Lineage II

NCsoft launched Lineage II in South Korea on 1 October 2003, bringing it to North America on 27 April 2004 and Europe that November. Despite the number, it is a prequel: the story is set 150 years before the original Lineage of 1998. Built on Unreal Engine 2, it looked like nothing else in the genre at the time — a sharp, anime-inflected fantasy world at a moment when most MMORPGs still looked like spreadsheets with trees.

The thing it is remembered for wasn't there when Westerners arrived. Castle sieges — the mass clan warfare that defines Lineage II in every retelling — weren't implemented at the North American launch, and only arrived with the Chronicle 1 expansion. Players who bought it on the strength of the siege reputation spent their first stretch doing something else entirely.

That something else was the grind, and its reputation was earned in public. GameSpot's Andrew Park wrote in June 2004 that the game "offers either a repetitive grind or a stiff challenge" and was "not suitable for casual gamers who can only play an hour or less per day." GameRevolution was blunter, calling farming the most efficient path to good gear and "also wildly boring." The player-killing system had its own folk memory: kill someone who doesn't fight back and your name turns red, marking you for everyone.

The grind produced the strangest chapter in its record. A player named Craig Smallwood sued NCsoft after it locked him out of his accounts, claiming he had played more than 20,000 hours over five years and that the game had left him unable to function; in 2010 a federal judge in Hawaii declined to throw out his negligence and negligent-infliction-of-emotional-distress claims — a rare crack in the armour of a game company's user agreement. Those were allegations that survived a motion to dismiss, not findings against NCsoft, and the number is remarkable either way.

One correction worth carrying, because the two games get merged constantly: NCsoft did shut down its Western servers in 2011 — for Lineage, the 1998 original, which it judged no longer financially viable in the West. Lineage II went free-to-play that same November with the Goddess of Destruction expansion and never stopped. The sieges are still running.