Lineage II

The first thing a player does when playing Lineage II is to create a character. They can choose their character's race and personalise the character's face and hair. However, the gameplay allows many options for personalisation of the character visuals: for example, the player can choose attributes and traits like a hairstyle, hair colour, facial expression, and gender among other features.

Every player has to begin the game in a temple in their character's race's zone (for example: Humans start in "Talking Island" and the Dark Elves in "The Shilen Temple"). Most commonly, the player can choose between a mage and a fighter in each race except Dwarves and Kamael, which can be only fighters.

The game follows a fictional history through sets of plots called "Sagas". There are currently two sagas: "The Chaotic Chronicle" and "The Chaotic Throne". Large-scale updates/expansions are known as "Chronicles", which introduce new story elements as well as new features and add-ons. They are released every six months. Each Chronicle new skills, quests, areas and items. Some chronicles also increased the level cap.[4]

Hyeong-Jin Kim, the production team head for Lineage II, came up with the basic concept for the game in early 2000. Development happened in October–November of the same year.[1][6] Kim and producer James Bae have stated that their reasons for developing a prequel for Lineage rather than a sequel is that "Lineage will continue to be updated as a game", and that "by working on its past, we will not be risking conflict with the direction of updates that Lineage will take in the future."[1]

According to Kim and Bae, the game's initial subtitle, "The Chaotic Chronicle", was developed with the intention to "express the large-scale war, strategies, conflicts, and collaborations that we hope to encourage among players".[1]

Lead Game Designer Raoul Kim said that the reason for rendering Lineage II in 3D was "simply because most games today are [also] using 3D graphics", and because they deemed it "more appropriate than 2D for the things that [they] were going to create." Developers chose to use the Unreal Engine 2 game engine because of its ability to render outdoor scenes and its powerful editing features.[1][7]

According to Game Design team head, Cheol-Woong Hwang, there were different concepts for each of the race's home villages. He described the concept for the human village in Talking Island as "ordinary", while the Elven Village was designed "so as not to lose the natural and royal high-class feeling." They designed the Dark Elven village based on a "grotesque and serious feeling in order to express the rough history of these who had been expelled from the Elves".[8] There are three versions of Leneage II available presently - classic, essence and Fafurion. Where the classic bears the same look and feel of the game as it was decade back, the others have specific functions.[9][10][11]

The overall reception for Lineage II is mixed; the game received average review scores from various video game rating websites. Andrew Park of GameSpot said that the game "offers either a repetitive grind or a stiff challenge", and is not suitable for casual gamers who can only play an hour or less per day.[15] Allen "Delsyn" Rausch called the Kamael "an interesting race in that, unlike other Lineage II races, they focus specifically on the warrior path with high-level class paths segregated by gender".[18]

The Chronicle 5: Oath of Blood expansion won the Expansion of the Year award at Stratics Central Editor's Choice Awards 2006,[19] and Lineage II earned an Honorable Mention for the Game of the Year award.[20]

Lineage II is one of the MMOs that were subject to ethnographic study in Constance Steinkuehler and Dmitri Williams's article, "Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as 'Third Places'".[21]

The Chaotic Chronicles

The Chaotic Throne

Goddess of Destruction (Free2Play)

Epic Tale Of Aden

• U.S. official site
• EU official site