Producer Aaron Rigby tells us about the gameplay and characters in Lineage II. Click the "stream" option for a closer look.

After failing to make an appreciable dent in the US massively multiplayer online role-playing game market with Lineage: The Blood Pledge, South Korean publisher and developer NCsoft is ready to give America another go. Though you may not realize it, Lineage is reportedly the world's largest and most popular online role-playing game, with more than a million subscribers. Lineage II launched in South Korea late last year and quickly established subscription records. Lineage II: The Chaotic Chronicle is the upcoming US release of the game, and it will include the first major new content update, dubbed The Chaotic Chronicle. As we've seen from our time with the beta, NCsoft hopes to make a serious impression with American gamers this time around.

Lineage II uses the familiar high-fantasy setting found in most online role-playing games. There are five playable races, all based on traditional high fantasy, including humans, elves, dark elves, orcs, and dwarves. Naturally, each race looks and plays distinctively different from the others. Humans are the most-balanced race, while elves are weak in melee but are lightning fast. Orcs are the "tanks" of the game, so they're slow and lumbering but are powerful in combat. Finally, there are the dwarves, who aren't quick or powerful. Dwarves can't cast magic spells either, but they are the only race capable of crafting items.

In the world of Lineage II, you can play as an orc, an elf, a dwarf, or a human.

The character-creation system in Lineage II is simple and straightforward. Rather than have players make a lot of decisions early on regarding their characters--only to regret them later--players will only have to decide which race and gender to play and whether to be a fighter or a spellcaster. You can also customize your appearance by choosing your hairstyle, hair color, and face. After that, character creation is finished, so you can begin playing the game. You can have up to seven different characters on your account, each of a different race and gender, so you won't be tied down by having just a single character.

When you start a new character, you'll be given the option of taking a basic tutorial. You'll begin in the heart of your race's territory, with some basic weapons and equipment, and from there, you'll be given a few basic quests to get you oriented and to let you start leveling up. Some of these involve killing a certain number of pesky animals or retrieving an object for a non-player character. Your first immediate goal is to reach level five, at which point you can train your character to both develop new skills and begin more-serious quests.

Lineage II will let you develop your character as you go along, so you can use the points you've earned to learn certain skills and abilities, like weapon mastery (which increases your attack level) and new spells. As you progress, you'll also be given the chance to change careers twice. For example, we started out as an elven fighter. At level 20, our character was allowed to become either an elven knight or an elven scout. If we chose the elven knight, then at level 40 the character could then choose again to become either a temple knight or a sword singer.

Dark elves don't encumber themselves with such annoyances as ample clothing.

You'll be able to adventure on your own for the first five levels, but Lineage II is built around the group dynamic of player clans. You can venture out on your own, but you'll discover that the enemies will become harder to defeat. If you tackle them on your own, you'll end up resting up after each battle to recover hit points. To make things more difficult, some monsters (such as goblin raiders) travel in groups, so low-level characters won't be able to tackle them on their own without getting swarmed. But since you start at the heart of your race's territory, you should be able to find other adventurers looking to team up.

The highlight of the game will likely be its siege system. A player clan will gain control of a castle and will thus be able to wield political and economic control over a certain area. However, a clan must have its ownership of a castle contested every two weeks by holding a siege, which lets other clans attempt to take control of the castle. Both sides can enlist other clans as allies, which results in epic battles with upwards of 300 participants.