NCSoft Announced Lineage 2: Remastered

Yes.. yes it’s really coming. This isn’t a lie, this isn’t clickbait, and most importantly.. this isn’t for mobile devices. This is for good ‘ol fashioned PC, baby!

If you’ve been watching the MMO scene then you’d know a little while ago NCSoft announced they were doing a graphical overhaul of Blade & Soul, porting the game over to Unreal Engine 4 after all these years.
Did it need it? Not really, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate getting the opportunity to play Blade & Soul in an overhauled state.
We’ve seen trailers and they look impeccable. Whether or not NCSoft can live up to the hype and bring an optimized, high quality experience is another story, though.
But people believed that that’s where NCSoft would stop, because.. well, what other MMOs do they have?
Aion, which has had its North American servers dead for longer than I can remember.
Guild Wars, which – and I know there are still fans of the original Guild Wars game – and I’m not saying it’s bad, so don’t jump down my throat here – just that it hasn’t been popular in quite a few years.
Guild Wars 2, which NCSoft are slowly moving into maintenance mode, much to the dismay of the community.
And finally, Lineage and Lineage 2, both of which are so old I bet you’d forgotten they even existed.

But NCSoft most definitely have not, because here we are, at the end of 2019, with the news that out of all the games at their disposal, Lineage 2 is next in line to receive a graphical overhaul in the form of “Lineage 2: Remastered.”
No, this has nothing to do with Lineage 2M or Lineage 2: Revolution for mobile devices. This is a complete overhaul of Lineage 2 for PC.
NCSoft announced earlier last month that they were looking for a technical artist that is familiar with Unreal Engine 4, Maya and 3DS Max for work on Lineage 2: Remastered, also referred to as “L2: Remastered.”

Interestingly, NCSoft never officially announced the project at G-Star 2019 which was highly unusual, since that’s the convention that every South Korean publisher announces games at.
However, even despite the lack of an announcement, the overhaul is going to be quite a daunting task to undertake as the game was originally released way back in 2003, and upgrading the game to Unreal Engine 4 isn’t going to be easy.
In fact, an overhaul like this has never even been attempted before, and if that isn’t difficult enough, Lineage 2 launched back in South Korea in 2003 and was built on Unreal Engine 2.5.
That should give you a rough estimate of how complex this will ultimately end up being, if NCSoft are capable of completing this transition at all.

Lineage 2 over a decade ago was one of the most popular MMORPGs around. If you hadn’t played the game then you hadn’t experienced what the genre truly had to offer.
Yes, the game much like all MMOs, changed quite drastically over time, becoming more pay to win and much more casual friendly.
But even though the game was very popular over here in the West, the South Korean iteration of Lineage 2 remained significantly more popular, having tens of millions of active players.
Honestly, that could be the reasoning behind Lineage 2: Remastered. The game is still highly popular over in South Korea – I mean, the game has remained alive and receiving updates for over 16 years.
And if there’s anything we know about South Korean MMO developers, it’s that they value high quality graphics above all else – story, mechanics, and gameplay be damned! So long as the game looks visually appealing, they have a game that will make them billions.
So what better way to drive up new player participation or to at the very least bring players back to the game than to do a complete graphical overhaul to rival other MMOs that are currently dominating the market?

Not only that, but Lineage 2 was so popular that they went ahead and released Lineage 2: Classic for players to relive what made Lineage 2 great: Its early-game.
To date, there are still thousands of players online concurrently on both the current version of the game and classic version.

Now I would like to at least mention that this overhaul is a work in progress. While it has been officially confirmed by NCSoft themselves, it is likely going to require a lot of time and even more effort on the part of the developers.
So expecting this any time in the immediate future is highly unlikely, especially since NCSoft confirmed that Project TL, the sequel to Lineage is going to be releasing in 2020.
What form that’ll take – Alpha testing, Beta testing remains to be seen but they confirmed that it’ll be released in a playable state next year.
Whether that will ultimately delay the Lineage 2: Remastered overhaul is up for discussion, but suffice it to say NCSoft have a lot of work on their table right now.

I never got to play Lineage 2 back when it was still relevant and popular, but I was excited when Lineage 2: Classic launched.
I’m excited about the Blade & Soul Unreal Engine 4’s upgrade and equally as excited if not moreso for Lineage 2: Remastered because this game is probably going to look gorgeous.
I wonder if, then, they plan on introducing the graphical overhaul to Classic as well. Eh, well. Another thought for another video.