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First Impression: Lineage 2
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My impressions and opinions on Lineage 2
I was never a big Lineage 1 fan, but when the announcement for Lineage 2 came down I was impressed by their site and their screenshots, thinking they were finally ready to join the next generation of MMORPG’s. I signed up for the beta the day they opened signups and started checking their site periodically for updates.
When I got my closed beta invitation at the beginning of March I was pumped. 3 of my friends also got into the beta at the same time so we all started playing together. The following is my impression of the game after about a month and a half of playing it (both in closed and open beta). I will break it down into 4 areas, the good, the bad, the ugly, and conclusion.
The Good
The game world is beautiful and smooth; the character models are definitely nice to look at. I try very hard not to let graphics have much weight (some, but not a lot) when I am reviewing a game. I firmly believe you can have awesome game play with crap graphics, but not awesome graphics with crap game play and still be fun. So I will focus on the mechanics that I feel were really good.
The combat system is very cool. It reminds me a lot of DAoC with a basic attack and special abilities that use up your mana power (MP). It is very fast, most fights under level 20 (I didn’t get passed 20 so I am not sure about above) were over in a matter of seconds. The combat animations were smooth and well performed. You can map inventory items to your quick bar that are associated with the F keys so you could easily switch from ranged weapon to sword when the mob got close. There is some considerable down time if you take on mobs around your level or higher, but I found that if you fight mobs you can easily kill you can kill non-stop and get better XP and Cash overall, even grouped. Overall, the combat system is by far my favorite part of the game.
The skill system is also pretty slick. I am a fan of simple and effective. I hate having 9 zillion things to choose from and having to worry about whether or not I am gimping my character by selecting one skill over another. The skill system is both level based and point based. You gain Skill Points when fighting mobs that you can spend on skills available at your level. For example, as a fighter you start out at lvl1 with no skills, at lvl 5 several skills become available that you can spend your SP on, like Power Strike that makes you do a high damage attack with a sword at a cost to your MP bar. You then proceed to “buy” skills with earned SP until you have all of them, or all the ones you want. Then at 10 more skills become available, some new, but a lot are just the next levels of previous ones. The beauty is that when you train something you tend to see a noticeable improvement in your overall effectiveness, whether it be a spell, a combat move, or enhanced defense. It helps give a real feeling of progression.
Another thing I like is how much equipment can help your effectiveness. Saving up for an awesome sword or bow or armor really paid off because they really improve your abilities. In games where they focus entirely on skills and not much on equipment I tend to feel like I shouldn’t even bother buying equipment. It was fun to complete a quest for a Sword that was WAY better than the noob one you started with, or get lucky and have a mob drop some item you could really use. Or even just save up enough to get the next best item from either a player or NPC store.
The Bad
Unfortunately, there are quite a few things I really dislike about the game. Although, none of them were enough to make me stop wanting to play (I still play and have fun), but they will probably influence my decision between this game and another I want to play after release.
The first thing is the chat system. In an MMORPG I feel that anything that helps you communicate with other people to be a KEY ingredient. If you are trying to coordinate communication not only with a guild, but friends, and the world as a whole you need a GOOD chat system. The chat system they have is very basic and totally ineffective for mass communication. Coming from EQ I am very spoiled in terms of chat abilities. Granted, EQ’s wasn’t very powerful to start with, but I thought the whole idea of a next generation MMORPG was to take where current MMORPG’s are now and improve them, not ignore the valuable strides they made. Like I mentioned before I played with 3 friends right from the start, and later 5 more started playing so our group was pretty big, but there was no good way to communicate.
To start with, the chat box isn’t wide enough and you can’t change it. It was clearly designed to support Asian languages and not English. You can expand it up and down, but that’s all. You can’t make new chat windows to allow you to focus on different types of chat at once, and they don’t have “user created” channels that would have GREATLY helped us communicate.
The tell (or whisper if you prefer) system is so behind the times as to be comical. You type “(player name) (message) to send one, which is fine and easy, but you can’t easily reply to a tell, you have to manually type in their name. It does, however, remember the last person you sent a tell to, but that becomes more of an encumbrance than a help when you are talking to 2 or more people at once. For example, I am talking Tom, I hit the “ key and it brings up “Tom, but now I get a tell from Sally, so I hit “ and it brings up “Tom again, so now I have to backspace to get rid of Tom, but if I hit the backspace twice to quickly it kills the whole line, so I have to type “ again which brings “Tom back up, ARRRGGHH! Then I backspace correctly and type in Sally to send her a tell. Now I need to talk to Tom again I hit “ and it brings up “Sally. Rinse, repeat. It’s so retarded I have to wonder who was in charge of designing that part.
Even when you select a different chat channel, like “group”, all it does is put a # automatically at the beginning of the text bar, so that if you are in group you have to backspace first then type “ if you want to give someone a tell. I can’t count how many times I saw something like this while in group, “”Soandso yeah, we are over here east of gludio, next to the river”.
The other annoying chat thing is that tells and group talk both show up over your head when you are typing, so nothing is ever private. An example is when someone comes running up asking to join our group, one member knows the person is a flake and reckless, so he tells the group, “Don’t invite him, he will probably get us all killed like he did to my group last night”. Ordinarily I would then think of a polite way to say we don’t need them, but they just saw this guy say that, now we have a huge fuggin argument going on that might turn into an actual fight all because the message wasn’t private like it should have been. The work around is to type garbage into your chat bar first since only the first 20 or so characters show up over your head, a player work around that SHOULD NOT be necessary.
The next major flaw is the quest system. First, there aren’t enough of them, at all. There are maybe a dozen worthwhile quests for each race in the current build. While that sucks, the absolute game killer is that they are COMPLETELY ungroup friendly; and not only that, a lot of them encourage player collision which helps to ruin the community.
I will use some examples to illustrate this. Our little group decides to do a quest that requires us to kill Stone Golems and collect some quest item. So the 4 of us go out and hunt golems for like 2 hours, 1 of us has 1 of the several items needed, another has 2, and the other 2 have none. This seems a little messed up so we figure it is broken and move on. Later I go back alone and solo some; I get all the items in no time at all. Turns out, if you are in a group you don’t get items if you don’t get the killing blow, and it also seems there is something to do with damage done because the more people in your group, the less likely a quest item will drop at all.
The next example involves the mushroom quest in the Elf City, you collect 10 spore sacs and get 2000 adena (money). Well, we have already discussed how being in a group hampers your ability to get the items so EVERYONE is soloing this quest, and EVERYONE is doing this quest since it pays so well. So what do we have? 100 people soloing in the same small area. What does that get you? A truck load of fights, name calling, spamming and griefing. It is so brutally stupid in design that I actually had to stop doing quests in order to enjoy the game. In DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot) everyone in the group got the quest item(s) when the mob(s) died. This actually encouraged grouping because people wanted to group in order to make the quest easier, so you would see chat like this:
Player1: “Hey, are you here for the Pirate Quest?”
Player2: “Yeah, just got here, waiting for him to show up”
Player1: “Cool, the 3 of us are doing it also, you wanna join us?”
Player2: “Yes, thank you very much”
A couple minutes go by and they complete the quest together.
Player1: “We are going to go do the Goblin Charm quest now, want to come with us?”
Player2: “YEAH! I tried it solo yesterday and couldn’t do it”
What happened here? A friendship was made, the community got a little stronger.
Here is a common occurrence in Lineage 2:
Player1: “WTF man, please don’t attack the mushroom I am fighting”
Player2: “FU, I attacked it first”
Player1: “No you didn’t I was casting a spell long before you got there”
Player2: “Don’t make me PK you, noob”
Player1: “Do it fucker, I dare you”
Player2: “Naw, a pussy like you wouldn’t fight back, ill just kill all your mushrooms”
Player1: “Scared to go red like the griefer you are? How about if I just heal all your mushrooms?”
Player3: “Hey, you noobs attacked my mushroom!”
Anyone else see the flaw here?
Of all the problems with the game this is the greatest. I took part in at least 6 quests that ended in collision with other players doing the same quest. That is a major flaw, and one that could be easily fixed.
Their control system isn’t bad, but it could use a lot of help. The click to move system is ok once you get used to it, but it has a lot of issues with collision with rocks, walls, pillars, etc. and sometimes when you are trying to get away you accidentally click a mob instead and start fighting it (I have died several times this way), or even worse accidentally click a mob someone else is fighting and hit it, now you have a huge argument on your hands. They do support using the arrow keys and WASD, but it is jinky and unrefined. A lot of times when using them my character would just stop responding.
I can’t say I am comfortable with the fact that you can drop items you are wearing when you get killed by a mob either. If you are in a group it doesn’t matter because usually a group member will pick it up for you, but in a game that encourages soloing by mechanics it really sucks to spend 30,000 adena on a pair of pants only to drop them on the ground an hour later when you die.
The economy is very bland (the vast majority of items enter the world by being bought from NPC vendors), but that is not necessarily a bad thing, as it does tend to be stable. The NPC’s dictate the worth of items, and the player crafting is limited to dwarves only and I have heard the system is pretty mediocre and not worth the effort.
The Ugly
The worst part of this game is the community. This is strictly based on the community I saw in Closed Beta and Open Beta, it may be different after release, but I doubt it. I did meet a lot of cool people in the game, but I remember the large amount of assholes a lot more. I am not sure if it is a reflection of the Pro-PvP community, or of the mechanics of the game, but I haven’t seen griefers or scammers in this quantity since UO. On a busy weekend evening it wasn’t unusual to be involved in as many as 4 arguments or fights while just playing the game. You walk into a noob city and it seems like half of the vendors are setup to trick newer players into selling their equipment really cheap, or buy items at a ridiculously high price through false advertising. There are too many grief and scam things going on to even try to list them here, but let’s just say it leaves a bad taste in my mouth every time I witness one, and it will likely drive me from the game eventually.
Conclusion
Overall the game is fun. In terms of game play it is definitely not a step forward for the genre, more like a step to the left, a little different, but not better. The low level grind is rough, but it does still feel rewarding as progress is made. Despite the glaring inadequacies of the chat and quest systems I would still (and have) recommend it to a friend who is burnt out on EQ and/or DAoC.
I think the game could be a lot more fun than it is if they would just fix the chat, make more dynamic and deep quests (like 1,000 more), and make it so that quests encouraged grouping, rather than force soloing. Final recommendation? If you like good combat and intuitive character advancement and a decent PvP system you should definitely check it out. Alternately, if you are a griefer you should pick it up; it has lots of tools to use for griefing other players. The community is something that I have pretty much given up hope on, so make a few good friends and try to avoid conflict to enjoy the game.
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Posted By:
Niero
Posted On:
4/15/2004 12:29:00 PM
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