Cross-posted from my Ell Jay:
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I've been messing around with this here Lineage 2 game (C4, not the earlier ones), and found that it's really not too bad a game. For anyone that doesn't know, it's pretty much an MMO that's been around since before WoW (much earlier if you count Lineage 1), but the newest incarnation has come a long way. It's got some fine graphics, as can be seen in
my screenshot and
my brother's. They're resized though so that they aren't huge. Also keep in mind that my character is an elf mystic, which just happens to look female but is really male.
Anyhoo, obviously I'm not paying to play since it's $15 a month and I don't have that to spend on games, so I rigged up one of those private servers for it. Well actually, at first I played on one that l2extreme.com already has setup, but it was laggy at times and had some walking path issues, which kind of took away from the fun. My own server helps with some problems, but introduces a small few others in the process, to the point that I'm not sure I'd want to spend the time to play it fair. That was the problem with the WoW server I setup, its glitches didn't make it fun enough to play on fairly. But no biggy. A few GM commands later gives me enough cool stuff to kill things in one hit, either with my weapon or one of the really pretty spells it lets me cast. I picked the elf mystic this time since I did the fighter class on the other server, but you can see what they look like from my brother's shot. You're limited in class to just figher or mystic to start with, but there's several races to pick from, and on down the line you can evolve your class into more powerful sub-classes.
It has this whole thing where you can raise dragons, too. Cheating, you can mount yourself on a big one that flies, or a smaller one that's like a little rhino type deal. You can also get pets of various kinds to help fight. I couldn't notice a particular increase in speed from riding things though, so getting from place to place (and it's a huge world) might be time consuming.
All in all, I think it's probably a better game than a lot of the reviews gave it credit for, but I'd probably have to withhold complete judgement unless I could play on a real server, where I'm sure all the problems I experienced wouldn't exist. I was tempted to try it, actually, until I found out the monthly fee was the same as WoW's. But at least this game doesn't cost $50 to buy if I ever took a notion to do so. I think you can get a nice collector's edition for just like $20.
So I'll prolly keep it installed for a little while to check out the scenic areas, since some places are perdy to see. The biggest downside to the private server though is that it runs in Java. I understand that this gives it a huge cross-platform ability, but writing something that needs lots of speed to handle all the goings on is kind of stupid, cause I can definately notice the slow sometimes. I might see if I can run it on the BBS machine, but it's fairly slow and has little ram and space free compared to this machine, so I dunno if it'll even wark. I'm sure I'll be bored of it in a week's time anyway . . !
