By Jim Rossignol on May 12th, 2011 at 9:44 am.
NCSoft have reported that they are shutting down that most Korean of RPGs, Lineage, two months from now in North American and Europe. They had this to say about the closure period: “As of today, no new accounts can be created. We will no longer charge anyone whose account is set to recurring billing, and Time Cards can no longer be used to add additional game time. We have reactivated all existing accounts in good standing, and everyone can play for free* for the remaining time that the servers are open.” There’s also going to be refunds for any unused game time.
The MMO first appeared in Korea in 1998, and launched in the West in 2001. I never played it, and now I never will.
12/05/2011 at 09:51 CaLe says:
I hardly knew ye.
12/05/2011 at 10:00 Heliocentric says:
Well at least its a respectable end. It was probably still turning a profit which is madness.
12/05/2011 at 16:48 Matt says:
Actually, it wasn’t, which is why they’re shutting it down.
12/05/2011 at 10:10 Kevin says:
Surely you could do a piece for RPS where you tried out the first 10 levels of the game and wrote about the experience.
I myself haven’t tried Lineage. I did play Lineage II; had a 76 Dark Elf Storm Screamer as my main. Problem was, when you reach level 76, the leveling curve turns into a wall where you’d spend an afternoon grinding your character just to fill your exp bar by one percent (mind you, this was before the vitality update), and by that time, I was spending more time helping to run our guild than leveling.
13/05/2011 at 05:58 Felixader says:
Note the part of the text ewhre it says: “As of today, no new accounts can be created.” ^_^
12/05/2011 at 11:09 Ruadhan says:
I played Lineage one for at least a year back when in first launched in the West. The whole concept of pledge warfare and capturable areas was actually pretty cool; on the other hand the solo experience was pretty amazingly boring and grindy. It was pretty unforgiving, too – near level 50, the experience per level increased hugely (level fifty took tens of hours if I remember correctly), but each non-PVP death knocked off 10% of the level’s experience. Losing hours of work because of lag was pretty awful :)
Much like the single-life roguelikes though, that did mean you felt really invested the whole time.
The pledge battles were amazing though. More Eve-like than anything else, I suspect, but with preordained battle times.
12/05/2011 at 11:38 The Hammer says:
Man, Lineage. An unspoken legend in PC gaming.
/salute
12/05/2011 at 11:39 The Promised Landt says:
Aww man, it was my first MMO, and soooo grindy, it made me look for greener pastures.
If my deadlines weren’t kicking my ass I’d take a last look, though I suspect it’d be pretty bleak without a pledge.
And I’d have to agree about the pledge battles. For me, it was way more fun than DAoC or UO (never tried Eve).
12/05/2011 at 12:44 TsunamiWombat says:
Lineage 2 is still going strong though, with all it’s boobtasti glory.
12/05/2011 at 13:11 crainey92 says:
Lineage, a true classic in the MMORPG market, we will remember you.
12/05/2011 at 13:16 sana says:
As long as my Lineage 2 elves are safe.
12/05/2011 at 13:37 malkav11 says:
You really aren’t missing a darn thing. I beta-tested the Mac version. I -will- salute them for having a Mac version at a time when pretty much no MMO did – and WoW was still years away. And not a crippled, ghettoized version like EQ for Mac, either. Lineage for Mac was the real, terrible grindfest.
17/05/2011 at 00:29 DigitalSignalX says:
After 11 years someone might have actually reached the level cap if they played 12 hours a day every day. At least in L2 you could do it in a year prior to all the xp boosting patches.