Four years in the making…
Now for all you MMO players, you might well be aware of Lineage and it’s offering to the gaggle of MMOs out there at the minute. Of course, the daddy of them all is World of Warcraft which I now resolutely avoid in the same manner that a reformed smack addict avoids drugs dealers or a recovering alcoholic avoids bars… I just can’t allow WoW to take over my life again…But there are plenty of alternatives to WoW, most of them using the same formula and, I’ll be kind here, similar interfaces to allow the player to navigate through the game world. Of course, going back to the days of 56k modems and the birth of the free two hour connections, I was an extreme Ultima Online fan. Me and one of the HEXUS.community admins, Zak33, would spend whole nights playing UO, long before we ever got involved in HEXUS.
And I guess that’s why the mythical/middle age Earth setting of many of the MMORPGs appeals to us both. We did our time grinding in UO. We know how many pound coins it take to weight down the F1 key for repeat hits on the target dummies. We’ve chopped trees, whittled wood and fought savage killer bunnies. We are born again online hard.
Except that to review an MMORPG nowadays and do it properly takes absolutely forever. MMORPGs aren’t quick fix games. Right from the off they ask you to invest some serious time into them. The key here is how fun the game is from that humble beginning when your character will find a fight with a large daffodil something of a challenge. But beyond that there’s the skill and character progression, the social aspect of clans, dungeoneering or quest parties and then the sub-culture of unique weapons, items and all that stuff, which drives a thriving real-world business of selling game items for real life cash…
Click for larger imageSo when I received code for Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne - The Kamael I was wary of getting sucked into another MMORPG that’ll take up all my free time, what little of it I have. But there was a ray of hope shining into the HEXUS review dungeon and that was in the form of my old mate Zak33, who, as it turns out, is a near-fanatical Lineage player. He was more than happy for me to take over his high level character to see what Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne - The Kamael has to offer the long term player and create a new character to see how the game is for the n00b adventurer.