Lineage 2 Review

Variety in the eye of the beholder
The only real respite you'll have in the game is found in the scenery. This game is beautiful, there's no other way to say it. The graphics are detailed, lush, and the atmosphere is brilliantly displayed from one zone to the next. There is almost no loading times in the game, except when entering some specific dungeons, or when teleporting from one village to the next and those are relatively short. Walking around the world is never boring. Ruins are generously scattered around the landscape, mountains loom invitingly in the distance, then tower menacingly above when up close.

The Unreal engine that powers the game might make the game beautiful to look at, but it does greatly tax a system's resources. Of course, a nasty memory leak problem doesn't help, and makes it almost necessary to reboot the machine once in a while to keep one's performance at peak.

The greatest graphical achievements of the game lies in the avatars and their equipment. Armour is depicted with exquisite detail, and makes your anime-inspired avatar look extremely cool. Although it should be mentioned that some female avatars are displayed in a less than gratifying way… Dark Elves immediately come to mind, and a great number of young boys can be found playing them just because of… that. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it just makes the game seem a little juvenile at times.

As good as the visuals are, they still sometimes seem like they were pulled off a cookie-cutter. Two characters of the same race and same gender have about a 1 in 4 chance to look exactly the same if they wear the same armour. If they don't look alike, it's probably because their hair is a little different… I guess that variety is the price to pay for beauty?

Sound is subtly excellent. The sounds of weapons smacking your opponent is greatly satisfying. The background noises are absolutely mesmerizing when you take a pause to really listen: crickets singing in the hot afternoon sun, birds chirping happily in the forests, ominous booming of gongs in the Dark Elf mountainous regions all make you stop and look for the source. Of course the magic is that there are no birds to be seen, but their aural presence is quite magical and immersive. The orchestral music is equally as good, and only comes up when needed (entering a city or an important landmark, for instance).

Conclusion
Whether the current player base will stick with the game or not remains to be seen. Most players currently are hard at work trying to get higher and higher in level so that they can actually make a difference when castle sieges start, which should happen once Chronicle 1 is released around June 28. I doubt that the imminent release of the much anticipated update, which was originally promised to be available at launch, will make a huge difference unless NCSoft gets cracking down on the bots even more seriously then they have been so far.

Why? This game is so very much dependant on the quality of gear a player has that it's borderline offensive. As outlined before, the game catches the player in a vicious circle of grinding: grind for XP, grind for money, then grind for better gear to be better at grinding XP. The fact that a level 20 player who is fitted with excellent gear will beat a player 5 levels above him if the latter isnt outfitted as well is proof enough of this. And because Adena is so hard to get, this unfortunately encourages the more competitive players to actually buy their Adena with real money off of eBay… which in turn encourages some people to aggressively farm the Adena to sell it for real cash. This circle isn't vicious anymore, it's downright scary.

This isn't to say that L2 isn't fun. I had quite a lot of fun while grouping with good people. At the same time, I've almost always had fun when grouping, no matter how poor the game. The fact of the matter is that people are fun, sometimes despite the game's mechanics, and that might confuse some people into thinking that the game is fun. L2 is not fun in its current state. It has some quality, but unless some things change it won't get any better.

And please don't think that I'm feeling this way because I'm a "carebear" player, or because I've been frustrated by a few player-killers. There's a way to play and enjoy a game that forces you to constantly look over your shoulder for fear of being killed, and I do enjoy that. That's actually fun! It adds a whole new perspective to playing an MMORPG which is sometimes seriously lacking in other non-PvP games. But because of all the players farming like drones in L2 it's sometimes impossible to enjoy yourself. The farmers have so much Adena that they can afford the best equipment, which in turn makes them more powerful. The people that make a living out of using bots and farming Adena are sometimes aggressively territorial… You can only imagine what happens when you suddenly "invade" one of their preferred farming spot because a quest asks you to kill the mob that they are hunting. As you level up spotting farmers and bots becomes less of an issue, but most new players get discouraged long before they ever get beyond level 20. It's all very unhealthy, and does not promote quality gaming for any type of player.

It's true that L2 is more of a hardcore achiever's type of game. If you have only 4 or 5 hours a week to spend on a game, you shouldn't even waste it by trying L2 as it will frustrate you beyond belief. The achievers will be in heaven in L2 though, as there is always more to get, bigger foes to crush, new places to go. But everything is achieved through a series of grinding mechanics that just don't justify a $15 monthly price tag. If castle sieges are worthy of this grind it will make the fee at least a little more bearable.

There's so much I didn't talk about too… The less-than-adequate control scheme that centers around a point-and-click movement interface; the sometimes irreverent and very racist community of players (and these exist on both the Asian and American sides); the lack of clear feedback from the developer as to what is happening with their game (there are updates to the client for which there are no notes to be readily found); the elusive crafting skills only available to dwarves...

It's sad to say, but I've told myself that I have to be a little less forgiving with MMORPGs this year. We're getting into the third generation of games, the genre has matured, and now we have to stop being lenient toward games that don't measure up. L2 is one of them. If a game is fun and entertaining without being innovative, that is at least something. But not L2. All it does is hook you up with a terrible addiction to gather more, to get the bigger sword, to get to the next level. It never throws you a bone. There is never a feeling of success. It's like the act where a clown bends down to get his hat from the ground, but trips and kicks it out of the way every time so that he keeps running after it. If you get that analogy, you'll understand what L2 is all about.

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