Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne

The Lineage II series of games is perhaps the most famous series of Korean MMORPGs and a kind of a classic, too. Being a rather standard fantasy-style online game, Lineage II differs from others with its meticulously drawn characters (especially female ones) and their equipment and the very queer operation of the random number generator that is responsible for what items you will find on the body of a slain enemy. This is called Korean random.

Lineage II comes in so-called Chronicles. The first Chronicle was issued in October 2003. The world of Lineage II is updated once every half a year, so the game has changed a lot in gameplay, visuals and content. Today, the sixth Chronicle, called The Chaotic Throne, is the latest. It runs on the time-tested Unreal Engine 2.0.

Of course, the engine is old already and is not match to Unreal Engine 3, but after some face-lifting it still looks good even in the year of 2009, especially in the MMORPG genre. HDR is supported but (the age of the engine shows up again) HDR and FSAA cannot be enabled both at the same time. We selected HDR for our test because it has a bigger effect on the visual aspect of the game than FSAA and produces a better-looking picture. We’ve got the following results:

Save for a few exceptions, the MMORPG genre is indeed all-embracing in that it allows playing with inexpensive hardware: a Radeon HD 4670 is good enough for playing Lineage II at 1680x1050 with maximum graphics quality settings. If you’ve got a 1920x1200 monitor, you may want something better, but not much more expensive, like the Radeon HD 4770. The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 is ahead of the latter by an average 17% but the bottom speed of the two cards differs by 2fps only. The GeForce GTS 250 feels at ease in this game, too, giving you the choice between ATI and Nvidia products. Considering the power efficiency factor, we’d prefer the Radeon HD 4770, though.