Another fun game fallen into the tribulations of the modern monetizations of the gaming world
When most people think of Lost Ark, they probably think of an over-marketed Amazon MMO with proven success in other regions and they would be mostly right. I also feel like this game doesn't get enough credit for what it does despite a lot of what it does wrong. As I have hit Tier 3 of the game after playing for 165 hours, It's hard to tell whether I enjoyed the time or hated it despite me still playing it as much as I have.
Let's start with what this game does right: The combat. It's hard not to make comparisons but compared to other MMOs, it's honestly the most fun I've had actually playing an MMO. The combat is frantic, the animations and buttons feels satisfying to press, each skill has specific perks you can choose that completely augment and change how the skill acts like turning a one press button into a combo button and vice versa. The engraving system also gives you a lot of customization here with your playstyle like specific risk and reward perks or class specific ones that change the way you play your class completely. After spending almost 8,000 hours in FFXIV, 200 hours in WoW, can't even count the amount of time I've spent in OSRS, I can safely say Lost Ark wins in combat here. It keeps your attention and has an insane amount of customization with your skills with more ways to augment them later on. The content on launch here is almost overwhelming at times, the western launch essentially launched with years of updates along with the base game here considering this game isn't completely new to the world. It always feels like there's way to progress your character here and you're never really limited to doing a specific one either, you have the traditional rifts which are called Chaos Dungeons here which is mostly aimless slaughtering of enemies with minimal difficulty, Guardian Raids which consists of hunting a boss in an open map akin to a Monster Hunter hunt with the team sharing three lives and the boss running away after a specific point of damage, the next tier of content you can do is Abyssal Dungeons which consists of the first instance of responsibility in the game considering each boss mostly only have one or two mechanics that will wipe the whole party if you screw up. There's a lot of other endgame excursions like the Tower, The Cube and even a gathering dungeon called the Platinum Fields and this is just the tip of the iceberg here. You can also do questing and explore some islands to get some resources to improve your power. The game does a pretty good job of letting you know what to do and when something specific you want is up which I wish more MMOs had at this point.
Lost Ark sadly doesn't completely reinvent the genre if at all here though. The leveling process to get to the "fun" part is bordering on atrocious especially when the main appeal of the marketing and the game itself is what you can do once you hit the soft level cap here. We're talking 20-40 hours of some of the most basic generic fantasy you can think of here with the localization team bringing a lot of spell errors as well. The Lost Ark leveling experience will consist of questing and the awful MMO quest design it brings: killing x amount of monster, collecting x amount of resource, head to x spot. It's all very basic with very few times that there's something different and even the few times it manages to do something different, it sorta flounders and overstays its welcome such as the stealth segments here which consists of just avoiding an enemy's AOE while they are walking around for a long period of time with no checkpoints so if you get caught once, you're screwed and gotta replay it all again. I can easily see how someone can get bored by this and I don't blame anyone quitting the game before even reaching the endgame which again is what is the best part about this game. I also now want to talk about the elephant in the room with this game in general: the shop. Let me explain how gearing in Lost Ark works in brief detail: you do chaos dungeons/abyssal dungeons to get armor pierces for your tier, in order to improve your power, you need specific resources that you can get from a multitude of endgame activities and "hone" your gear, you do this until you hit a high enough power to continue the main quest which will involve 2-3 hours of questing and then you have to hit another milestone in power until you can do it again and that's essentially how a tier works. The honing system is how you improve your stats and power and at the final points of the power of a tier, it can be extremely frustrating with luck being the only factor unless you spend gold on items that improve your odds. The final honing for the tier will be an incredible expensive resource hog and at the base value will give you a 40% of actually being successful. Now if you run out of resources here, this is where the shop comes into play. You can buy these resources for honing on the shop on a rotational basis and if you really want, you can completely skip a tier this way without doing any endgame activities and just using your gold or credit card to buy these instead. Paying money in this game will make you progress faster in essentially what it does from a gameplay stance. The shop also has the usual suspects here including skins, mounts, pets, the premium aura which acts like a sub more than anything, some potion packs you can buy with crystals which you can buy with gold and that's really it. I think the best approach to playing this game is just doing a few of your dailies since this game actually has a lot of dailies and one for an alt so you can transfer those resources to your main to power it up but I feel like that's just asking too much from a person in this day and age. Last but not least, the social aspect is pretty neutered here. You have your own housing but no real roleplay tools or ways to play with your friends easily here not to mention the characters having no face animations when they emote which is kinda creepy.
If you aren't into MMOs or grindy games in general, Lost Ark won't change your mind. The combat is fun but it requires your time if you want to play it for free, the time investment isn't too bad but I still think it's too much to get the dopamine rush of getting progress. Even now despite the time I've put into this game whether I enjoyed it or not, I played it but I felt more of an obligation more than anything at one point. If you're really into MMOs and really enjoy Diablo's combat then I would suggest giving this one a shot, if you aren't then you won't enjoy this game and better spend the time elsewhere.
When most people think of Lost Ark, they probably think of an over-marketed Amazon MMO with proven success in other regions and they would be mostly right. I also feel like this game doesn't get enough credit for what it does despite a lot of what it does wrong. As I have hit Tier 3 of the game after playing for 165 hours, It's hard to tell whether I enjoyed the time or hated it despite me still playing it as much as I have.
Let's start with what this game does right: The combat. It's hard not to make comparisons but compared to other MMOs, it's honestly the most fun I've had actually playing an MMO. The combat is frantic, the animations and buttons feels satisfying to press, each skill has specific perks you can choose that completely augment and change how the skill acts like turning a one press button into a combo button and vice versa. The engraving system also gives you a lot of customization here with your playstyle like specific risk and reward perks or class specific ones that change the way you play your class completely. After spending almost 8,000 hours in FFXIV, 200 hours in WoW, can't even count the amount of time I've spent in OSRS, I can safely say Lost Ark wins in combat here. It keeps your attention and has an insane amount of customization with your skills with more ways to augment them later on. The content on launch here is almost overwhelming at times, the western launch essentially launched with years of updates along with the base game here considering this game isn't completely new to the world. It always feels like there's way to progress your character here and you're never really limited to doing a specific one either, you have the traditional rifts which are called Chaos Dungeons here which is mostly aimless slaughtering of enemies with minimal difficulty, Guardian Raids which consists of hunting a boss in an open map akin to a Monster Hunter hunt with the team sharing three lives and the boss running away after a specific point of damage, the next tier of content you can do is Abyssal Dungeons which consists of the first instance of responsibility in the game considering each boss mostly only have one or two mechanics that will wipe the whole party if you screw up. There's a lot of other endgame excursions like the Tower, The Cube and even a gathering dungeon called the Platinum Fields and this is just the tip of the iceberg here. You can also do questing and explore some islands to get some resources to improve your power. The game does a pretty good job of letting you know what to do and when something specific you want is up which I wish more MMOs had at this point.
Lost Ark sadly doesn't completely reinvent the genre if at all here though. The leveling process to get to the "fun" part is bordering on atrocious especially when the main appeal of the marketing and the game itself is what you can do once you hit the soft level cap here. We're talking 20-40 hours of some of the most basic generic fantasy you can think of here with the localization team bringing a lot of spell errors as well. The Lost Ark leveling experience will consist of questing and the awful MMO quest design it brings: killing x amount of monster, collecting x amount of resource, head to x spot. It's all very basic with very few times that there's something different and even the few times it manages to do something different, it sorta flounders and overstays its welcome such as the stealth segments here which consists of just avoiding an enemy's AOE while they are walking around for a long period of time with no checkpoints so if you get caught once, you're screwed and gotta replay it all again. I can easily see how someone can get bored by this and I don't blame anyone quitting the game before even reaching the endgame which again is what is the best part about this game. I also now want to talk about the elephant in the room with this game in general: the shop. Let me explain how gearing in Lost Ark works in brief detail: you do chaos dungeons/abyssal dungeons to get armor pierces for your tier, in order to improve your power, you need specific resources that you can get from a multitude of endgame activities and "hone" your gear, you do this until you hit a high enough power to continue the main quest which will involve 2-3 hours of questing and then you have to hit another milestone in power until you can do it again and that's essentially how a tier works. The honing system is how you improve your stats and power and at the final points of the power of a tier, it can be extremely frustrating with luck being the only factor unless you spend gold on items that improve your odds. The final honing for the tier will be an incredible expensive resource hog and at the base value will give you a 40% of actually being successful. Now if you run out of resources here, this is where the shop comes into play. You can buy these resources for honing on the shop on a rotational basis and if you really want, you can completely skip a tier this way without doing any endgame activities and just using your gold or credit card to buy these instead. Paying money in this game will make you progress faster in essentially what it does from a gameplay stance. The shop also has the usual suspects here including skins, mounts, pets, the premium aura which acts like a sub more than anything, some potion packs you can buy with crystals which you can buy with gold and that's really it. I think the best approach to playing this game is just doing a few of your dailies since this game actually has a lot of dailies and one for an alt so you can transfer those resources to your main to power it up but I feel like that's just asking too much from a person in this day and age. Last but not least, the social aspect is pretty neutered here. You have your own housing but no real roleplay tools or ways to play with your friends easily here not to mention the characters having no face animations when they emote which is kinda creepy.
If you aren't into MMOs or grindy games in general, Lost Ark won't change your mind. The combat is fun but it requires your time if you want to play it for free, the time investment isn't too bad but I still think it's too much to get the dopamine rush of getting progress. Even now despite the time I've put into this game whether I enjoyed it or not, I played it but I felt more of an obligation more than anything at one point. If you're really into MMOs and really enjoy Diablo's combat then I would suggest giving this one a shot, if you aren't then you won't enjoy this game and better spend the time elsewhere.
2 Comments
ff14 killer
Pringle
2 years ago