Lineage II: The Chaotic Chronicle

"Think thrice before buying this game"

I won't lie to you, this game has a lot of potential. However I feel it is a waste of money and time, and hopefully I prevent some of you from buying or playing this "PvP oriented" mmorpg.

Gameplay

Your adventure in the world of Aden starts in 1 of 5 starting towns dependant on your race. At first you choose to be either a fighter or a mage. You will be given minor quests to get a map, some pocket cash, and some things to explore for a while. In your town you can buy gear and other items, but you'll spend most of your time in the fields hunting. What to hunt? The game does a good job of telling you this by the "con color" of the monster you target (click). If the monsters name is dark blue it is very easy, light blue easy, green slightly hard, white average difficulty, yellow difficult, light red very difficult, and dark red near impossible. You level fast at first, and soon you will reach a high enough level to obtain a quality weapon. Enjoy this as it is the last quest that will be worth doing in the game.

After your weapon quest (all races/classes have one) you will go out and hunt until level 20. Some prefer to hunt alone, some prefer to hunt in groups in the begginner dungeon. Up till now the game has probably been fun, but after you reach level 15 the game shows it's true colors.

One's level in this game is far less important than one's equipment. To get better equipment you need money (adena). To get money you must kill lots and lots of monsters. However, if you are killing white monsters, you will gain experience far too quickly to generate enough adena to keep yourself well equipped. This is when you learn to hunt only light blue and green monsters because they are easier to kill, but give you the same amount of money. After a monster becomes dark blue to you, it rarely drops adena and items. Welcome to "the grind." Instead of killing monsters which pose a threat, your entire L2 career will consist of killing monsters endlessly that pose no threat to you what-so-ever to earn enough money to upgrade your gear. Gear is far more important in this game than one's level. Sound boring? That isn't even the worst of it.

By around level 20 you'll meet the farmers for the first time. The farmers are actual people employed by actual companies that earn in game money and sell the in game money on ebay or websites. At first you might say "well that's hardly fair but what's the big deal?" The big deal is that these players will ruin the game for you. Under the system in place, the character who does the most damage in killing a monster will get the adena it drops unless you are in a party. This means that even if you are fighting a monster, and a very powerful character comes up and does more damage than you, the money is his. These employed farmers are more powerful than you...by far. Remember that adena doesn't drop if a monster is dark blue to you? It turns out that this color is only dependant on your numerical level. So what these farmers do, is create very high level characters, buy them the very best equipment, then let themselves die so many times that they become the ideal level to hunt a certain monster. Now they are powerful enough to kill the monsters in one hit, never have to recover from a battle, and they make a lot of money which they sell on ebay. This effects you because they will not let you have any monsters to kill. Sure there are plenty of monsters out there, but you will quickly realize that certain monsters are "ideal" for you to fight, and the farmers won't let you have any.

If you enter these farmers territories they will attack the monsters you attack, killing them immediately and taking your adena. Since they are so much more powerful and better equipped than you you stand no chance. You will not recieve any experience or adena in this area. They will swear at you, tell you to leave etc. These farmers are EVERYWHERE, hunting ALL the best mobs for you to hunt at every level past 15.

Eventually you'll reach level 20 and change your job for the first time. Each class has it's own jobs, but you will get more powerful, hopefully have better weapons and be able to stand your ground a little more. Or so you thought. Once the farmers realize that you are capable of doing the most damage to a monster from time to time they will begin to attack you. And remember they are very high level characters that just died so many times they are now at your level, but they retain all their power, and use gear of their previous level. But this is a PvP game i thought? Oh it hasn't even begun yet...

The PvP system also works on a color scheme. There are 3 levels: white: normal, purple: PvP mode, and Red: chaotic. A white player is just a normal player not engaged in PvP. If you want to engage in PvP (which you can at any time) simply strike another player. This makes you purple. You are now in PvP mode meaning you can be killed by other players with no penalty. However, you can not kill players at will. If you kill a player who never strikes you or anyone else before you kill him (i.e. he stays white, having not gone purple because he never hit anyone) you will become red. If however, the player you attacked attacks you back, and you are both purple, and you kill him, you will remain purple for a short time than return to white. Now remember about gear being all important in this game.

If you become red the way out is to fight "tough" (green or above) monsters until you work off your "karma." Turning red (killing a white player) generates a certain amount of this karma, and killing monsters subtracts a little bit at a time until you reach 0, at which point you become white again. Alternatively, if you die enough you will return to white. However, while you are red, players who attack you do not change colors. Also, when you are red the chances of dropping your gear is very very high. This means that anyone who sees a red player will attack on site in hopes of you dropping some expensive gear that they can take. This means that becoming red is avoided like the plague, because at higher levels, earning enough money to buy anything you may have dropped can take weeks, especially if you drop your weapon and have no way to kill monsters for money. What does this have to do with the farmers you wonder?

The farmers realize that you have no way to prevent them from stealing all of your monsters and adena. They also realize that they are far more powerful than you, and that you personally value your equipment that you took the time to get. Therefore they will attack you, with their high level skills, which gives you three options. First you can do nothing. They will still take all your adena and monsters, and you will have to rest and heal frequently so that a monster doesn't kill you. It's possible a monster will kill you because the farmers are powerful and hit hard. Eventually you will reach a point where you can defeat the farmers. If one hits you, you hit him back in hopes of killing him to get him to leave you alone. Probably they will easily kill you, but if you are powerful enough to kill one, all the other farmers in the area you weren't even aware of will gang up on you and kill you. You'll lose a lot of experience and time. Thirdly, you can just walk up and kill one of the farmers, becoming red by doing so. Now you've painted a giant target on your back and everyone in the game will attempt to kill you to get your gear, which will most likely happen if you're in crowded area such as a dungeon. Perhaps the farmers will kill you, they are there to make adena to sell on ebay and your equipment is worth a lot of it.

This puts you in a bind, you have no good places to hunt monsters because the farmers never let you get anything out of it. If you fight them they are very strong, and will gang up on you and you'll die. Also note that going red, losing equipment, and losing experience from dying is meaningless to them. They have billions of adena to re-equip themselves, and their goal is not to gain experience. They wish to remain at one level forever killing the same monsters all day long to make adena. If you do kill them, they use an exploit to respawn immediately and it goes on and on.

Getting to level 40, at which point you change jobs for the 2nd time is quite an accomplishment. There were no quests to help you along your way. Only tedious repetitive fighting that poses absolutely no challenge. You've had to fight for the scraps the farmers leave you the whole way, not to mention that all the other "real" players either exploited various bugs in the open beta phase of the game to illegally make huge sums of adena, or they are buying it off ebay to keep up with everyone else doing the same thing. If you played honestly, at this point you are under-equipped, over-leveled, and you find yourself weak despite all the work you put into your character.

It still gets better. The majority of these farmers are from companies based in China, meaning they are chinese. Therefore, they do not speak english. You can't reason with them, you can't chat with them, all you can do is be harrassed by them with absolutely no way to stop it. There are so many of them even in a game world as big as it is, there are few places to avoid them. These few places are filled with other real players who were driven out of every other area, and are very over-crowded making leveling and earning money difficult.

Well you figure, at least now I can participate in the castle seiges and clan wars that the game promised! No you can't. These parts of the game have not been released yet and have been delayed several times already. All there is to do from level 20 to level 40 is fight unchallenging monsters to keep your gear up to snuff, while being harrassed by players playing only to make a profit off the game the entire time.

That's insane you might be telling yourself, surely the developers will do something about all these problems. No they will not. They don't care. No matter what happens in this game, how badly you are harrassed, what items you lose to any number of bugs, no matter how many cheats and exploits are used against you the designers will do nothing at all to help you. They will say sorry and ignore any similar requests for assistance.

This is what Lineage 2 is really about. An endless, mindless, boring grind of levels, fighting tooth and nail against a huge proffesional organization of foreign players who harrass everyone to sell adena on ebay.

Graphics/Sound/Performance

All beautifully well done, well except performance. The game looks amazing and sounds amazing, as long as you have a brand new top of the line computer to play it on. Anything more than a year old and you will need to turn every single setting to the absolute minimum to have any chance at operating effectively.

Also, the towns are very very crowded places. People are resting, and trading items all the time, and this excessive amount of players in such a small location makes walking through town, and performing any action while in or near one difficult, even for the best of the best computers.

The game also has a memory leak, meaning the longer you play, the worse your performance gets, and the more system resources the game requires. Eventually you will have to restart the game as it become unplayable. The developers know about this and have made no plans to fix it.

Overall

This game is a peice of eye candy with poison center. It looks great, sounds great, but the support from the developers and the actions of proffesional companies making money off the in-game currency is outrageously out of hand. The customer support is awful, and the game is full of huge bugs. Add this to an already very boring leveling system, and take out the PvP aspect because you can not risk dropping your gear, and there is absolutely nothing about this game worth paying for. I would just move right along, and find something better. If you start playing it you will see all these things for yourself, and will probably quit. This game is for professionals who want to make money, not for you if you want to have some fun.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 05/30/04