That classic trope of riding along in a wagon I can only hope means I’m about to embark on quite the adventure. So far I have some mixed feelings about Lost Ark. It is an ARPG that was released back in 2019 that has just arrived in western and other markets.
Since Lost Ark already has some age to it I find that is a double edge sword for the game. This is usually a good thing for a game content-wise as there will be lots to do for quite some time at least that is my expectation of things.
That also means if you are not careful it can be easy to overwhelm the player with way too many things. From the looks of it, they are slowly releasing a bunch of content for the game over time depending on a set of player progressions that the game developers are keeping an eye on.
It will also be interesting to see how the game if at all is molded for more western tastes. The game itself appears to have first been released in South Korea which explains some of the overall aesthetics of the game and many of the choices.
I started about a month after this game hit the US. I felt that would give the developers a decent amount of time to work out any major issues. I also had other games I was engaged with at the time and did not want to deal with day one issues.
One thing I have noticed right away since downloading the game is a few gig patches for the past few days daily. I’m not sure if that is going to be a normal occurrence for this game. I was somewhat hoping to have avoided seeing daily large updates this far into the launch. That is however something to keep in mind as a possibility.
At first, I thought this game was going to follow a more standard character class system. You start by picking between a couple of different classes. I went with a warrior the first time out as everything else seemed to like it could be a bit squishier and I’ll be playing solo a lot of the time.
What felt odd was that they had you pick an advanced class so soon. When you are starting a game off having a player make such an important decision so early on puts a lot of pressure on the player. They seemed to try and release that pressure somewhat by allowing you to test the different advanced class skills against monsters and a boss in a play area.
After some storyline, you are then dropped off in a more expected setting. You come into this world on a boat. That seems normal with the exception that you already have a bunch of skills unlocked, have combat level 10, and are put in some large fights where you need to know the skills at least a little bit.
I found this approach of dropping the player into the world without further character progression to be a little off-putting. Instead of having a couple of levels of unlocking new skills and learning what each one does. You just have them.
This leads me to a lot of just button mashing. Since I did not know what I was doing, the game quickly if that had some short text pop up that went away quickly. When faced with large hordes of monsters you are just using everything till they go splat.
Whatever was supposed to happen before reaching combat level 10 if anything at all seems to have been important. I don’t know if this is how the original game went about it. If I somehow being my first time out got to bypass other starter content or what is going on.
This seems to be a reoccurring theme for the game sadly so far for me. I assume since this game has been out for a couple of years there have been many additions to it that are intertwined to the point of removing them at first is not a real possibility. Thus leaving the player overloaded, confused, and just wanting to run off to kill things.
There were many instances before you even got to grasp the basics the game was already unlocking further advanced progression resulting in you needing to make choices. Skills for instance you can level up, pick different empowerments, and other things.
Having to make such decisions based on a limited exposure of using a skill a couple of times is just odd. This seems like stuff you would want to introduce the player to a little while into the game. After they got a feel for things and are not just button mash pushing to stay alive.
There is also just a lot of busyness going on. You might do one thing and unlock a bunch of achievements all at once. You might have a bunch of notifications indicating new things being unlocked that you need to check out. Opening new windows to be greeted by a massive amount of information as seen above and not having much of a clue what is going on regarding most of it.
All of this is quite strange once you realize the game is not just dropping you off into an open world to do as you please as so far it is all quite locked down. So far my first few hours have been quite the guided tour. You get a quest, you head to a quest location on the map and then you get another quest.
In many instances, you appear to be locked in an area until you further along with the main story. This makes you feel like there was some intent in building the player up to a certain level of understanding. That however is just not evident with the actual outcome.
You can also tell this game has been translated into a few different languages. Most of the time you will have a voice actor read a single line of dialogue when interacting with an NPC. After that no more voice, you are off having to read it yourself. There have also been some strange word usages or the voice actor saying something a little different than the text.
Most of my time spent so far has just been going from quest to quest to quest. I have been picking up all the quests I can see as that just feels like how one would go about things. Killing monsters themselves give little experience and rarely drops anything.
I have not felt like my character was even close to getting killed at least so far. Even when there are massive hordes of monsters and I’m just taking them out like some kind of god. Seldom needing to pop a healing potion. Then again I did start right off the bat having an advanced class that once I fill his gauge up and engage it everything around me is flattened like a pancake.
Final Thoughts
It was an interesting few hours. Hopefully, a lot more of all the windows, features, and stuff becomes more apparent and explained as I get further into the game. If not I’ll have to sit down and try to better understand on my own quite a few things. At least despite some confusion, I’m having a blast.
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Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Lost Ark
From my understanding, there used to be a proper story from levels 1-10 for each class, but because a lot of the existing players didn't want to do that anymore, the developers were just like "eh, start them at 10 and get them to choose their advanced class straight away."
I was hoping that would be reverted in our western release, but alas, it wasn't.
It's not as information-overloady straight off the bat as I was worried about though. When you get to the first proper city at about level 30 though there's a bunch of new information. THAT overwhelmed me a little. I ended up just ignoring it and slowly learned it for myself as I continued to level.
The large updates you downloaded recently are because of the March Update. I'm guessing that's going to be a thing every month. 😬
It's a shame they did not keep it around for your "first time playing" and than boost you to level 10 on any other character you are playing.
Other than that it's been interesting. I'm wondering what kind of crazy person wants to collect those 1k+ seeds and if I'll do it!
~shifty eyes~
I've gotten about 300 of those seeds so far! 🤣 I might be crazy!!
Feeling the same about how they drop and unload so much stuff all toghether at the start. I generally like no handholding but here it was different, I just didn't felt the difference from different skills and proprieties as they were dropped all on me. It makes finding a new skill trivial when you still don't know how the other works. I liked it but I haven't much time to spend on it right now.
Least my second day I'm starting to understand a few things after going though them. Many of the windows are quite nice to have just not like all at once lol. It sounds like it gets even worse once you get to a much higher level.
what I liked most about the game is the pvp but lately I feel a bit disappointed as the developers are giving more importance to pve than pvp.
I have never been into PvP that much in these kinds of games. That was an unknown factor for me going into it. While you are hoping for more PvP I'm just looking to avoid it. Not real sure on how that part of the game works yet.
The game is very interesting I really enjoyed it. because I spent much time on it.
That is great to hear. I'm hoping it has lots of fun things to do.
It seems a pretty interesting game. I played the Diablo series before. I think I am going to try this one out.
I use to love playing Diablo. This is quite a different game so far it's been fun.
Your words made me more excited about this game. Good afternoon.
Nice gameplay, fun to watch. Thanks for posting it, cheers! !PIZZA
Thanks, have a great weekend.
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