One of the most fun mmo's ever made out there, used to play it at RU and had a blast.

Unfortunately amazon had to buy it lol

coping hard rn

lost ark is like what if we took the minute to minute combat of diablo 3, cut about 75% of it and filled the rest up with fetch quests where you deliver like a basket of eggs to 5 townspeople, took the soulless and entirely embarrassing story and writing from d3 and decided this is actually too profound lets dumb it down somehow, then threw in a bunch of pay to win mechanics in for good measure.

its so aggressively mediocre that i cant help but assume the reason its so popular is amazon is running a covert ad campaign so powerful the likes of which have historically been reserved for when the cia is prepping to coup a small middle south american country, if only to keep the foreboding sense of doom i feel over the popularity of this game at bay.

there is little here to appreciate but a carefully crafted dopamine shotgun intended to leave the player bleeding from a dozen holes in the skull, with a conveniently placed cash shop with whatever you need to plug them. want to make this experience we have stretched out across hundreds of hours less painful? only 20$ per wound.

I honestly don't know if this will so much be a review of a playthrough in progress - subject to change as I make my way towards endgame, or will essentially outline the problems I'll continue have with the game indefinitely going forward. For some dubious reason it’s managed to sink its hooks in me and I’m keen to see where things go. (update: i give up lol. they refuse to upgrade their EU servers and this game is simply not worth the 6-hour queue time. eat my entire shit)

Lost Ark features one of the most dripless, uncharismatic settings and stories I've ever seen, it's fascinating how ungrounded it manages to feel throughout, no matter how many varied locales and beats it drags me through. On top of a frankly dire localisation, there really is just no theming here to ground anything. It's not even just that it's ultra-generic fantasy, as you leave the starting zone to begin exploring other islands and continents, settings vary wildly. From a Chinese xianxia-inspired gladiatorial island, tropical island where you drink an Arthur and the Invisibles shrinking potion, and I've arrived at a mecha desert continent with a city that is essentially MIdgar. The variety is definitely here, and there are instances that make good use of them in the sense that presentation here is generally top-notch. The camera will make cinematic movements through dungeons at points as grandiose setpieces do their thing in the background, it does a pretty good job at pretending it isn’t a top-down ARPG-inspired joint. One of the highlights so far has been one of the dungeons in the shrunken zone, where you’re walking across tables in a pirate camp as they stab their maps and spill bottles. The problem really is that I’m 100% certain the director is just copying One Piece and forgot to implement any levity or even pathos (it’s very funny when a painfully unconvincing “sad” sequence happens and the main story quest won’t progress until you stand in a certain spot and use a /cry emote). It just hurtles at a noticeably disinterested pace through its own ideas, introducing you to hundreds of characters that are all written like shit and exist to open doors for you to the next toy the director will eventually throw out of the pram.

I chose the Bard for my class, because by the game’s own admission it’s apparently the most difficult to play of the suite of guys. ARPGs are a genre I’ve always struggled with, especially Diablo-likes where you just click on swarms of approaching hitboxes until they turn into red mist forever as their health values slowly increase in perfect sync with your gear’s damage output, I was hoping the mechanical difficulty of a slightly gubbed support class and the general sense that I’m skinner boxing in a world filled with other rats in the same maze would help me out. In a sense, it is - it’s nice to look at the world chat and see emote spam, people notifying the zone that a world boss called Willi Willi has respawned by dryly saying “Willi up”, as well as that trademark EU data center racism. The combat here is functional I guess, my bard has about twenty skills for me to choose from, complete with Diablo 3-esque runes for me to alter certain properties, but I’ve done fine sticking to a handful that turn the hoards into mulch with low effort. Dungeons have the most boring kind of modular, numerical difficulty options for better gear, but I wouldn’t roll out of bed for that if it was on fire. I know for sure I’m not getting the most out of the game mechanically because the localisation does a frankly dogshit job at explaining its systems well. After a certain point in the story it dumps a ton of gear nuances and crafting mechanics on you all at once and it nearly drove me insane reading its indecipherable prattle.

Ultimately this just feels like a souped-up Ragnarok Online. The Korean MMO hallmarks are all here, the spectre of inevitable grind looms over so many unhideable UI elements - bars to fill and percentages to tick up (this thing even has the nerve to hide Korok seeds out of geometry). My modern MMO experience is squarely on FFXIV but I really only appreciate how that game doesn’t have a glowing shopping cart button onscreen at all times when you play essentially any other MMO - Lost Ark is a casino and a skinner box first and foremost, a game second. It boggles the fucking mind how this game essentially demands you to level up alts with its oh-so-generous server-wide “roster” buff system. The levelling process here is painstakingly railroaded - killing enemies gives 1/10000 of the exp of a quest, of which you’re completing in a choreographed straight line through a continent every few minutes. There is no player expression or true variety, and the exploration is pure smoke & mirrors. You’re here for one reason and one reason only, constantly trickle in money so you can Boost through the tedium. There’s not even one lost ark, there are like seven..

When Guild Wars 2 was in early development, ArenaNet considered not having "leveling" at all--just no concept of "level" in the game whatsoever. Looking at GW2 as it is now, it's easy to see how that could've worked. You'd explore the world to get skill points to unlock your skills and traits, but you wouldn't have to worry about filling your EXP bar to hit arbitrary milestones that make your numbers go up. And given how GW2 now throws full level-up books and level boosts at you these days, honestly I think they should've stuck with that idea. It's hard for me not to look at Lost Ark with a similar lens. The levelling experience doesn't seem to accomplish anything (you even start at level 10, and immediately choose your advanced role). The levelling system works in a game with fixed classes and a strong narrative thrust like FFXIV, but Lost Ark is a game that promises a seafaring adventure, that instead has its levels arbitrarily introduce the world for you. I want to strip numbers out of games so fucking bad dude.

I honestly can't see the appeal of this MMO, it literally has no substance.

The story is totally forgettable and not good at all. The characters are your stereotypes and are just there for the sake of fetch quests. Oh yeah, the whole game is just a fetch quest cause you go from A to B in every area. The areas exist for the sole purpose of wasting your time and get exp by doing quests.

The only good aspect of this game is the combat but even the combat doesn't have any depth. You start at level 10, immediately choose your sub class and you unlock abilities over time. Unfortunately the abilities only do damage and have no other factors.

The main reason I play MMORPGs is the social factor. This game has no social factor at all. Guilds are the only thing that is social but they are just useless. It basically feels like a very cheap copy of Diablo and it's not even good.

Also in this game there are around 4 different outfits. If you want more, pay some real money. I think that's why I really dislike korean MMOs in general, Black Desert did the same.

All in all, it's a waste of time. Please just play a good MMORPG.

Incredibly frustrating game. The core combat here is a ton of fun, and going through dungeons is a blast. The combat system really makes mowing down dozens of mobs at a time addicting.

The issue, however, is that these combat opportunities are drip fed to you over the course of the most generic, trite fantasy story possible that gets bogged down even further by the virtue of wanting to be an MMO. I just handled 40+ enemies at once in this dungeon, why is the next quest objective "Kill 4 bandits" or "Pick 3 flowers?"

I hear end game is where this games shines, and I'd believe it. When you can just do all the fun stuff without 90% filler? Yeah, that sounds great. But I won't see it because I can't imagine wasting anymore time delivering apples or some garbage.

"it's eat or be eaten in this cruel world" ~lost ark (2022)

you faced down the darkness living within you, but you never backed down. you overcame your inner darkness and protected your true self... now go forth and deliver these flowers for the local guard. we're counting on you

when you're done with that, feel free to mash your keyboard and dish out a variety of attacks that all feel exactly the same. will you press "w", or "q"? the possibilities are simply endless

currently redownloading path of exile

- I can unreservedly say that the environments in this game look gorgeous, but animations in the world vary wildly between being 1. unnecessarily detailed for a top-down MMO played at this level of zoom, and 2. absolutely horrendous, like they were legitimately only half completed

- The big setpiece battles look incredible! The rendered scale of battles here shits all over the battles in Diablo 3 (and similar battles in other Diablo clones). It's the only time during the main campaign where you feel like your character is as powerful as the story says they are. I'm level 40, why am I still killing six boars at a time? Spawn more enemies please.

- Loads of classic MMO bullshit. Classes locked to a certain gender, painfully over-acted dialogue (even for an MMO), horrendously horny animations and armor for any female subclass. I tend to play as female characters in most games and I think this is the first time I've ever been outright embarrassed about it. I've got a fairly high tolerance for it but when I equip all the new, strong armor I get after a dungeon and see my character is wearing dolphin shorts and a... uh... cheongsam crop top(?) it's gonna get an eye roll from me.

- For an MMO it's actually kinda hard to play with your friends? You can party up but you have to go back to the friends list to see where on the map they are, you don't get to see what quest they're doing or where their objective is, but if their objective is "eliminate 10 rats" or w/e you can contribute to that without being aware of it at all. If someone who isn't the party leader tries to start a dungeon it just laughs at you and doesn't notify the party leader at all, so you've gotta tell the party leader what waypoint is closest to you (if they're not on the same map) and have them manually run all the way to the dungeon to start it. Maybe endgame content is easier to coordinate, but boy did they make the main campaign a pain.

- Classes are actually fairly interesting overall, and the ability to modify each skill as you level it provides an opportunity for build variety among each subclass (although not to the same degree as D3). The specialty skills are my favorite part of this system, as it offers you a sort of gameplay "anchor" to build around. Personal favorites are the gunslingers' gun-swapping, the soulfist's 3-tiered damage amp, and the gunlancer's shielding/status immunity.

- I'm not at endgame yet but I've enjoyed my time with it so far. There's a lot of bullshit "mash G until the quest is complete" nonsense mixed in here but fighting stuff is enough of a treat that I'm hoping for something like the rifts from Reaper of Souls once I clear the story. There are a lot of systems here that I haven't had to engage with yet (or don't care to, e.g. housing) but unless this game takes a hard left turn before endgame I'll probably continue to put time into this for a couple more weeks. I can't really see myself coming back to this long-term, though. We'll see if that changes - right now I'm biding my time until I can see what this game looks like once you're truly finished with the story.

While my journey is nowhere near done I have almost 50 hours in game and am currently doing end game content. I LOVE Lost ark this is the MMO I have truly been waiting for and while some may not enjoy the usual MMO tropes if you are able to past the early game you are in for a treat. Honestly if you bomb rush the story reaching end game does not take long at ALL compared to most MMO titles and you can very much skip side quests even though some give good rewards. For me this game does many things right with its end game but it also does something else right for me that I have been waiting for in MMOs for so long. PVP. This game has an amazing PVP that is non P2W and is playable the moment you unlock it as all armor and stats are equalized so it is pure skill based.

All in all the combat is fun, end game is fun, and PVP is a blast. I mean the game is free just give it a go and like I say if you hate the usual early game grind to end game just rush through the story and you will hit endgame a lot quicker then say FF14.

It's an MMO that doesn't require you to play multiplayer at all, you are actually disencouraged to play with other people, as you go slower and gain no benefit at all, the devs expect you to rush to max lvl and start lvling up another 4 characters, it's insane. But it's a fun braindead hack n slash with very satisfying sound and visual effects, reason why the casual majority got into it, it's entertaining and free-to-play without being pay-to-win (as far as I'm concerned).

The story is very epic but only because it's just a blatant plagiarism of many different good games, for example, the main character is an obvious mix version of early Arthas and old Anduin, from Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft, that follows the exact same progression and growth.

I think the reason why it got so popular is Amazon's stupidly large advertisement budget and control over Twitch, plus the lack of interesting or outstanding games released on 2022 so far.

I can guarantee that the hype will die on February 25th when Elden Ring comes out if not before, because the game is so braindead and easy that I got bored on release date. *Post-Elden Ring edit: RIP Lost Ark.

🇧🇷 [Primeiras Impressões]

-Me prometeram um Diablo 4 belíssimo, recebi um hack 'n slash genérico cansado com um cenário bonito de 70GB. Em resumo: uma bela e pesada decepção-

Como típico jogo feito com 100 equipes de outsourcing pra entregar o jogo pronto logo, sem uma direção e supervisão sólida, Lost Ark começa no encanto de uma belíssima tela de seleção de classe e personalização. E da mesma forma que encantou à primeira vista, desencanta rapidamente com o decorrer da experiência, se resumindo a apenas um belo cenário e sono.

O jogo já começa com uma referência clara ao Paraíso de Diablo 3, como se peitasse a franquia descaradamente. Inclusive as pop-ups de conquista são extremamente similares. Uma pena ser incapaz de entregar a consistência de Diablo para ser de fato equiparado á.

No primeiro minuto após a criação do personagem, achei um pouco anti climático me jogar num cenário de teste de classe e pode até summonar inimigos ao invés de estar, de fato, imerso no início da aventura com a classe que eu JÁ escolhi. Aventura esta, inclusive, que traz mais um plot perdido de jogo mobile chinês genérico onde de repente você está no paraíso do Diablo 3 falando com anjo e aí de repente você está num barco sem explicação nenhuma com uma roupa deslocada ajudando desconhecido a encontrar tesouro a troco de nada.

Com uma UI/UX medíocre que falha em apresentar imersivamente todo o conteúdo do jogo, como skills e sistemas. O jogador logo é jogado em uma HUD cheia de botões e precisa se esforçar para descobrir o que é tudo aquilo por si só, o que gera um problema de imersão na experiência, além da leitura visual dificultada.

Falando em UI, a interface de diálogos consegue ser detestável de ponta a ponta, com sua posição de câmera de baixo apelo estético, texto na parte inferior extrema da tela e um sistema de escolha de resposta onde você só tem: UMA única resposta.

Combates fazem parte do core gameplay da proposta e neste caso a primeira impressão do sistema de combate é: TÉDIO. Apenas segura o clique do mouse para continuar batendo até não houver mais inimigos.
Um monte de habilidades já disponíveis quais você sequer foi familiarizado com (e boa parte não mostra uma distinção situacional de uso) que resumem a experiência em: aperte tudo que estiver disponível sem precisar de estratégia alguma. Talvez o confronto com chefes seja a única coisa que acabou tendo alguma emoção.

A exploração de cenário também é bastante tediosa e você simplesmente anda pelos mapas sem prestar atenção de fato neles pois eles não têm NADA que exija que você mantenha os olhos atentos, fazendo um mal uso e não valorizando o belo cenário e ambientação, que é o carro chefe da proposta.

O resumo da ópera: Para quem já foi educado com Tree of Savior e Genshin Impact, fica difícil engolir essa experiência de jogo. Se o jogo falha em me entregar uma experiência encantadora no próprio prólogo (que é o momento mais primordial da experiência de jogador, onde eu me conecto com a proposta) e depende de um endgame pra isso, então ele falhou como entretenimento. Seria o mesmo que me pedir para ficar 2 anos num relacionamento tóxico para que enfim eu colha felicidade. Portanto, não recomendo.

No he acabado ni mucho menos con Lost Ark, pero he "terminado" con su leveo.

MMOARPG donde explotas todo lo que te plantan delante, con 4000 mecanicas que te explican durante el progreso y que no retienes ni la mitad, momentos de facepalm absoluto con desiciones de diseño y por estetica, pero que, aun con todo esto, es extremadamente divertido, entretenido y sobretodo, satisfactorio de jugar.

Seguiré con ello, tocara empezar a farmear y aprenderse conceptos, pero estoy muy muy contento con esta primera experiencia.

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.