of the problems that are created by users and not the game itself, I give Lineage 2 a 7 out of 10.
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