Meter
02-18-2004, 06:47 AM
Posted by Grayrage (mailto:grayrage@darkenbane.com)
As folks surely know, we are miserably bored waiting each day to see if our inboxes have the acceptance letters from Blizzard for the Phase I of the WoW beta. In the mean time, several DBers (myself included) have popped into the Japanese open beta of Lineage II and have experienced it enough to write a small review of what to expect.
Not wanting to go into a pro/con type of review, let me just just touch on basics of what I like and don't like. First and foremost I am prepared to call Lineage II the prettiest graphical MMP game I have ever played. I shit you not that after making a Dark Elf female you will no longer need to go to porn sites to slap yer salami. The character models are just incredible. Animation is up there as well with the exception of the running model which looks like the characters have something inserted in their arses in a painful way. In fact, we are still wondering if the guy who did the running animations got ahold of a bad crack rock the day he did it. All of the bells and whistles of graphical beauty comes at a price, however, as our A64 3400+ with a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and 1 Gig of PC3200 often found it's way to under 10 FPS and rarely above 25 FPS at 1024 X 1280 16bit. I am guessing folks with gimpified PIII's and 50 year old ATI's might be watching a picture show instead of playing the game whilst folks with modest machines will have to play the game at much lesser resolutions to make it run at all. The sounds are no less fun (I never listen to the music so I am talking about fighting noises and such) which get you into the game quite dramatically. Bottom line, the eye and ear candy is there and downright awesome.
So how bout' game play, you might ask? Well, here is an area I have noticed some problems. The exp grind is not bad (it's about the norm) and I like the pace of it as there is little to no downtime. You gain EXP and Skill Points when you kill stuff using the exp to level up and the SPs to learn spells and skill. All of this seems pretty good and fun from my limited play experience. Some problems I noticed, however, came in the form of grouping "penalties". It seemed that experience was divided up among groups in a manner which makes soloing a more viable and faster option for leveling. It's MHO that grouping should be encouraged via the ability to level much faster in bigger/better balanced groups. I did not get this impression from L2, but it's still in beta and this may yet need to be balanced out. PvP is another issue that seems, on the outside, to be a prominent factor in the game, however the way it is implemented makes it quite the opposite, at least in the early levels. Basically, if you attack someone, you are flagged as a "PK" and that person can kill you with no penalty. If, on the other hand, you attack and kill someone without them attacking you first, you are flagged a "PK" for a long time which allows EVERYONE to kill you without penalty AND makes you KOS to the GUARDS until the flag wears off (which takes quite a while). ON paper it sounds like a good system, but in effect, I found little to no PvPing at all as no one wanted to be flagged a PK as the penalty was too high and playing flagged in such a manner is too hard. Again, this might still be in the balancing stage and perhaps relaxing the penalty for killing someone is in order so more folks are willing to PvP.
Lastly, I wanted to go over my impressions of the mechanics of the game. My biggest complaint about L2 is the movement. It's a Shadowbane style movement set up where you point at a spot and you character moves to that spot. Yes, they DO allow first person view and allow you to use the arrow keys to move from that view, but for some reason it is really clunky and unresponsive using that view and method and it's not customizable with no mouse look ect. Basically, it's VERY obvious the game was not designed to play as a first person perspective game. It's just that I like the ole' WASD mouse look first person type of thing. I also found targeting a bit inconsistent where using the hotkey buttons more often the not did not work (somewhat reminiscent of EQ) and clicking on targets sorta' tricky if other folks were around.
So, bottom line, would I play it? Yep. In fact, I am gonna keep playing the beta and look forward to getting online :) It's definitely fun and I am interested to see how it is up in the higher levels. Am I prepared to drop WoW for L2? No, but I am sure willing to keep it in mind if WoW drops the ball and comes out without a PvP server! So what is DB gonna do? Well, there is some discussion of setting up a L2 public board just to see how interest is amongst our guys, but there is no rush. We will see how things go.
As folks surely know, we are miserably bored waiting each day to see if our inboxes have the acceptance letters from Blizzard for the Phase I of the WoW beta. In the mean time, several DBers (myself included) have popped into the Japanese open beta of Lineage II and have experienced it enough to write a small review of what to expect.
Not wanting to go into a pro/con type of review, let me just just touch on basics of what I like and don't like. First and foremost I am prepared to call Lineage II the prettiest graphical MMP game I have ever played. I shit you not that after making a Dark Elf female you will no longer need to go to porn sites to slap yer salami. The character models are just incredible. Animation is up there as well with the exception of the running model which looks like the characters have something inserted in their arses in a painful way. In fact, we are still wondering if the guy who did the running animations got ahold of a bad crack rock the day he did it. All of the bells and whistles of graphical beauty comes at a price, however, as our A64 3400+ with a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and 1 Gig of PC3200 often found it's way to under 10 FPS and rarely above 25 FPS at 1024 X 1280 16bit. I am guessing folks with gimpified PIII's and 50 year old ATI's might be watching a picture show instead of playing the game whilst folks with modest machines will have to play the game at much lesser resolutions to make it run at all. The sounds are no less fun (I never listen to the music so I am talking about fighting noises and such) which get you into the game quite dramatically. Bottom line, the eye and ear candy is there and downright awesome.
So how bout' game play, you might ask? Well, here is an area I have noticed some problems. The exp grind is not bad (it's about the norm) and I like the pace of it as there is little to no downtime. You gain EXP and Skill Points when you kill stuff using the exp to level up and the SPs to learn spells and skill. All of this seems pretty good and fun from my limited play experience. Some problems I noticed, however, came in the form of grouping "penalties". It seemed that experience was divided up among groups in a manner which makes soloing a more viable and faster option for leveling. It's MHO that grouping should be encouraged via the ability to level much faster in bigger/better balanced groups. I did not get this impression from L2, but it's still in beta and this may yet need to be balanced out. PvP is another issue that seems, on the outside, to be a prominent factor in the game, however the way it is implemented makes it quite the opposite, at least in the early levels. Basically, if you attack someone, you are flagged as a "PK" and that person can kill you with no penalty. If, on the other hand, you attack and kill someone without them attacking you first, you are flagged a "PK" for a long time which allows EVERYONE to kill you without penalty AND makes you KOS to the GUARDS until the flag wears off (which takes quite a while). ON paper it sounds like a good system, but in effect, I found little to no PvPing at all as no one wanted to be flagged a PK as the penalty was too high and playing flagged in such a manner is too hard. Again, this might still be in the balancing stage and perhaps relaxing the penalty for killing someone is in order so more folks are willing to PvP.
Lastly, I wanted to go over my impressions of the mechanics of the game. My biggest complaint about L2 is the movement. It's a Shadowbane style movement set up where you point at a spot and you character moves to that spot. Yes, they DO allow first person view and allow you to use the arrow keys to move from that view, but for some reason it is really clunky and unresponsive using that view and method and it's not customizable with no mouse look ect. Basically, it's VERY obvious the game was not designed to play as a first person perspective game. It's just that I like the ole' WASD mouse look first person type of thing. I also found targeting a bit inconsistent where using the hotkey buttons more often the not did not work (somewhat reminiscent of EQ) and clicking on targets sorta' tricky if other folks were around.
So, bottom line, would I play it? Yep. In fact, I am gonna keep playing the beta and look forward to getting online :) It's definitely fun and I am interested to see how it is up in the higher levels. Am I prepared to drop WoW for L2? No, but I am sure willing to keep it in mind if WoW drops the ball and comes out without a PvP server! So what is DB gonna do? Well, there is some discussion of setting up a L2 public board just to see how interest is amongst our guys, but there is no rush. We will see how things go.