Although I really did not intend to get into it, I got a bit hooked with this Korean MMORPG/ARPG called Lost Ark, which came out in the US sometime in February. A few friends pushed me towards it along with watching a streamer or two and as a result I became curious. Right now, I’ve got a few alts and have been slowly progressing my way towards end game content and feel that I have played enough to post an early review.
The Good
Easily, the first thing to talk about this game is the generally smooth look and beautiful art that’s been done. Since I came out of the worlds of Diablo 3 and Path of Exile, I felt that I had actually moved forward into the present in terms of a contemporary gaming experience and look. The landscape, cutscenes and overall look are quite amazing. If anything the environment that Lost Ark lives in feels quite alive.
Depth-wise, this game at first glance may not seem enormous because of how many systems are slowly introduced to you over time. But the leveling experience gives you exposure and tries to teach you some concepts like life skills, teleporting from Tripods, the importance of songs, etc. little by little, feeding you bits as you progress into the story. And for a game with a soft level cap of 50, you would think the end game starts at that point.
NOPE
Leveling from 1-50 really is just the start of the idea of various systems that you will encounter. Even finishing the first continent initially made me believe that the real end game was starting. But there were still more systems like sailing to be taught. And from the spot I’m at (Rohindel), I know that there are more things coming up.
But while you’re leveling, some systems may not be as evident in terms of usage such as Engravings or the Card system and how they might benefit you. Later as you get deeper into the game and start focusing on more end game activities, these systems become critical as your class’ power becomes more focused through these methods.
From here, let me talk about the importance of quests. Unlike World of Warcraft, as an example, questing is the key to gaining levels. You cannot grind out dungeons or killing mobs to level up. In a way, this is a good thing as many players in general hate questing and find ways to opt out of it to get to whatever end game meta is present. Here, you cannot avoid it. You must go through the quest route and are gated by completion. In that sense, you will be inundated by the story, especially the first time through until level 50 where you cannot skip cutscenes. I suppose the primary benefit in this is that the quest designers’ efforts are forcibly appreciated, which I felt in World of Warcraft were often times overlooked because people were horribly impatient.
The prologue of this game pretty much puts you into the thick of things and even before that there’s a huge character customization section where your look can be go down to shaping the face and eyes. It’s pretty impressive and in truth has no impact on the game outside of the fact that you get that ability, which is something games like Diablo 3 and Path of Exile lack.
Once you choose your name, you’re immediately thrust into meeting Beatrice who is your guide on this journey. As you pick your class and specialization, you get to sample how the class will feel through a demo of the combat system. While I only did this once, I can appreciate why it’s there. A good chunk of the game is dedicated to combat so you want to pick a character that feels natural to you. This is probably one of the better ways to get a feel for how the character will play but it’s not a clear indicator of what is to come.
One of the early things you encounter in the game with the prologue is the concept of basic boss mechanics. The first boss you fight will throw you off. In a way, this first fight is a bit unfair in that you have to think on your feet and figure out quite quickly how to use your class’ abilities to defeat a being that can knock you back and perform big time damaging hits compared with the otherwise frail mobs you had been fighting against up until this point. But the truth is that most bosses in this game are going to have variations of these types of mechanics so pitting you against one early on prepares you mentally for what’s coming up.
Also, basic boss attacks and mechanics are pretty well telegraphed. Many are color coded so you can make some assumptions on what to do (i.e. if you see red coming at you, get the fuck out). You can see Lost Ark borrowing from other systems like League of Legends or the doomed Wildstar with the way effects are implemented. I thought this was a great thing since games like Path of Exile just instagib you without allowing you to realize what’s going on. So at the very least, if there’s a red circle that you die from, it’s pretty much on you.
Another thing that struck me is how gearing is important but it’s not a crutch in Lost Ark. World of Warcraft was easily one of the most heartbreaking games to play in terms of getting loot once you hit the end game. Maybe you need a critical piece of gear that allows you to enter a new tier of content but RNG is just killing you from finding such a thing. Or Path of Exile where you want to try a build out but can’t because the gear is too rare to find on your own without going insane or that you lack the currency to get the items you need.
In Lost Ark, doing quests, killing elites and even vendors have your gear. So you won’t have issues getting enough basic gear to progress. Progression with gear is a different issue that I’ll touch on later. But for the most part, gear is pretty generic, ilvls do matter and everything is a stat stick. The end game gear will be more relevant as you get other types of stats that matter for your builds. But the leveling gear is just that and it’s very easy to obtain.
Another major positive in this game is the lack of permadeaths. Being associated to ARPGs, one would imagine that a “hardcore” (die once) setting would exist. Instead, dying just penalizes you with a mechanism similar to World of Warcraft where you gear gets damaged and you either must face a waiting penalty or utilize a feather for an instant revival. There are a few things that are hardmode in this game but death is not one of them.
One of the most enjoyable parts of the game for me are Chaos Dungeons. This is the closest aspect to the game that reminds me of an actual ARPG. They’re very simple, just go in, kill a ton of things in waves and do so quickly. It’s the type of experience I like in a game like this because it’s simple, you get and get out. Also, you can get some great loot that helps a ton in adventuring and makes you actually feel like you’ve accomplished something. My only two complaints here are that you require a special build for doing Chaos Dungeons and there aren’t more of this type of content for people who want to progress solo and just want mindless progression.
Probably, the best part about a game like this is that it’s free to play. There are, of course, paid for type of things in the game but none of them are truly mandatory (not in my experience thus far). The supporter packs have some nice benefits like an aura that cuts the cost of traveling down or an extra character slot to go beyond the allotted six. But given what you can do in this game without spending a dime, it’s hard to complain in that sense.
The Bad
Now, that we’ve got the positives out of the way, let’s start digging into various issues I’ve found in the game. And this is going to be a pretty long rant at times because I have some severe issues.
First, the UI/UX is horrific. Let me get that out of my system. Whoever are the designers they need to fire them and replace them with people who understand good game design. This is at all levels of the game too. The biggest problem I have is the sheer amount of redundant clicking. One simple example is entering a dungeon scenario. First, you arrive at a spot which is a solo instance that asks you if you want to enter. Then you need to click another button to confirm that you want to enter it. Shouldn’t one be enough? And if you made a mistake, why not present an exit?
Second, the basic interface just is unconventional. G for talking or interacting with objects rather than just right clicking is nonsense to me. Yes, you can do that too but in a lot of instances, you either can’t or you won’t get the desired result. Of course, you gradually gets used to the G button but it’s in an odd spot on the keyboard and if you’re in the middle of combat, your fingers need to dance around a bit, possibly making mistakes for some stupid interaction that must take place in an encounter.
Also, the way the combat system is setup is bad. It just feels bad. The basic combat keybinds drive me crazy. It takes a while to get used to and not all abilities are firing-and-forget style. Some require channeling while others force you to press the key, target and press again. Others might involve motion like a teleportation movement or worse yet transforming into another form that presents a whole new interface that you don’t have time to read because the new form is on a short period and you just have to spam everything to maximize what you can get out of it quickly. The latter part angers me more than anything; it’s like Archon from Diablo 3 where your fingers have been trained to react one way then for a brief time require immediate context switching without the ability to re-train.
By far the worst instance of this situation is the Deadeye class. My description of this class is that it’s been designed for a schizophrenic who enjoys driving a big rig truck down the side of a cliff with broken brakes. Of course, for those asking, I chose this as my first character, which made everything else a million times more difficult. But the reason I hated this so much is that you are constantly rotating between three different gun types to switch between abilities. That means more awkward context changes, remapping of muscle memory in a short fashion and situations where can’t make a mistake. People say it’s higher skill cap required but I say this is dogshit design. What’s even more frustrating is that you’re a backstabbing semi-range class that isn’t ranged. What? I suppose what I really wanted here was the Gunslinger but you can’t really figure these things out until you’re deep into the game.
And that brings me into my next point where this is a game that tricks you into thinking that it’s easy to pick up and hard to master. No/Yes, Yes. It’s easy to get into because of the long tutorial but it definitely is not easy to pick up. And again I blame all that squarely on poor UI/UX. A good example is the fire quest early on. You need to pick up a bucket, run to a fire spot and douse it. Sounds simple? Well, what they don’t tell you is that you need to press a certain key to aim onto the fire spot. So for a few minutes, I was running back and forth picking up and dropping buckets without any effect. I get that it forces you to read things more carefully but the entire game is like this and the interface constantly changes to do things. So I’m not just referring to combat but just mastering how to play the game.
Another thing that drives me crazy is the sheer number of mobs in this game. Not only that but their placement too. Many mobs have a “leash” which is a concept possibly from World of Warcraft where aggro’ing a mob causes it to pursue you up until a certain distance. That distance might be too long at times especially when you’re attempting to do quests and have dialogs with NPCs. And for better or worse, many of these mobs respawn rates are crazy fast. So if you’re just trying to get a piece of ore, you might have to kill things over and over and face constant interruption. Outside of wasting time (which is a frequent theme in this game), it’s just endless frustration that serves no purpose in my view.
And while we’re on the subject of dialog with NPCs, let’s address another elephant in the room: waaaaaaaayyyyy too much dialog. These flavor texts just go on forever. Like other games such as World of Warcraft, the bulk of these meandering gibberish are skippable. But for whatever reason, the writers in many cases seemed to enjoy going overboard with the sheer volume of horrible script. Once in a while you’ll encounter a situation where you need to make a choice and maybe forced to actually read the dialog. Or if you’re clicking too fast to speed things up, you might accidentally hit a choice you didn’t intend. Once again all I can think of is how terrible this setup is.
On top of that, talking to an NPC does not isolate you from mob attacks. It puts you into a zoomed interface so that you’re forced to listen to the thoughtless contemplation of some of the worst, inane, brain rot I have ever encountered. It’s as though they hired some junior high school students to put together the whole thing. It’s just drivel.
And like the unending verbal diarrhea in this game, the other redundant, unforgiving time sink is the sheer volume of cut scenes. There’s very few real cinematics in this game. Most of the cinematics are nothing more than the game at a different camera angle with dialog and scripted movement thrown in. So most likely a lot of these scenes are easily created by comparison to really good cinematics like over at Blizzard (which I will give them the utmost credit for). Luckily, in Lost Ark’s case, the basic engine is good enough to make these cut scenes tolerable. But the number of them is offensive especially during the first leveling process as you are not allowed to skip them.
The Ugly
While there are a variety of annoying problems in the game, there are aspects that just make me want to uninstall the game. A lot of it really is just UI/UX again but those things are too generic to fold up into a single section. But I wanted to talk about the truly reprehensible parts when it comes to certain UI/UX things.
First, there are a few stealth quests that are notorious in this game. One is in Shunshire. I got to that point on my main, knowing full well what it would entail and the frustration I would be forced to endure. So I FastPass’d an alt to 50 to skip Shunshire and am questing in Rohindel to complete the area and get my Gunlancer to surpass that Shunshire quest via the Knowledge Transfer mechanism. It will cost me 1k gold but knowing the stress I will be avoiding may save me a ton of IRL money for a new keyboard. But the point I’m trying to make is that quests like these are just evil, they serve no purpose outside of serving the ego of a product designer and probably can be a game killer because there’s no way around them.
Next, I fucking hate the fact that you have to press spacebar after getting knocked back. It wouldn’t be so bad if the damn movement/stand aspect did not have a cooldown attached. I will get into cooldowns in a moment but this game has so many interruptions and knock backs that if you’re not some cokehead Starcraft Diamond player with ADHD, you’re going to hate the constant blow backs. It’s annoying and just is another item that adds to a huge list of my frustrations with combat.
But in that I touched upon the idea of cooldowns. And I hate games with cooldowns. Outside of your basic right click weapon ability, everything in this game with regards to combat, potion usage, special item usage, etc. have a cooldown associated to them. And the reason I hate cooldowns in games like this is because now you’re forced to monitor multiple parts of your screen. Your eye goes to each ability and in many cases, the tiny print for the countdown is impossible to see, so you don’t know how to time things, especially during some of these hectics fights. Or if you have an ability that requires a double spam and you’re but a second off, oops you lose. I felt like especially in boss fights you were running around most of the time praying that your opponent would stand still for just a second so you could get off a shot and avoid being knocked back. Because if you’re interrupted, you lose the ability altogether. That whole system feels like garbage to me and yes I understand skill capped blah blah blah; but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong either.
And while most boss mechanics are reasonably telegraphed, some are outright indecipherable. There are fights where again the interface changes, a small, indiscernible flavor text pops up that partly obscures the screen and you’re forced to read and react at the same time without possibly knowing what to do. And some of these flavor texts aren’t small amounts to read but lengthy sentences. It’s so stupid because you’re in a boss fight and being told what to do even though all you really should be doing is wailing on the boss’ health.
From there, let me say that many of those boss encounters last forever. Dungeons, scenarios and boss encounters are nothing more than endurance tests of your patience. And it’s not like you have just one or two encounters. Every zone feels like you have 2-3 and every continent has a few dungeons and scenarios that take forever. Boss fights may have multiple phases where you get no rest time and may even be forced to fight an entirely new entity despite the fact that you’re already fatigued. Not to mention the boss health at times are outrageous. You just keep thinking to yourself, “When can this be over? I just want to go to sleep.” That was how I felt on that last dungeon encounter in Vern. I slammed my keyboard so hard I thought I broke it and I gave up for that night. But the real thing I couldn’t but wonder was why? What’s the purpose of these multi phased fights that drag on forever? Same thing with these dungeons. Smilegate doesn’t get an extra dime for the amount of time you spend doing these things. It just feels like an absolute time sink.
And that partly leads to the dungeon scenario thing. For an MMORPG type of game, it sucks that you can’t group up for these. Why are you forced to do a dungeon scenario by yourself? Why can’t they make dungeon scenarios just dungeons? Why is there a separate experience in the first place? It’s rotten design again. If I managed to get in a group with a friend, I should be allowed to share my activities with that person.
But there are activities that you have to group with people like raids and abyss dungeons for end game content. This part drives me nuts knowing how PUGs work in games. And this doesn’t make me want to become anymore social either. So again just another ancient artifact that needs to be re-thought in the world of MMORPGs. The fact that you probably have to look up mechanics and come prepared suck because it’s just more nonsense that you need to spend doing outside of the game rather than just going in, wailing on a boss quickly and getting out.
While I’m probably missing a ton of other issues, I wanted to list one last thing: the voice acting/story. The voice acting is bottom tier and I make no apologies for my contempt towards the soulless drivel being inflicted upon one in this game. What magnifies the horrors of cringe unleashed upon the world by the voice acting is the equally generic, god awful, fan servicing that probably was conceived in some board room that strung together a barely coherent story. The story might seem great to a basement dwelling nerd who masturbates with ketchup all day long, but it’s just flat out ludicrous. You have your Korean big boobed women in skimpy outfits, your boi band ghey Korean idols for characters, every copy infringed environment from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings done way wrong and the most downright insulting stuff that makes Whimseyshire from Diablo 3 look like Game of Thrones. There is no comforting way for me to describe this lackluster, imagine-less, uninspired world. What makes it worse for me are the names. Just random garbage that occasionally makes me believe some person rammed their head against the keyboard multiple times and only filled out a few vowels here and there to create hundreds of insipid, bland and paltry names. I have my own offensive names but I stick by what I create.
Final Thoughts
Despite my negativity, the game is fun to play and can be quite addicting. Since every is a system of upgrades and grinding to make you progress, you never feel like you should be stopping. A small quest bread crumb might be a poisonous hook that snares you for a good few hours or worse yet until the sun comes up for a few days as you simply want to get through to see what comes next. There is no satisfactory stopping point where you can successfully declare that what you accomplished is enough. There’s always more to do and you feel constantly behind.
I really hope though that the devs not only look at end game content but some of the shitty decisions they’ve made on various quests and the linearity of the game. Right now, I feel like this is almost Disney-esque in terms of how they want you to experience the game in an extremely tight funnel because there’s a lot of things I would prefer to never have to do again. And while there are mechanism like the PowerPass you get from finishing Vern, the real issue should be sections of painful content like dungeons, scenarios, etc. which aren’t fun and force you to bang your head against the wall until you finish them.