Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

by Cody “Micajah” Bye

When gamers talk about successful massively multiplayer games, the first game that commonly springs to their tongue is the World of Warcraft. It’s hard to deny the popularity of a game that’s seen nine million users pass through its storied lands. However, there’s another contender to the throne of ultimate popularity, one that’s been around even longer than the lands of Azeroth.

The next Lineage 2 expansion will have a completely new playable race!

For those of you that still haven’t guess what game I’m talking about, the title in question is NCsoft's fantasy MMORPG, Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne. It’s a game where player versus player combat is a commonly accepted practice and there’s no other way to play. Over 17 million users have interacted in the game, nearly doubling the number set forth by Blizzard and WoW. Last weekend, I had the chance (along with a host of gaming press compatriots) to sit down with a panel of the game’s North American developers at their Austin, Texas, studios to discuss their seventh (and largest) free expansion of the game. The panel consisted of Tim Tan (Producer), Samuel Sungno Han (Associate Producer), Jessica Folsom (Community Manager), and a whole host of marketing and Q&A personel. Each of these developers contributed in some form to the discussions, and all were extremely enthusiastic about their upcoming product.  

Dubbed The First Throne: The Kamael, the latest expansion for the 3.5 year old Lineage II offers gamers more content and features than anything they’ve experience in the past. Over a gigabyte worth of content has been included in this new expansion, with the biggest change coming in an entirely new race, the Kamael, and a new starting land for that race of player characters.

According to the developers, the Kamael are “one-winged soldiers with affinity to dark magic.” So what does this mean for the Lineage II player? You’ll have a new bad-ass combat-oriented race that relies very little on magic and prefers to get messy with either a sword (for the males) or a crossbow (for the females). When it comes to tanking, few races are as good at it as the Kamael, and I'd go so far as to say that the tanks in the game will almost exclusively be the Kamael in the post-expansion days.

Aside from just a generally solid combat ability, the Kamael are also able to harvest the souls of NPCs that have died in combat to power their special attacks.  In fact, many of their combat abilities require souls to work, leading me to ask the obvious question of whether the new Kamael will have a “Soul Power” meter. This resulted in a multitude of chuckles from the crowd, and a comment of making a Kamael named “Undercover Brother.” After the laughing died down, Tan said that there won’t necessarily be a soul meter, but that their will be a ticker located in the chat box and in the general user interface.

On top of the new race and all of its quirkiness, a new interface is going into the game as well. The developers changed the interface to hopefully make things a bit clearer for players of the game. “It should make things a lot cleaner for the players,” Tan said.

This new interface will probably be necessary for players who are actively engaged in the political landscape, especially with the new inclusion of fortresses and fortress battles into the PvP arena. Unlike castle sieges, there will be almost no wait for players to jump into siege-based combat when the fortresses go live.

Fortress battles are an integral feature in Lineage II: The Kamael.

“Basically the fortress battle is like a smaller version of the castle siege,” Tan said. “Castle sieges can occur every two weeks and are usually meant for larger clans or alliances. The fortress battles are actually meant for groups or smaller clans to take over and are on a much quicker time cycle. You still gain bonuses to holding fortresses, just not as much as you might from keeping a castle.”

“All of the fortresses are in various territories as well,” Tan continued. “It’s not exactly an oath, but you have the option to swear fealty to the castle that’s associated to the particular territory. If you don’t, it actually causes problems, which ties back to the game’s political system. The castle lord will want to take that fortress back from you if you hold one within his territory.”

When another memberof the press asked about the viability of fortress sieges in smaller groups, Tan mentioned that there will be plenty of fortresses to attempt to take and each of them will run on a very fast timer. “Players will be actively attempting to take a fortress all the time, so there will definitely be chances for players to take over fortresses from other players,” Tan said. “On top of that, the larger groups would have to spread their forces incredibly then to actually try to defend each of these keeps from the various invading groups, and you can’t be available all the time.”

Tied to these fortress battles (and a whole list of other political system features) are some of the game’s first instanced dungeons; an area of gameplay that the Lineage II team had yet to really explore before the Kamael expansion.

“The system is actually fairly broad, but there are some instances that are actually tied to the political system,” Tan said. “If you take over a fortress, there are instances tied to that fortress. If you take over a castle, there are instances tied to that castle. Outside of that, there are actually hunting grounds out in the world that are also instanced. That’s a fairly new path that we’re going down.”

When I asked Tan about the fan reaction to instanced dungeons, he said that it had been fairly non-reactionary. “There really hasn’t been any hesitation to it that we’ve seen,” Tan said. “It will certainly be a different experience than what the Lineage II players have done in the past.”

Inside these new instanced dungeons, players will find all sorts of new items, enhancements, weapons, and armor for their characters to use. “There are new sets of armor and armor slots going into the game,” Tan continued. “It may not sound that interesting, but we’ve got new equipment slots for the shirt and the right wrist. Along with that we’ve got new S80-type armor going into the game along with new weapons.”

After getting a question about the new armor and armor slots and whether they’ll be able to be crafted, Tan said, “I know that one part of the new bracelets are tied to fortress battles, but they aren’t craftable.”

The Final Form Kamael are pretty bad-ass. Make sure you stick around for our hands-on experience that will be running later this week!

Along with the new armors and weapons, some new elemental augmentations will also be available for characters to apply to their weapons. Like most elemental augmentations, one can be applied to a weapon to increase a particular elements damage, but the same can be applied to an armor to increase that particular armors resistance to an element. Tan figured that players would eventually create sets of the armors to protect themselves against particular PvP attacks.

Finally, Tan let us know that a whole set of new account services were being introduced into the game including character transfers, name change, and gender changing services. These will cost a small transaction fee, but many Lineage II players are certainly looking forward to these welcome changes.

However, the details for the account services are still not openly available to the general public. “We haven’t gotten everything pinned down just yet, and we need to make sure everything is balanced out before announcing any of the changes we’re going to make,” Tan said. “However, I can say that there will be a cool down period between transfers of the same character and it will be longer than a week.” So all of you who were thinking of making money by importing goods from other servers into a less stocked server, your hopes have just been crushed. No cheating for you!

On top of the character transfer comment, Tan also commented about the Gender Transfer service. “For those of you who are curious, you won’t be able to reselect a new fair and face style when you switch gender. It just does a straight switch from one to the other. The Kamael also won’t be able to switch genders, and there will be a disclaimer to point this out to players.”

In general, the entire panel was very excited about the upcoming expansion that they’ve brought online to North American players. While some of the kinks are obviously still being worked out of the system, players should be extremely excited about what’s around the corner for Lineage 2. Stay tuned the rest of the week as I give my thoughts on the actual Kamael play-session at the NCsoft Studios and how much fun it was to transform into the Kamael’s Final Form!  

---