Open Beta Testing For Lineage II

[LochnarITB]

It has gotten a little better for me. The thing I missed came about because of my first death. It was my new character trying to kill things for my first quest. I died and it offered to return me to the nearest village. This was night on the server, so I had no perspective of where I had been. I didn't get the world map reward from the first quest. I finally got a map from a vendor and that helped. I then went back and completed the first quest and was pointed to the counselor guy in the center of the first village. He is the game help file. I also changed a setting that helped. Under options, it allows you to turn off names of other players. This means that only the characters with names above them are part of the game. If you speak to them, they offer info and quests. While I have found several quests, they still pretty much consist of killing x number of y's, but some of them involve visiting multiple people/places once you have the materials.

I am enjoying it. I don't, however, see myself spending money to purchase and then subscribe to the game. I do find the graphics nice and the maps nice. At one point, I fell off a cliff into a small body of water. It was deep enough that I was under water and an indicator started marking my time until I drown (at least that is my assumption since I got my head above water before it ran out). I couldn't swim, but I was able to walk my way out (can you say highlander). As my head started to come above water, I left a small wake in the water like a periscope from a submarine. The indicator didn't go away until I actually got my nose out of the water either. Another time, I was out looking for my latest victims and needed to recover my mana. There were a couple boulder type rocks sitting along the path. I climbed my character up on one and sat him down. I laughed for a minute as my character sat there, with his legs hanging over the edge, watching other players run around killing orcs and werewolves. It was me watching my character watching the action. Very surreal.

Getting on has still been a problem. If I am going to get on, it happens first time. If not, I can try over and over and not get in all evening. I also found that I lose my connection about 3-4am. This is about 9-10am in Europe so I wonder if that is when the servers start getting flooded again.

I guess I can't complain too much since I am playing for free. I am sure they will be able to sell this thing and make some money but I don't think it will be the be-all-end-all MMORPG.