Adventures on the continent of Aden [some gaming]

After a year of making music on my new laptop I got a little bored.

I began researching MMO's as a way to kill some time. I dug up an old game released in 2003, Lineage 2. It's a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) that is set in a fantasy world of Aden. I used to play it (Chronicles 1,2 and 3) back in junior high school/HS some odd 20 years ago.

I also tried it when it was made free to play on official servers in 2014ish.

The Lineage 2M game creator, NCSoft had cobbled together a mobile game that works on Windows too so I decided to give it a shot. The download was huge, a whopping 18,7GB which took most of the space remaining on my SSD after music files.

So I began my journey. The tutorial was very helpful but I was already sort of familiar with the game plot and mechanics. The Elven Oracle I created spawned on Talking Island (TI) which was previously where Humans began their game.

After getting acquainted with the controls I began questing in TI and managed to level my char to 20ish in an afternoon. Now I've been playing for a week and a half as the game gets gradually harder. The main quest has led me to familiar places but there are some new areas too.

I always fancied the beautiful scenery and adventuring in the game, now the lack of Gatekeepers (a NPC that lets you teleport between places) and an automatic quest move/map teleport system makes it much more easier than before, of course with a cost of Adena (the currency of the game).

The new auto-hunt feature is a nice addition but renders player-to-player interaction somewhat useless as most people seem to bot (afk) popular hunting areas. I used to party (group) with other, unknown players before when the hunting area was difficult.

Another new thing is the collision system which halts the character from moving upon a hit. A lot of other things has changed too, like the skill system and the class transfer system (which now, if I understood correctly, is based on Class cards which you draw).

In Giran Village.

I haven't tried PvP (player versus player) yet but for some it's the heart of the game (and I'm a healer class anyway). I'm more interested in casual PvE (player versus environment) killing mobs and getting experience and Adena from the main quest. There are special Einhasad statue quests in every village too but I was too busy with the main one.

This game used to be (on some servers) heavily about castle sieges. Every village has a castle that is controlled by a clan and they get tax money from town purchases. I attended one back in 2005 or 2006 and remember my computer almost freezing due to so many players. Boss raids can be quite crowded too.

For some background, I used to be a dwarf crafting and selling soul/spiritshots (consumables that enhance physical and magic attacks) in Gludio, Dion and later Giran. I would leave my computer on with a shop overnight and the store would be empty in the morning unless someone started competing with prices. Location was very crucial too, you'd have to know the road leading to a popular hunting spot and away from competition to make some profit.

Then I rolled an alt, an Elven fighter which later on developed to a dagger wielding Plainswalker. I tried crafting an expensive and then rare Blue Wolf Leather armor with the help of a clan dwarf but due to 60% success rate it failed and weeks or even months of purchasing leather and other materials went down the drain.

Back the dwarfs were the only class that could craft. Now in L2M it's available to everyone, I even crafted a Karmian Tunic for my Elven Elder (which I later discovered useless as the game gave me a New/Returning player gift armor pack which I didn't know about)

So there's a lot to discover. Other chars I've had were a Human Bow (Hawkeye) and a Human Dagger (Treasure Hunter which was all the rave in PvP back in C2). On official I've also played an Elven Elder (a healer) and an Orc Overlord (I decided to give it a go as I saw it doing castle sieges and clan wars).

Anyway, I have a feeling the journey has just begun. Merry Christmas to everyone, this could well be my last post of this year (as I'm very much sucked into the game). No music/DIY (or icefishing) this time either.

But I do have a few unreleased deep house tunes in the making for 2025.

Have a good one!

-ef