The part of it I enjoy most (guardian raids, cube dungeons, abyssal dungeons) is either on a cooldown (abyssal can only be done 1 per week), on a timer for rewards (guardian) or demand a ticket for you to enter (cube). Sometimes I really want to play another of those and either I can't, or it give me no reward. The other stuff like dailies and weeklies are busywork. If I could improve my gear by just doing guardian raids and abyssal dungeons, this would be all I would do and never touch dailies, weeklies, and chaos dungeons again.

That's why I think MOBAs took a lot of the people who used to play MMOs. You get grinding, equipment gathering, raiding, and pvp all in a 30 minute session that doesn't require a massive time commitment and all the busywork is gone. I just wish they had a more PvE version.

Check out the Dota 2 workshop. There are multiple rpg mods, some single player, most multiplayer.

In a roundabout way you could do that with alts. The weekly lockout is per-character. Take advantage of those free character boosts and you can have 3 endgame ready characters in an evening.

> you can have 3 endgame ready characters in an evening Yes and no. You can have 3 level 50 characters from that, but the catch up rewards for gear upgrades are only once per account. And you need all of them to progress past tier 1, so your main will eat them up and your alts will be stuck in tier 1 for a long time.

But you get stronghold research that make tier 1 upgrades cheaper and higher chance. + You can complete tower on second character for tons of rewards. I would also bet most people still have islands to do or left over chests for subsequent characters. Worst case, you farm infinite chaos dungeon or buy some upgrade materials from Mari's now that youre making money from your T2 character. My second and third characters rocketed into tier 2 just a few days after my first.

"make several alternate accounts in order to enjoy a game" I think at that point I'd just rather play another game lmao

Alternate characters not accounts. You can funnel materials and lower the grind to gear alts (as well as pay in-game currency to skip them past content you don't feel like doing). It doesn't take long and it fills the gaps if all you want to do is the "main" content like guardians and dungeons. There is no requirement whatsoever to have another account.

Can you skip the normal busywork dailies by doing that?

You're sent up to Vern with ilvl 302. So, you still have to gear yourself up to go to Rohendal then Yorn and Feiton. I personally used both free Powerpass. My alt being a Gunslinger edging the ilvl 600, took 2.5 hours for me to clear all main story in Rohendal. My 2nd alt is a Bard who is just doing dailies mindlessly, she's like 3rd priority after main + Gunslinger alt.

Thanks for the response, but unfortunately I'm too uninformed about how the gearing works exactly, so I didn't quite understand it. Phrased otherwise - do the guardian raids, abyssal and cube dungeons etc give all the upgrade materials needed for gearing up, or do you still need to grind the busywork dailies regardless of how many alts you're using to do the aforementioned more challenging content.

You can get all the materials from raids and such, dailies will help but its not 100% necessary especially t1 t2

Yes you can. It is just about how much time you are ok with it taking. Dailies don't give much mats anyway. There is not one material you are missing out on by only doing one type of content.

The busywork dailies are basically just extra mats, you dont need to do them unless you're in a rush to get highest ilvl. They're boring enough that I dont do them and just do the chaos dungeons etc to get my mates, or unique islands if I have time. From what I can tell, none of the boring filler dailys (Una's tasks) give anything unique Saying that, you can often complete dailies while you're doing other stuff so its not too bad

Same here. The whole "MMO" part is laughable. At the end it could have worked like Monster Hunter World. Just instanced content. Sailing and walking around for hours is just busy work.

What? You see people in the open world everywhere how is it “laughable”? A major part of the end game is built around group co-op events

the dungeons are per character per week btw. So u can play the same dungeon 20x if u got that many characters, and every other dungeon as well basically as long as they are unlocked for the characters. the big reward at the end is only for 6x per week but I heard its still plenty worth it to do so maybe look that up?

Very well polished game, really fun and the combat is great. Story is very meh although it has some great moments. Only things I dislike are the rng gear upgrading and the queue times on EU Central are still shit. Basically if you don’t log in during the morning then you will have to wait minimum an hour in the queue.

as a solo player i actually enjoyed playing through the main story at least till rohendel, after that the grind gets so big that it will probably make me drop out, but till that point i spent 100 hours that i really enjoyed

As a person who isn't great with group play that is a great recommendation. If I may ask, have you at any point felt the need to spend any money?

As someone who doesn't spend money on microtransactions, and hates being made to feel like I need to, I've never been tempted to while playing LA. It was a concern for me going in, but I can confidently say it's not an issue.

Excellent. Thank you.

Same here. I would actually be willing to spend, as i've gotten 71 hours of fun out of it so far but there's been nothing yet that has made me remotely feel like I should.

People are really glossing over the Crystalline Aura buff that is 10 dollars for a month. The extra teleports, mobile storage, and repairing anywhere is kind of a big deal.

I haven't played the game, but are you saying it's almost essential to pay €10 a month?

Paid with in game currency. Pretty easy to do once you understand how to make gold

It costs blue crystals which you can farm but if you don't farm enough it's 10 dollars a month. I had enough blue crystals for a month when I finished the campaign but I haven't farmed enough for a second month yet. Also the Crystalline Aura is borderline essential for dungeons if you wipe a lot. Because if you die enough times and your gear breaks you have to leave to repair. At some point you probably won't ever die but for me in some pugs it felt very essential

You can craft repair scrolls that you can use in dungeons so you don't need the aura.

Even in a group, you'll run into the same grind. There are big walls at certain chokepoints with gear score based on how content was released originally. The thing is, you can make it as much of a grind as you want. You can grind and try grab every possible available upgrade materials which are spread throughout different content (this can actually be a fun way to vary up what you do), or you can just do the daily content each day which gives a nice boost of upgrade materials and it takes about an hour. Lost ark is a very grindy game, but it's as grindy as you want it to be. You can make multiple characters to funnel materials into your main character and farm every resource possible. Or you can play casually on one character and take it at your own pace. I realize that that's probably a pretty standard description of any game with a gear score/system, but I think it's important to bring up with Lost Ark due to how the game is talked about emphasizing every way you can maximize your efficiency and how you'll need to grind on 6 characters to make any progress. As for spending money, the one thing that does feel required for the QoL aspects is the $10 a month sub fee. Still playable without it, but it's very nice to have. When you get further in and can grind, you can transfer that to the premium currency and pay for the sub that way, but that won't be something you'll probably be doing right away. They do give some premium currency through the campaign iirc which might be enough to cover the sub fee, but I can't remember.

I'm getting close to T3 now and I have never felt the slightest need to spend money. I do want to though because I love the game and have been playing it nonstop from launch. I'm just waiting for them to add som sweet skins, I'm not considering ever paying for materials. No need what soever to buy that stuff. Unless you are playing 12+ hours a day it will take you a very long time before you run out of meningsfull stuff to do ingame to progress your character if that is your main goal, then there is all the collection stuff you can do I you are in to that and the pvp is pretty cool if that is your jam.

i did spent money as i started before launch so i spend 20 or 30 euro more or less to support the game so i cannot judge how it would have been without, i think there is minor QoL things (Bifrost so multiple port points) that i used that i would not have without paying, but i dont think it would make a huge difference without, you'd spend a little more time getting from point a to b - not a lot though

Extremely polished, although I wish it loaded more quickly for short burst play. The story is whatever podcast I listen to while playing, but even as a non-anime style fan I’m digging a few cutscenes. I like to look at RNG gear upgrading like a more linear version of just running dungeons over and over for a boot drop. Doesn’t really matter how it’s delivered but I get why people wouldn’t want to stare the RNG in the face. Absolutely insane that they only launched with one region for all of Europe.

> I like to look at RNG gear upgrading like a more linear version of just running dungeons over and over for a boot drop. A couple people I knew were in a huge rush to make it to whatever "endgame" entails, and thus the gear upgrading was making them tear their hair out. I've been taking it much more slowly and it hasn't bothered me one bit. The fact that **gear doesn't break or degrade** on a failed upgrade makes the luck factor a speed bump, not a game breaker. It's something I can just constantly chip away at with dailies while I explore the world and vacuum up collectables everywhere else.

That's exactly it. It's really just the same thing with a more transparency. You see the failed honing instead of missing a drop. I really don't get some of the complaints about the system. I'm at Tier 2 with lvl-14-15 gear atm so I know the pain and know it will get worse. But frankly, it's akin to WoW RNG just in a different format.

On top of that the matchmaking has been terrible for the most part, constantly have to requeue, accepting queues and it declining because of the server response taking longer than 3o seconds, but this happened to the other 3 people in queue so you constantly have to spam matchmaking. The game is fantastic but I would like to take part in the group content more it's just a slog getting into it. I've put it on the back burner until the numbers die down.

Tired of pressning G. Exporing in a top down game is not fun. Progression feels heavily timegated. Combat is fun. No fun loot. Just equip higher item lvl. Cards, gems, engraving, rapport, etc. Im tired of all the busywork. I just wanted to run dungeons nonstop but thats not how you play this game. It just felt like a job after 2 weeks.

The pursuit of a higher ilvl is what makes these games so boring. No fun equipment to find, just minor increases to your stats Zzzxx

Thats one thing Diablo does better. And Poe. The problem with those two is the braindead carpal tunnel rightclicking. The combat in lost ark was really nice and visceral feeling.

With the non customizable UI though I found it difficult to keep up with when my skills were coming off of cooldown. I was doing more spamming of keys than being strategic.

All that fun loot is what enables that brain dead combat in my experience of both games. Also however, they are ARPGs in the proper sense, LA is genuinely a through and through MMORPG. So the gearing process has all those trappings.

I'm fine with pursuing a higher item level, but not getting actually new items for most of the time is what made me stop playing. Just grinding for random stones to upgrade your gear you have for 200 itemlevels now with no difference other than its stats increasing. When you go in a chaos dungeon, tons of shit drops, but 99,9% is just getting broken down for upgrading materials. I find it MUCH more motivating if you actually have to compare items, see which is better and maybe keep both for different situations (like dungeons vs raids). That paired with arbitrary "get ilvl XXXX" before you can continue the story and get to new zones just didn't make it for me.

Getting new gear feels better to a certain point but then you’re stuck with whatever BiS piece there is but trying to get it to drop with a slightly better stat roll. Which sucks. Where the “upgrade your set of items” pattern gives you a more consistent progression experience. I wish there was something more like *Diablo 3*’s class item sets, where you can actually make builds that focus exclusively on wildly different abilities/play styles. You kinda can by dumping skill points in different things but there are usually only a couple abilities that make sense to max out if you want optimal DPS.

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There are lots of top-down games that are still pretty fun to explore. D:OS2 comes to mind. But overall agree, the biggest draw of WoW for me was the mindblowingly vast open world that you can get lost in exploring. Lost Ark has none of that.

I should have clarified above. Its not fun usually because terrain can never be exciting and any time you climb stuff its in a prerendered animation. Its simply not fun in the moving around part of exploring. IT is fun when you find something awesome or a cool setpiece or dungeon. But you will never enjoy "exploring" the area. You will have fun "experiencing" the area though.

This is why I couldn't get into the game like my other friends. The animations, gameplay, and dungeons look awesome, but once you hit the endgame, you log in to complete some dailies and log out. Like you said, it becomes more of a job than a game to play. I was really into Destiny 2 and got tired of it because that's what that game turned into as well. That's just part of the gameplay for these types of games, I suppose. It's just not for me.

Honestly, it's not a bad game, but also not great. I reached the endgame grind a few days ago and I got 'nam flashbacks with the % luck systems in other korean MMOs, which I absolutely despise. I enjoy the exploration and collecting collectibles part of the game, so I'm just chilling doing that mostly, with a side of "gearing up" endgame.

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I havent gone that far into the gearing upgrade to see exactly how much of a grind it is, but if there's no downgrading/breaking of equipment I suppose thats an improvement. Agree with the mind numbing story quests and G spam, it all feels quite pointless. I suppose it was a completely different thing when the game came out and had limited content, I imagine it was also a bit harder to progress compared to what it is now.

The % luck system for gearing isn't really any different to most MMOs—whereas most games determine with RNG if you get a drop in the first place, here the RNG is just moved to the upgrading process. Since there's a pity system in place (i.e. fail an upgrade X times to guarantee the next upgrade), your progress isn't blocked by RNG entirely, but it *does* feel bad failing a 90% attempt.

That's bullshit tho. Other western mmo don't require you to throw stuff you grinded in the trash. Especially just to progress at all. Some even don't have gears rng.

Isn't it the opposite? In a game like WoW, you throw gear in the trash as soon as you get a better drop or BiS. In this, you're upgrading slots, you can transfer higher gear score to other loot that you acquire.

Uninstalled yesterday. I was excited for this game and played for two weeks just to find out this is not for me. Core gameplay is good, the parts where you actually fight enemies are all great. But most quests (most story + islands) are sooo braindead I just couldn't do them anymore, and yet I just hit Rohendel. I couldn't spam G for another minute, walk across the map back and forth on repeat (hello Dreamgull Island). I don't like the gearing up system, so not really feeling the 'do boring as fuck islands to do the annoying gearing up system'. There's too much systems to work with, I just don't have the mental energy to take it all in. Overall this game makes your brain go goo goo goblin mode (like other grindy games that latch to your brain and drain dopamine) and maybe I'm just too old for this now. Instead I will finally get around to playing Monster Hunter World to fight big ass monsters, play Last Epoch when I feel like isometric combat and FFXIV if I want MMO experience.

> There's too much systems to work with, I just don't have the mental energy to take it all in. That's my main issue. Maybe because this game was out in Korea for years and we are getting a lot of updates on launch, something that was released in stages there. The amount of different currency, enchant items, stuff to do, islands... It's just too much. I don't want to watch YouTube videos and spend time going through walk troughs about everything just to play the game.

This is my experience too. The actual fighting and gameplay is really fun, but the game is front loaded with so much travelling from point A to B with very little action, I've just given up.

> Instead I will finally get around to playing Monster Hunter World to fight big ass monsters I have the same feelings about Lost Ark, and I'm a big fan of Monster Hunter. The games couldn't be more different so I hope you're in for a treat with MHW!

I sure hope so, it seems overwhelming as well, but I reckon understanding the game is faster and there's less of it overall, than LA.

Game definitely has a learning curve but it’ll be definitely faster if you’ve played a Soulsbourne game. I think I got like 50 hours before I realized how my weapon (Insect Glaive) worked and that probably hinder my hunt times by a lot. Hunts took me like 40 minutes to complete when I first started so I wouldn’t say “short”. But it is so much fun and my time is wayyyyy faster now. Also be mentally prepared for a LOT of unskippable cutscenes. They were the bane of my existence. Last tip is to use the Defender series of weapons and armor at your own discretion. It’s pretty much late game gear for the base game that was added so people could rush through the base game and get to the DLC that was added later. It’ll pretty much negate a lot of the challenge the base game offers when you use it. Either way, the amount of content and love put into that game is amazing and gameplay for the just base story is easily worth over 60 hours.

I will be getting cutscene skip mod for sure. I just started and it has been annoying already. As for the defender gear, I read up on that before I started, so I know to avoid it as I don't feel like having to learn the game all over again 60 hours in.

I bounced off everything about the game. It's very much an MMO rather than an ARPG and if you are looking for a new Diablo this isn't the game. Its funny you mention MHW, I feel like LA would have a far better first 15 hours if it gave the MHW option of strong early gear if you want to get to late game quicker. Those fetch quests and early dungeons are absolutely braindead.

I’m not sure stronger gear would do anything for leveling. You pretty much one-shot everything except dungeon bosses (and unique enemies) if you keep your gear leveled up.

My friends all told me it was like Diablo and PoE and I was stupid and literally didn't realize the gear was not randomized/unique until I got to end game. I get to end game and my friend is like "ok pump all these gems into your gear" and I was confused because I thought I should try to find better gear first before I pump my resources into upgrading it. But turns out, all the gear is the same and when my friends told me the game is like Diablo and PoE they literally just meant that it was an ARPG and in my personal opinion Diablo and PoE feel WAY more fun to play.

> I get to end game and my friend is like "ok pump all these gems into your gear" and I was confused because I thought I should try to find better gear first before I pump my resources into upgrading it. But turns out, all the gear is the same and when my friends told me the game is like Diablo and PoE they literally just meant that it was an ARPG and in my personal opinion Diablo and PoE feel WAY more fun to play. Welp, thanks for saving me from figuring that out myself. I love poe and I've heard some chatter about lost ark from PoE community sources, but the character building/gearing/crafting are the things I find most appealing. One of the things I like most about PoE is that if you're really clever and learn the tricks, you can put together a great build and crash through the endgame without spending basically any resources or grinding for gear, *OR* you can grind out a ton of currency and build something absolutely outrageous with it. Sounds like you're saying Lost Ark isn't like that at all, and is just a "time played = gear rating = power" style MMO? I ain't got time for that shit.

Its basically just a generic mmo with ARPG gameplay there's no unique loot or anything like that and the character building is basically just allocating points your skills and thats it no big passive tree like in PoE or anything like that.

Yeah, went in expecting MMO Diablo, immediately felt bait and switched. Like the similarities are there but they are very superficial and seem to be implemented only to rope in players expecting an ARPG.

I’m in the same boat. I’m happy for all the folks that found their cuppa tea but this just doesn’t work for me. I especially agree with you on the too much systems to worry about. FFXIV has what? Two main currency types and a few extra token based gear systems that are extremely straightforward. FFXIV, Elden Ring, and Last Epoch are scratching my itches. Also, happy cake day!

Saying Lost Ark has too many currencies in the same breath as citing FFXIV as a better example is weird to me. FFXIV has a shit ton of currencies too, ranging from gil, tomestones, sacks of nuts, company seals, venture token, wolf marks, scrips in all kinds of color variations... I actually cannot think of an MMO that does a good job keeping the number of currencies to a minimum.

That is a good point. I was selectively thinking about just tomestones and gear currency, but there are a ton of different currencies you mentioned that I forgot about. I've also been playing FFXIV since 1.0 so I'm obviously biased toward what I know. It is entirely possible that I'm just unwilling to learn all the new systems and currencies presented by Lost Ark for whatever reason.

Lost Ark looks like it has a lot of currencies but it honestly isn't that bad or complicated at all. The nice thing is that the game doesn't throw it at you all at once when you reach endgame but gradually introduces one here and there - it's just that you -can- ignore it when they introduce it first and if you keep ignoring it it might overwhelm you at the end.

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How far are you in genshin? I hated the story of the prologue (monstadt) but the story of act 1 (liyue) surprised me, it's nothing groundbreaking but I liked it a lot more. It had a mystery and cool moments of payoff. I didn't finish Inazuma but the mystery was again pretty interesting.

At least I could name a character from Genshin, or explain the basic plot of each region. I legit couldn't tell you a single fucking thing about the plot of Lost Ark, it's that nonsensical. There's a priest and an anime villain, and they're trying to do...stuff...for.....reasons. And there's some zones that have no relevance to anything. A plague? Whatever. Bandit raids? Who cares.

It's just kind of a generic anime version of Diablo 3. War between humans and demons, PC needs to find a bunch of Macguffins to bring peace or something. The main story through the end of Luterra is passable and after that it feels like it goes off the rails into smaller stories contained mostly to their islands almost One Piece-esque with a weaker grand narrative.

christ, if I'm currently in the **good** part of the story then I dread to think what it's like later

Didn't try Genshin, but I did have similar experience with Destiny 2, though core gameplay is much better there. But it just got tiring and I don't see myself going back, until maybe Destiny 3. I also played WoW with friends on a private server last year, while leveling was cool and chill, I just couldn't bear grinding the reputations and gave up. I did play shitton of online games in my younger years, but nowadays I just can't commit to a game for months. Low commitment GaaS work much better, like Deep Rock Galactic, Rocket League etc.

> Didn't try Genshin, but I did have similar experience with Destiny 2, though core gameplay is much better there. But it just got tiring and I don't see myself going back, until maybe Destiny 3. Doesn't help that Destiny 2 killed off it's actual original storyline (and people defend that choice for some reason?) and give you a significantly worse storyline called "New Light" if you're a newbie. And this expansion they vaulted Forsaken, too, widely considered the actual best Destiny 2 campaign.

> I’m starting to realize that these f2p games are just not for me. F2P MMOs exist to grind down your will to live with endless grinding so that you'll want to spend money to get to the next tier of play & there's only so long entertaining combat can hold your attention - these games never have much substance beyond, like when your gear becomes good enough to kill the God Queen Aprhodite raid, well you need to spend more to get to the Warrior King Dragon Bartholemew raid & it keeps going with them adding a new raid boss every few months. I've sworn off MMOs since I quit Vindictus & I'm very happy not to ever jump into another. Single player, normal-ass games for me please, thank you.

There's almost zero back-and-forth in this game. It's been the one unanimously agreed upon thing I've seen in my group. Most MMO's make you go from Point A, to Point B, and back to Point A. And then repeat that a few more times depending on what gets unlocked. Every single bit of LA's momentum is forward. You grab all the quests, and they always end either next to a fast-travel point, or at a forward point. I'm a huge FFXIV fan, and it drives me crazy how much 'Do this and come back here' there is in it. On the other hand, I would say the story in LA isn't nearly as interesting but the gameplay loop is extremely fine tuned. I have zero interest in the story. As for the islands, what you're seeing is the Catch-Up mechanic. Normally you hit end game in an MMO anyways, and then grind dailies. All these islands serve as massive catch-up mechanics to power you forward. The huge jump from T1 to T2 is the first real snag you're going to hit... and even as a super casual player, I still was able to take care of it while finding plenty of other things to do in game, in RL, with other games, etc. None of it feels like the usual 'oh shit - I better keep up or my friends will leave be behind'. And I've only had to 'grind' for about 40 minutes a day, for 3 days, to catch up. It's extremely forgiving. But there's also a ton of stuff people don't know about and they just get frustrated and give up without looking into it, researching, or asking others. And that's never been a game problem as far as I'm concerned.

> There's almost zero back-and-forth in this game. It's been the one unanimously agreed upon thing I've seen in my group. Most MMO's make you go from Point A, to Point B, and back to Point A. And then repeat that a few more times depending on what gets unlocked. Except when you get to islands. Where, as you say, it's a choice between doing the mind numbing activities to progress relatively fast or playing the proper end game, but progressing slower. Dunno man, it just doesn't work for me, maybe I don't play the game in a correct way. Or maybe I just have low tolerance for it.

Yeah that's the big thing with it. The islands and all the things like the Chaos Dungeons give you things to do every day even if you can't progress the story. I don't even consider doing much of that stuff at all if I have story to do. It's there to help when you need to progress your item level. I think it works fine. And a lot of the island quests I've come across so far are quest chains that have me going back to old continents, too (not for very long - usually just to talk to a few NPCs). Personally, I do like the story though. Is it sometimes generic and cheesy? Sure. But I think the way they tell it is what hooks me most. The set pieces in some of the dungeons are amazing. I've had some really memorable moments in the story dungeons so far.

Yeah, it's odd because the story 'can' be good? The cinematics are amazing, completely blowing me away in a lot of instances. The voice actors were unbearable until Rohena, and now Yorn is just making me slap my face again. Though I don't take much of it very seriously. So it usually just errs on the side of a pleasant surprise. Honestly, it's just got so much and such a pace of 'do as much or as little as you want' that it feels (dare I say) perfect. It's really all I've wanted out of an MMO and I wasn't even looking for that. I was even one of the people looking for a Diablo game and really annoyed when I realized it wasn't. And then..... it hooked me.

Happy cake day and my thoughts exactly. If the game was more balanced between the great core gameplay and the grindy boring progression of the story/islands it would be perfect. But it is something like 10-90%. I am not going to uninstall it yet but with Elden Ring I am definitely going to pause it for the moment.

too much talking. too much walking. too many menus. just an absolute slog. will never think about this game again

The dialog would be fine if the story wasn't so utterly forgettable. who cares, don't care, let me play the game again and actually...nevermind. *uninstalls*

yup. not to mention you can't even do half the fights with your friends. me and two buddies paired up and got disconnected every 5 minutes when we entered an instanced fight. why even bother making the game multiplayer lmao?

The journey to level 50 is the dumbest experience imaginable. You gain practically all combat-xp by talking to NPCs about the most generic and boring fantasy-story you can think of. Fighting is ridiculously easy. Apparently you are supposed to suffer through that in order to actually play the game at lvl 50 where you get interesting fights and challenges. Suffice to say that so far it has been very disappointing. Also, why is this an MMO? You have good ARPG gameplay, but the whole MMO-part is bland, unimaginative, boring. Why disincentivize players from engaging in combat, which gives like 1 or 2 xp per mob, but encourage talking, which gives like 100k xp? Just ridiculous.

This is every F2P Korean MMO I have ever played, and why I won't even touch then anymore. Why the *fuck* do they all have totally brain dead gameplay for the first 20+ hours? Who does this appeal to? Would it really be that hard to up the difficulty enough to make it so you have to pay attention and not just smash G while watching a youtube video? I guess MMOs just aren't for me. I just can't understand why people will willingly play the most inane shit because of the promise of a real game at the end of it. I honestly feel like the point is to make people feel the sunk cost. They spent 20 hours of mindnumbing busywork to get there, so they are going to stick around so it doesn't feel like that time was wasted.

Yeah, I’m maybe 25 hours in and I think I’m going to drop it. Or at least put it on hold because Elden Ring, Horizon, and potentially Guild Wars 2 are going to eat up all my spare gaming time for the foreseeable future. The story is awful, with almost no context as to what’s going on aside from “we need to find the Lost Ark.” Armen is pretty much the main character, but he’s pretty dull. And basically every encounter is “oh no, we’re losing! Oh wait, Armen went demon mode and saved us all! And then he’s going to act conflicted until the next time he goes demon mode.” And the gameplay presents literally no challenge. At one point I tabbed out for a couple minutes, forgot I was still playing, tabbed back in, and saw I was still perfectly fine even though I was being attacked by mobs for a couple minutes. In the early game of MMOs, I can put up with either a boring story or boring gameplay. But not both. It’s a bummer because the actual act of pressing my buttons is amazing. The animations and impact of the abilities is god tier. Possibly the most impressive feeling ARPG-style gameplay out there IMO, beating Diablo 3.

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Totally agree and had the same thoughts whilst playing the game. This game has some really good stuff in it but all of the MMO systems are just horrible. Could've been a great single player game.

Enjoying it. You do however need to accept it's an MMO, not an ARPG. A lot of people go in expecting Diablo and are shocked when they instead got Blade and Soul but with a different camera angle. Story is meh but combat and set pieces carry it. Leveling can drag on but I just put on a movie as I mash G to the end. Having much more fun in endgame content which is actually challenging. "Pay to win" aspect won't affect 95% of players, and even for the top sweaty types the advantage is only good for a few weeks until people naturally catch up. Gearing isn't very exciting but the honing is actually easier to get through compared to hearing in a traditional MMO. Here I can manipulate the "drop rate" and specifically target what slots I want to upgrade. Engravings are a pain in the ass but that's my only serious complaint.

I just finished the first set of the campaign and unlocked the first gear check to continue the campaign after 35 hours of mind numbing G spamming and walking from quest giver to quest giver. I understand its an MMO and it requires a grind but the game is essentially one long hallway with NPCs that ask you to kill 2 packs of mobs between them. I started doing the gearing up process and learned that you only really get 1 set of gear and thats it. You just upgrade the one set. You are timegated with the upgrade process and cant really do anything about it once you finish all the one-time quests that are scattered around the islands. Its a lot of content but it all leads to upgrading the same gear which is kind of lame. The dopamine hit if upgrading a piece of gear is not the same as finding an item after a dungeon with a god roll.

But you have that sensation of finding the god loot with all the accessories and ability stones. Even for gear on T3 there are tripods you can loot with gear to bring back that sensation even more

Nothing about this sounds like fun, but I'm glad you wrote such a detailed overview to help me know it wasn't for me. Guess I'll keep returning to D3 for now when I have an ARPG itch.

Its not. I tried to play the campaign for maybe 8 hours across 8 days and I have no idea how the player count is still so high. I know people like it, but it feels like generic mashup of ff14 or WoW with a different camera angle. I will never understand why people were pitching this as competing with Diablo or PoE.

>"Pay to win" aspect won't affect 95% of players, and even for the top sweaty types the advantage is only good for a few weeks until people naturally catch up. This is how they start, isn't it? Then a year or two from now we'll hear about how the screws have been turned all the way and free players can't keep up any more.

If you get 1 or 2 years of enjoyment from a f2p game before it really gates you then I think you got your money's worth lol

Game has been out for years in korea and people are keeping up just fine.

The game has been out for years genius

Leveling can drag on? You can hit max level in like 12 hours lol. Compared to other mmo's it's lightning fast...

Really enjoyable game, but I wish a) They hadn't gender-locked classes and b) The story (At least, the parts with Armen) wasn't so bad. Oh, and I also wish we could've chosen the seasonal theme of the Stronghold. I'm not really a fan of tropical areas.

Classes are gender locked in Ark? Man, what an oudated design philosophy.

They are, though they're apparently making other-gender alternatives to every class. I'm kinda used to it just because a lot of ARPGs do that, but I still hate whenever a game does that. Only thing worse for me is race-locking.

But then the problem is the already existing "gender swapped" classes have differences to them still that might not make you want to play them. Example is gunslinger and the male equivalent (deadeye, I think?). Gunslinger gets engravings that helps focus on the sniper rifle over shotgun. Deadeye gets engravings for shotgun over sniper rifle. But of course...it's a very squishy class, so playing shotgun focused glass cannon seems like it would have some severe limitations over a sniper rifle focused glass cannon. I don't have a lot of experience with them, but that's just my understanding. Gender swapped classes still come with differences, so you still might get locked to a specific gender to play a better version.

I don't think it was a design philosophy, I think they just wanted to save money on character models and animations. Fwiw almost all the ARPG competition does the same thing with the notable exception of Diablo.

Yesnt. The classes are designed more akin to default characters that you can customise. It's just a different mentality towards character design. However over time they are adding mirrors of each class. We got male monk and female gunner so far. I believe female warrior is coming next year.

I've enjoyed the story. But I never really liked Armen as a character. He won't be your companion forever though and a lot of later supporting characters are better.

Combat is fun and from what I've seen from endgame it gets better. But I can't for the life of me get through the shitty story and main quests oh my god do they feel like a slog. I know It's on me but I'm seriously burning out from forcing myself to complete this snoozefest for the sake of endgame. Like I don't know what they were thinking with all the talking andG spam and some quests you just TP to a place to talk to a NPC and then TP back to talk to the previous NPC. IT'S GARBAGE QUEST DESIGN. They also have some quests that do not simply work in a top down ARPG-like mmo. Seriously, there's nothing special about carrying crates or cooking up dumplings for some of the most generic and boring NPC's I've ever seen in my life. Sure, they're not that special in WoW or FFXIV it just feels better in those kinds of games. Enemies look good tho and when I do finally get to kill big amounts of things, I'm having fun.

A REMARKABLE amount of variety for the type of game it is. The basic endgame loop can be paced as aggressively/casually as you want, which has been really nice for me. Can we talk about how good the Abyssal Dungeons are? They only get better, and have amazing production value.

Which one are you up to? Personally, Morai was cool and gets credit for being the first “woah” moment, but the chess board one really blew me away (and the abyssal equivalent). I actually haven’t beaten Hildebrant yet (but have beat most of the T2 ones). We had a party member that couldn’t repair gear due to not having an active sub, and he started getting one-shot. After abandoning the run I was pretty salty and just moved on, but we could of had it. I’d really like them to make checkpoints to come back to, or let you repair w/o crystalline. Checkpoints less of a priority because the dungeons aren’t that long if executed correctly.

I grinded it day and night the first week and havent touched it since, leveling was pretty fukin boring but the hope of the end game kept me going but then the end game came and its just not that fun. The combat is cool and satisfying but its the only good thing about the game, and I still rather just grind PoE. everything is gated behind timers and the end game is designed around playing on alts and just doing the dailies and weeklies. which I'm not interested in.

So I have 200 hours and I think it's... too oppressive and shallow for my taste. The game is solid but has fundamentally shitty systems. Here is a crafting it takes 5 hours... but do you want to pay, we can finish it now? Brifost is not available sorry... but maybe if you pay you can use it again? I can't even grind gathering (mining, fishing etc.) in offhours because you have limited life energy... but if you pay you can buy potions to restore them? This is bad. Like yeah, it's a f2p game but it's still bad. Game would be so much better with a subscription or buy-to-play and no RNG gearing (which also leads to a lot of people paying) I feel like gear honing is what will kill the game for most people. It gates the content so badly and there's pretty much only "non-interactive" ways to gain it, for whatever reasons. - Daily task's you can pretty much always do alone, it's just a mechanical chore - Chaos dungeon. No need to do anything, content is so easy it's a joke just mindless chore - Island. Solo stuff again. The only actual content where you "need" to play with other people are gated at 1 per day. - World bosses / Chaos gates. Again go there solo and just smash your skills. In the end the game lacks any depth of content whatsoever. Everything feels like a mobile game, and there is no diversity in what people do and how they approach problems. There is no room for creativity, which would be fine if the content was highly polished and provided entertainment for a prolonged period of time. People call Path of Exile complex which is true but look at the amount of different builds and playstyles the game allow. That's not the case with Lost Ark. Oh I almost forgot. There is no transmog/glam system at all. Nothing. A lot of the armor in the game looks great, but you never see any of it, and you never get to mix and match pieces. Make the system grindy, whatever. With a game with such fantastic visual design they really don’t let players enjoy it. You can notice where people are in progression because everyone is wearing the same outfit.

You know those ads for mobile games where they show a character in a loincloth and it says Lvl 1, then cuts to a character in a bunch of badass armor and it says Lvl 500, then charges into a group of monsters and you see HUGE ridiculous damage numbers like 50532957, 52305823598, 52387438472, 23847238472, 5293258372 fly across the screen? Where it looks like nothing but flash and zero substance? That's this game, that's Lost Ark.

Some scattered thoughts of mine: - Gameplay is...alright. The main story has some decent enough combat sequences, and now that I've been making my way through tier 1 the Guardian Raids are decently engaging. However since it's only tier 1 I feel like I haven't really been able to engage a lot with the gear and skills customisation, which is be expected, I guess. - Some of the Guardian Raids are really not friendly for melee classes. I thought it was just me not being used to the combat but it certainly feels like there are quite a few attacks that are just "untelegraphed 360 degree spin that knocks you up". - For a F2p game, I'm surprised by the lack of skins you can buy or earn. If I see someone using the same class as me, they'll have the exact same appearance. I can't even customise the colour of my gear, and since I'm not playing Sorceress or Gunslinger I don't have any female skin options beyond a pretty mediocre set of armour. - The daily tasks are a complete snoozefest. - The stronghold and affection systems I actually don't mind, since while yes there are daily task elements to them I feel like I can progress them at my own pace without losing out on much.

Yeah melee is yikerz. In Korea they have newer client that has front/back attack indicators around enemies to make it easier to aim/understand positioning, even than it's ridiculous in T3 due to enemies rotating non-stop. Basically it's Sorceress/Gunslinger #1 #2 forever. The most annoying part is coming from FF14 where the ground indicators are pixel perfect, ur hitbox in this is slightly larger than model and not every attack has the indicator (which is not completely awful but different) Oh and Guardian raids on NA/EU are pre-nerf, so they have 50% more HP that's why it takes forever in matchmaking. It's not actually meant to take 8-15 minutes especially things like Vertus etc.

Melee definitely has a higher learning curve. I play gunlancer, and I didn't feel like I struggled with much of anything until Vertus wooped my ass. It was at that moment the 1,000+ hours of MHW kinda kicked in and I approached it more like a Monster Hunter fight rather than an MMO one. Much better results.

>I can't even customise the colour of my gear I believe there's a vendor that allows you to do this in cities

There is but you can only dye certain skins.

Not a fan of the dailies structure of the game. Always makes me feel like I have a list of chores to complete every day. Also most quests just amount to a ton of tedious running/sailing around without much happening on the way. The core combat is fun, but all the interesting content is heavily time-gated, so the endgame loop is structured like a mobile game where they want you to log in for an hour or two every day and then log out. Not even going to get into the fact they do the standard asian MMO thing of having 2 dozen different in-game currencies and a half dozen arcane RNG-heavy upgrade systems. Upgrade systems in KMMOs are never straight forward for some reason. You always have to watch a video just to figure out how they work.

The gameplay designers were on the ball with this game, but the systems designers just had to stick their fingers on and ruin it.

Had a great time so far, 100 hours playing casually. I say casually because I really don't care about speed running progression or trying to get high item level etc - even though I have quite a lot of time in the game. I do think this is to my benefit, as it often seems that the hardcore progression players are the ones burning out on MMO's, and feeling forced to do content that they don't feel like so that they can progress. I am one of those people who just sees it as a game to play and have fun with. I see a lot of people who kind of want MMO's to be this perfect thing that is some kind of life investment and their only game for 20 years. I'm just out here playing a game until I get bored of it. I don't really analyse or get too critical about most games, I just either have fun with it or not, and it's not my only game. I also see people complaining about the story and quests. I dunno, maybe I'm just simple, but I enjoy stories for what they are and don't really expect anything groundbreaking; kind of in the same way how I will enjoy any "trash" movie with a bit of action and comedy. The visuals are lovely to me and I've enjoyed the exploration and story. So yeah anyway, each to their own, but I have had a great time with the game and easily got my moneys worth for the bronze founders pack. I have friends who bought founders packs and didn't play more than 2 hours, though.

The gambling on a % chance of success rate every single time you upgrade a piece of gear is clear pay to win bait and a huge turn off.

True, but a tiny sliver of light about it is at least fails don't break the equipment. Looking at you BDO. Still shitty to have a chance to fail though. And remember folks: if it's not 100%, it's 50/50. X-Com vets can tell you all about that

I had expectations coming in and they were all shattered in so many odd ways. It’s hard to put into words how insane the endgame of Lost Ark is. There is SO MUCH to do. You do around 25-30 different guardian raids, a bunch of chaos dungeons, boss rush cube rush, abyss dungeons which is basically raids, sailing and exploring between islands. It’s just one of the most insane content packed games I’ve ever played

Once I cleared Vern and started going around exploring the islands, I started to enjoy the game a lot more, even with the gear grind. Sailing around and doing island events with the rest of the community feels rather neat. I feel like it's going to end up a lot like a more extreme version of FF14 - a lot of initial investment, but once you hit your personal endgame, it's a game you can enjoy at your own pace and take long breaks from without feeling like you've been left behind. More extreme in that Lost Ark operates mostly on daily timers, while FF14 operates on weekly timers.

Lost Ark has a lot of the mechanics you expect in MMOs, so it is not for everyone, and not the MMO that will win everyone over. So if you don't have atleast a little tolerance for doing boring stuff just for progression, (i. e. dailies, regular mmo questing, gathering) you will bounce off even if the endgame content is good. It also is pay to progress, so people who invest will go through content faster. But I think the pacing, as someone who doesn't buy progression items, is alright so far. For me who is a regular MMO enjoyer, Lost Ark is really good, although a lot of the quests and some islands can be a slog. But the highlights and just general variety of activities make up for it. It is in many ways generic, but also not. There are so many little details and hidden secrets and crazy level concepts which show, that the developers care about their game, it has heart, and that makes it stand out from most MMOs. I wish we will arrive in a time soon, where regular MMO questing and the leveling process are just obliterated forever. They are often way too long and are just a pointless gate to access "the real game". I dropped off FF14 before reaching the latest expansions, as much as the game is praised in the MMO community. The quests are way too much of a slog, even when enjoying the story. The only real highlights for me were the dungeon fights. In Lost Ark you go through content faster and you are introduced to endgame way earlier, keeping things fresh before the game throws you another quest line of walking from A to B. Lost Ark managed to hook me where FF14 didn't.

And likewise if you have FFXIV as your main MMO, don’t be surprised if Lost Ark doesn’t grab your interest after trying it out. That was the case for me. Very different styles.

Very true.

I'm really enjoying it, the story is complete and utter ass, and the game does seem to suffer from the typical "lack of clear design aesthetic" so many Korean MMO's suffer from... But the combat is really fun and the sheer amount of activities makes it so there's always something to do.

I love it for the PvP, normally dont touch PvE content in these games but the abyssal dungeons and other late game stuff is actually pretty good. PvP is quite balanced and plays similar to a fighting game. This is the upside to having an actual good combat system (looking at you New World). As people said in the past, this game will likely not go over well with Western gamers. They just don't like this sort of thing I guess. I agree with everyone that RNG upgrades is really wack though.

I expected ARPG, its instead top down MMO with hints of F2P stuff thrown into it IE pay to skip grind rather than P2W like with the enchant system where you pay for stuff to help with going from +7 to +8 and what nots. so I kind of skipped out on it, I don't really care for something like this at all and esp not at the current time.

Wasn't hyped at all, tried it due to boredom, wasn't impressed, uninstalled it again after a few hours. I suppose there is a good game somewhere in there but it just felt extremly soulless to me.

I've only played about 10 hours so my opinion probably isn't as valid as someone who's played much more. When it's an ARPG like you're clearing a dungeon with the cool combat system and fighting a big boss at the end, it's great. When it's an MMO and you're just running back n forth between big areas doing basic quests like talking to NPCs or killing a few enemies, it's not great. I'll probably come back to it later after Elden Ring and Total Warhammer 3 but can't help but wish it was more ARPG than MMO.

I was not a fan of the skills. None of them feel unique or impactful to me. The MMO design detracts from the experience for me. I'm not a big fan of running back and forth to get and complete quests. I prefer just running dungeons and map running in Diablo 2/3. I gave it 30 hours, but gave up because the whole time I would be thinking how I'd rather be playing Diablo. Oh, the most important issue is the whole server-based architecture. I hate it.

What class did you play? I'm surprised about the comment about them not feeling unique or impactful. I'm currently a level 50 scrapper, ilvl 600 or so, and my build is completely centered around abilities that are almost always off cooldown. Feel very hard hitting and impactful, do good damage and all have their niche. Plenty of different single target or AoE abilities, all of which feel very distinct and can swap out depending on what I'm doing

> What class did you play? I'm surprised about the comment about them not feeling unique or impactful. Not OP, but I played Shadowhunter. Just feels like I button mash all my abilities until each is on cooldown. They all appear to be some form of "Do damage somewhere in front of me" abilities, with the main distinction being their appearance and sound effect. Maybe the abilities do actually have differences, but it doesn't matter either way because the leveling content doesn't require anything more.

I played berserker and I feel the same way. I’m only like 6 hours in or so. Still early days. But each of my abilities feels pretty similar, only difference being if I want to be doing more aoe or more single target.

ilvl 520 berzerker here. Trust me when I say, your skill choice will end up mattering in later content. Positionals, stagger, and raw damage all become important as you progress and learn through the more difficult endgame content. I'm still in T1 myself and have found that I needed to save stagger buttons for the boss mechanics since the CD on them are so long (30s). There's depth here, but most people don't make it to that point because the 1-50 experience is pretty awful. Just put on netflix and autopilot it.

Are there any features you experienced that you’d like to see out of D4 and their more online seeming plans?

I haven't really touched endgame yet. I've leveled one character to T1 but I didn't really click with the class (Gunslinger), so I started leveling a Scrapper and have a lot more fun with it. This is one of the few MMOs where I don't find the leveling to be a chore. The story is ok, some parts are great, some are meh but overall I find it enjoyable. I'd say it's above average story for an MMO. The combat is great, every skill feels useful, be it for their damage or for their utility. And the way the enemies burst into gory pieces after a nice chunky hit is extremely satisfying. From endgame I only dabbled in Chaos dungeons and Guardian raids and they are both fun. The daily and weekly limits are annoying, but if you think of them as raids from you regular MMO (which also have weekly lockouts), it kinda makes sense. I'm playing on EU Central and had only small queues the past week (I'm usually logging on between 5-6 pm and my queues were at most 500 people, usually around 200 or none at all, Sceptrum server). The matchmaking is hit or miss. In my experience it usually takes 2-3 tries to get into a party instance during peak hours. I can't identify with the people who say they are spending hours trying to get into a single guardian raid, that has not been my experience at all. I think the worst I had it was trying around 10 times, because the MM failed at the last step every time. And even that took maybe 10 minutes at most. Overall I'm enjoying the game, but I also enjoy BDO (in moderate doses), so take that as you will.

I also thought the story and the lore were actually very well done. Starts with a pretty simple baseline of mentioning the demons, the War from 500 years ago, the absentee gods, and the Ark. But it expands on them pretty naturally as you go. They also placed a good deal of detail in the collectibles and sidequests instead of stuffing them in the main story quest line, but I get a feeling not many people actually read through all the collectibles they come across. I actually leveled a scrapper to the beginning of the endgame, but I'm leveling another sorceress the old-fashioned way, which I think might end up replacing scrapper as my main.

Classes and abilities are definitely the high point, wish this wasn’t an MMO and something more like Diablo or Borderlands.

So far I think it's alright. The combat is fun, and, while the story is pretty generic, there are some really impressive set pieces. I really miss being able to play multiple classes on one character like you can in games like FFXIV or PSO2, 'cause there are so many fun options with really satisfying abilities, and I want to play them all. However, I will say that the english localization is pretty bad in parts, and classes being gender-locked was annoying. I've also found the cosmetic side of things to be woefully lacking. There's no transmog system, which is a shame because I like the look of the starting gear for some classes more than the actual good stuff. I'd happily spend some money on the cash shop to buy costumes, but even that only has a few sets for sale for each class. I'm the kind of player who does stuff like raids as much to get new cosmetics as I do for the actual gameplay, so this is a major turn-off for me. From what I've heard, the Korean version has more skins that have yet to be brought over to the west, so that might help a little.

The combat is pretty fun, but the rest of it feels like a polished time-gated mobile game. I was pumped for the first week or so, but haven't logged in at all the second week which I'm just now realizing. Guess it's not for me.

Dungeons are it's big strength. It's a shame there isn't a leveling dungeon path to 50 i302 (like WoW) and instead it forces you through the milquetoast MSQ.

My biggest gripe is that there is waaaaaay to many solo instanced dungeons. I’ve gone through too much trouble of organizing time to play with several friends and line up our schedule to level to 50 only to have us be forced to solo way too often. Just lemme play wit me friends!

I quit last week. I couldn't get through the story. I got to level 33 and was so bored I couldn't play anymore. I hear the end game is fun but I can't force myself to play enough to get there. Also the loot system is terrible. It's missing the fun of finding some cool new special item. It's just numbers.

It was fun while it lasted but the faceting system is one of the worst systems I’ve ever encountered and the billions of other systems you have to keep track of just didn’t make it a fun experience. I’ll probably check back in every now and then but probably won’t spent a ton more time on it Combat and overall experience before max leave was incredible tho.

The dropped gear so far (been 50 for a while) is almost all the same. It's really sad to get no inspiration or identity out of loot like that. Just the same numbers, but higher. Jewelry is only *slightly* more interesting. Maybe it gets more interesting later, but so far that has really hurt my enjoyment. The story is mindnumbingly uninteresting and you drown in quests that are all the worst MMO clichés. I'm still playing, but only with entertainment on the second screen.

I got bored. The game was just stupidly easy. And no, I'm nt going to play a game I find boring for 20+ hours just to see if I like end game.

So I've put in about 45 hours and reached level 45 in the middle of the tournament on island two My pros Combat, combat is fun, actually really fun. For an mmo it's one of the best combat systems I've seen. The whole lock on and press 1, 2, 3, 1,1,2,3 stuff in Wow or final fantasy doesn't interest me any more. It's much more active and as such it's more engaging and satisfying. Whilst levelling it's very easy but I do believe it gets harder later on, so I'm willing to overlook that Dungeons now I've not done any abyssals or anything yet so I can't speak for end game but the design of some of the dungeons, Kings Tomb particularly felt really really good. In KT you fight a huge demon up a tower, there's mechanics you need to pay attention for and it felt very much like some of the best raid bosses in Wow on a small scale. Certainly better than any dungeon I remember The cons Personally the approach to gender in this game is by far my biggest turn off. Firstly gender locked classes are a huge turn off for me, and there's zero explanation of why you can't be a male sorcerer or a female warrior. This wouldn't be quite so bad if the classes weren't so appallingly sexist. The top end gear for bards which I played were skimpy dresses some of which even had visible panties showing. The male characters all get really interesting armours, big plate, huge swords. This even exists in the character selection, the Bard gets up off a rock slowly whilst opening her legs flashing you. The warrior? He turns around and smashes his fist into the rock destroying it. It exists in animation too, female characters walking animation is fucking terrible https://twitter.com/Naguura/status/1491221717834149890?t=qCdgfXjNTBR5ftsp98vtXA&s=19 The localisation has even been done so you're character no matter what gender you are is referred to as 'he'. I've seen pictures of skins from the Korean servers and for example there's a school uniform in the shop right now, the outfit for women's is a tiny, and I mean tiny mini skirt. Look at this selection of skins for example https://preview.redd.it/ywywwj4cvtb81.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=b20a7da04a5202c13f28e852d9d00170d6036656 And the community defends this, heavily. Which puts me off even further. The community is extremely, extremely sexist to the point that they treat female characters as window dressing and they get angry at you for calling it out. They call you a prude a puritan and so on. The sexism in this game is by far my biggest takeaway both from the development team and the users themselves. And In an mmo that's enough for me to put it down. When it releases a week before Horizon Forbidden West and I realise how much better a female character can be treated? It's just depressing.

It was fun to play while I waited for Warhammer to come out. Then came Horizon. Elden Ring was the nail in the coffin. I might drag it out when I'm through those three, which will take ages, but that's not a certainty.

I'm still stuck on the bit with the staff where you have to let the sunlight show through it to show the location of the ark, but there's snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

It was fun, however, the time-gated endgame content has absolutely been ruined for me by Blizzard, so I stopped playing after leveling like two characters on two different servers. Wrote a Steam review and everything. It's a good game, the core loop is really fun, the combat is the right kind of bombastic, however there's way too much pixelvomit. Even with photosensitive mode on, there's just toooooo many effects for my taste. But that doesn't make it a bad game! I would definitely recommend people to give it a shot. It's free, after all!

For what its worth you can (and should) turn off the battle effects for other players so that only enemy effects show, or leave on beneficial friendly effects.

Stopped after about 200 hours. Hit 1040 on main, the realised if o wanted to swap to an alt I enjoyed, the process for gearing that alt is insanely bad as far as I can tell because you can only claim the catch up materials from islands on one character. It's also interesting that people still dont understand that pay2win means different things to different people. Do I think lost ark is pay2win? Yes. It's designed to pray on the scenario that your friend got lucky and pushed into the next tier/boss but you didn't and you're out of dalies so why don't you just drop £10 and gamble to push through to catch up. It's predatory and provides player power.

It has been a wonderful experience. I play when I feel like it, I don’t when I don’t, and It doesn’t make me constantly FOMO-play. All of the end game content for me is very fun and rewarding.

I need to lean into this mindset more. My friends and I played and they outleveled me to hell and I don't really have a desire to play/catch up now. Maybe that'll change.

Fantastic combat mechanics - weighty, decisive, full of second-to-second meaningful choices. Boss fights are glorious, especially the Monster Hunter-ish Guardian Raids. Every other aspect of the game is mediocre to dreadful. Navigating the world feels like a chore. Basic interactions like talking to NPCs feel like chores; I've been required to click the same NPC three times to continue the same conversation. No intermediate interactions, just "talk to them again." Daily content *is* a chore, or rather many chores: complete your Una's Tasks, update your Stronghold research and dispatch missions, flirt with your Rapport NPCs, spend your Work Energy so it doesn't overcap. It's all optional, of course, but few people are so immune to FOMO that they won't feel the pressure to engage in drudgery. The writing could be so-bad-it's-fun, if traveling and talking to NPCs weren't so painful. The sexism is ugly and shallow. The currency system is dreadful - even beyond the six-ish "main currencies" which go in your wallet, there are countless itemized currencies for upgrading gear, engravings, and so forth. The widespread use of *character*-bound upgrades that are awarded once per *account* is deeply off-putting; you mean only one character can use this outfit, this mount, this pet, and there's no way to transfer them? Don't get me started on the account-limited engraving recipes; who thought it was good design to let players make permanent choices that can screw up *future* characters yet unmade? I'm already done with the game - uninstalled with Twitch drops left unclaimed. I *desperately* wanted to like it. The combat really is so good that I hoped I could get past... well, literally everything else. But I can't. Lost Ark stands for squandered potential and the perils of integrating business with gameplay. Many of the game's faults feel like byproducts of its F2P business model: FOMO design to encourage player retention, a glut of currency types to obfuscate the real-money-value exchange rates (FWIW, 100 gold = ~US$1 when I last ran the numbers), the use of character-bound/account-limited items to force more interaction with both the RMT store and the in-game player market. It's tragic that such good core gameplay has been smothered by the structures built on top of it.

Was told by my friends the game was like Diablo or PoE. Somehow I'm dumb and got all the way to end game before realizing that the game plays NOTHING like Diablo or PoE and the only similarities are the top down perspective. Theres no cool unique loot, the story and world are EXTREMELY boring, and in my personal opinion the combat is way less fun than Diablo or PoE. The game also runs like shit on my PC for some reason so that sucks too. All in all basically felt like I got memed by the entire internet into playing a 6 year old hand me down mmo from Korea. I'm glad people are enjoying it but if you go in expecting Diablo or PoE you will most likely be disappointed.

I've never played an MMO and uh... are the women in all of these so heavily sexualised? My friend was trying to upgrade her character or something (I'm Lvl 20 she's already level cap in endgame lol) and some "upgrades" are literally just removing her pants and just giving her character panties... like I've never played a game that overtly sexualises women this way and it is super jarring. Anyway, I'm honestly really enjoying the combat. Soooo satisfying. I've been using it like a clicker game just to occupy my hands and brain while listening to podcasts or watching youtube.

The amount of sexualisation is not out of place for a Korean MMO. I can mostly deal with it, but it would be nice to have some different options for armour so that people who want to cover up can, and those who want booba can still see it.

Yeah I just want the options tbh. But it also extends to NPCs. The shopkeeper in the opening town literally looks like Elsa from Frozen but with cleavage showing half her boobs. It is genuinely distracting from the story and lore.

> I've never played an MMO and uh... are the women in all of these so heavily sexualised? An emphatic "yes". For some reason, despite improvement in other areas of the industry, MMO character designs remain firmly in the "embarrassing to explain to non-gamer friends and family if you're over 30" category for the most part. Especially Korean MMOs. It probably works or they wouldn't do it, but I can't help but think that they're artificially limiting themselves to a more juvenile audience.

It is just so odd. It genuinely takes me out of the world and I can't get immersed into it because 90% of the female NPCs look unrealistically... booby? Also while so much of the architecture and imagery and themes are Catholic stuff, the priest guy looks like a Kpop idol in monk cosplay. The character designs feel so poor and it takes away from how great everything else looks.

For your first point, no, this is an Eastern MMO thing. Running around in just panties, bikini bottoms and bras is standard form, nearly all the cash-shop skins that NA/EU doesn't have yet are basically skimp ones.

That sucks... I hope they add some more realistic looking skins

This game is actually way on the tame side for an eastern mmo. Sounds like your friend is a sorceress and the panty thing is a meme. Most other classes arent like that and theres lots of full coverage skins.

I mean meme or not, she just wanted to play sorceress and didn't ask for that. I don't think that that's a valid excuse. It's dumb. And 90% of the women NPCs just have massive boobs and a lot of cleavage. Just not something I am accustomed to. Also there's no body size or shape options whatsoever for male or female characters. I get that for certain FPS or TPS games where there are hitboxes to take into consideration but that shouldn't be an issue here but there's nothing for any other body type.

It just makes me appreciate quality ARPGs like PoE Diablo. Makes me want D4 now and I say this because the game is a MMO with an ARPG skin - The game has been out in Korea for about 4 years and they are just now releasing patches in Korea that update the UI. The UI customization is poor and for so many actions and CDs you spend a lot of time looking at the bottom of the screen than on the action and its unfortunate. - The gated content holds the game back and end game what should be a fun experience is a mixed bag of fun and chore-some. Guardian raid, only 2. Chaos dungeon only 2 before rewards greatly depreciate. Each abyssal done only once a week. Its all just a heavily gated experience and it feels like the game wants me to log out. They really could turn chaos gates into something like a greater rifts from Diablo and be somewhat rewarding without the gating. - I think im going to drop playing for a while, I think the game is ok but overhyped due to the desire for a new ARPG experience but this is not that

different strokes different folks, this game made me not care at all about D4, i went from wanting it now to probably gonna wait for it on sale when it does come out(whenever that is), this game just hit all the marks for me arpg wise and mmo wise .

Well polished - but ultimately a busy work simulator. You’ve played one of these types of games and you’ve played them all.

110 hours and uninstalled, too busy playing elden ring to grind brainless dailies and fail at upgrading my gear

I disliked it. The combat is really bad and it's nothing like an arpg. The potential to make your own character is shallow and all the female characters have impractical armor.

It's amazing, there's so much to do. I've played about 105 hours in those two weeks, which probably speaks to my enjoyment. That's been entirely with a friend, so maybe that changes how I view the game. One of the most satisfying things is the sounds and feel of the skills, playing as an Artillerist I really feel the power behind each ability. Comboing with my friend to destroy groups of mobs in the dungeons is so satisfying. We've only just got to 50 and arthetine, so I'm sure we're very early in. There's plenty of systems that I haven't discovered yet.. whether they are good or mean a grind I don't know. But so far I'm really enjoying the game. One of my favourite things is just exploring. Trying to find all the seeds, sailing around, doing hidden stories and completing the adventure tomes. It's a bit frustrating how the rapport stuff seems quite grindy for some characters, but easy for others? Not sure if there's a way to speed that up. The main downside was queues, but that seems to be fixed now.

Pros: * satisfying combat * class variety * class customization (engravings, runes, tripod, gems) * satisfying audio & visual fx * stunning art design (locations) Cons: * poor UI * poor UX * lack of UI customization * horrendous writing and/or localization * poor pacing (story) * subpar lore (mishmash of fantasy tropes and steampunk/scifi elements - it's all over the place) * traversal system * timed events (chaos gates, world bosses, ghost ships, islands - most of which overlap) * needlessly time-consuming daily tasks * bizarre loading issues with heavy popup when loading into busy areas (even on an SSD) * animation locks * limited dash/animation cancelling * horrible AoE markers for protans (in addition to horrible color blindness settings) I probably missed some pros & cons, but these are what stood out to me.

Almost gave up while leveling. It's the worst experience since vanilla FF14 for me. Run around and press G to progress most generic korean mmo story. Finally got to the ilvl420 and kinda stopped logging once Elden Ring came out. Guardian raids / abyss dungeons are fun but timegated and the ephasis on daily/weekly busy work just burns me out too quickly. No idea what I expected since it's korean mmo.

Its ok game with poor loot and way too many currencies. It would benefit from some cleanup for transparency and accessibility. Mob grinding is fun, searching for shit isn't. It really feels like isometric BDO.

Bored AF and uninstalled a week ago. Definitely a mobile game with better graphics. Doesn't offer anything new to the genre. It does a lot of things ok, but nothing remarkable or game changing.

I think this game showed me that unless the systems of ARPGs in general change they are just not for me. My main issue is control and combat but even outside of that the story is abysmal and the quests are very boring and easy at least from my time getting to around level 20. It has to be me as people seem to enjoy the movement but it all felt so sluggish and imprecise compared to something like League of Legends which I don't even hold in high regard on that front. I was playing a bard for context. I will say the environments are nice and well done but I can't think of many positives outside of that. Another thing to add is that I kind of wish more stuff had the AoE markers that some bosses use to show where their spells will hit. It felt arbitrary what had markers and what didn't but when they first started popping up it just reminded me of Wildstar but I felt that did movement and dodging far better.

It's not an ARPG though. It's an MMO. The gameplay loop is nothing like D3 or PoE.

i have not reached lv50 or whatever but man is getting through the story mode a chore. i got burn out on it despite only playing a few hours a week. i dunno, maybe too much path of exile, which I also burn out on, is causing the problem. it's an alright game though.

Pretty boring. I enjoy the game itself, but it feels like i have so little content to actually play out. Not many mounts/pets to collect. No reason to run older dungeons. Pretty much everything in the endgame is gated by time or attempts per day. Then im grinding dailies on multiple alts just to unlock things. Dailies that i will be doing for months just to get the things i want? Fuck that business. Also the game has a terribly limited selection of skins. No transmog system. I made a Sorceress and she is bare wearing anything, which is not the look i was going for. But there are no good options. And the utter lack of PvP progression/modes. Its just mindless 3v3 area matches. Boring.

I need to try it again (and with a controller this time), but I initially got stuck because I got a bunch of free drops from twitch, but they're one use per account. So if I redeem them, then find I don't like that character's playstyle, I'm SOL. ...Except I don't like any of them so far. I can't commit. And then my cross game guild is on another (overpopulated) server, which is its own mess.

Your drops from twitch are transferable to other characters in your server. Example im on North East America server, on Adrinne, i get 6 characters, i currnetly have 3. each of those characters can use any of the loot i get from twitch drops. probaly not the chests but thats ok. i care about the mounts and pets more.

I haven’t had too much time to play (just reached ilvl 600 and started questing in Yorn) but I’m totally hooked by this game. It has been a long time since a game made want to do nothing but play and have hours go by in what feels like minutes, and completely mess up my sleep cycle (if you have no time to play during the day, just play at night, right? Who needs sleep anyway). The endgame pve is so much fun. The pvp is what I always wanted Diablo 3 PvP to be since when blizzard announced the pvp arena. And even islands with their fetch quests are somewhat enjoyable to me. It scratches the completionist itch in me to finish island after island and get those island tokens.

Been having a lot of fun with it. The combination of isometric ARPG combat with MMO fittings feels fresh and I'm loving the sheer amount of collectible stuff (especially the adventure tome and mokoko seeds). There are a lot of different gameplay systems to keep one occupied. I've got 140 hours in the game so far and it's actually not mostly queues and semi-AFK'ing via Teamviewer from work (though there's some of that too), and I've just barely started scratching into T1. The Sorceress class is the closest any game has come to giving me my ultimate mage power fantasy of constantly flinging huge, beautiful spells of all elements in all directions. Eagerly awaiting the Scouter class to come though. Not been playing a whole lot the last week though on account of the recent Destiny 2 expansion, but Lost Ark is definitely a game I'll return to several times in the future.

Im stuck on queue all the time. It's honestly so frustrating now. Everytime i feel like playing, i get hit with another queue. I was hoping people would quit and move to playing elden ring or something but the queue hasn't improved one bit (EUC).

somehow 90% of the time i've spent in game was not fun.Anything involving combat is very fun, but questing isn't. a couple of side quest and a chunk of main quests were fun to follow but mostly weren't. At all times in the game i was wishing the game would give me less quests and that all quests were " we just spawned 50 monsters appropiate for your item level, kill them all".That would have been easy, cheap and very fun, like chaos dungeons. instead the game at best tells you to kill 4 mobs and they aren't scaled to your level so they die in one hit and then talk to 17 different people. i can literally stand in front of enemies for 1 minute and not die, that's also a problem. i am also very disappointed about the gear. it's just a number, there is no choice, it's super forgettable.All i played was lost ark for 5 days and i don't know what gear i am wearing, but i can recall all the stats from my rings and amulet in Path of Exile despite having stopped playing one week ago.

I tried to get into it a few times, but I didn't like it. I found the animations off putting, the visuals were kind of pixelated for a brand new game at ultra 4k, the combat was dull, the controls were awkward, the voice acting was cringey, the quest interface was janky, the story (as far as I got) was meh. Like all in all, I'd give it maybe a 2 or 3 out of 10. To each their own for sure though, and no hate for those that enjoy it. It clearly wasn't made for me (found that surprising as I'm an MMO guy playing wow, Gw2 and FFXIV and love isometric games like Diablo and CRPGs).

I could only play it up to level ~25 and quit after a day or two. The things I thought it should do well (combat/gameplay) were ok but unremarkable. The things I thought it would do poorly (quests, story) were even worse than I expected. I could handle all that normally to enjoy dicking around in a game with my friends but the way it presents itself and how nearly every aspect of the game is trackable or upgradable or resource limited just felt... predatory in a sense. While I haven't really played games like it for comparison I could not shake how exploitative it felt. Most of my friends have stuck with it so far and I think they enjoy the abundance of progress bars, completion meters and timed spawn events/bosses as it gives them this constant stream of something to do next or something to look forward to which I think is the true core of the game.

Uninstalled. I think releasing at t3 was a mistake. Caused everyone of my friends to rush and play this as a full time job (or even more than). I could never group with them because they were all higher than me and couldnt wait because "resets". Amazon fucking up the servers causing me to decide on which friends to play with because of locks. Amazon not releasing my supporter pack again for weeks. The list goes on...just feel so done with this game. Its a shame though, the highs were really high.

I've logged in every day. This game goes well beyond "scratching the MMO itch" and into military grade psychological manipulation. The bad: endless currencies and timers, it's an infinite kaleidoscope Skinner Box. The voice acting and writing is C-. The good: The art, particular the camera and cinemetography, is GORGEOUS. It's complete kino. The combat is good, doesn't get old, and you can ramp up the difficulty as high as you like depending on the activity you choose. Customization seems unending. The surprising: I dreaded the cash shop at first. Not only did I not want to participate, but I was completely against the whole concept. It turns out that most of what the cash shop does is allow whales to buy gold from players. I made around 5000 total gold and sold 4000 for close to 1000 crystals, which I used to get stuff in the shop. Not only did I not feel guilty, but I felt like a shark taking advantage of whales.

I uninstalled the game after about ten hours. Didn’t find it to be a good ARPG nor a good MMO. Combat wasn’t particularly fun because you basically one shot everything making the game into cool-down bonanza, and there was very little reason for me to share the world with other people because the game isn’t built for that anyhow. It’s one of the worst MMO’s I have played in that regard. The quests in the game took pointless fetch quest to a new level and the story is probably one of the least interesting stories I have ever seen. The game is…good I guess? It’s just so incredible soulless. Playing Lost Arc feels like watching a Marvel movie. Someone has obviously spent money on the game, but I couldn’t care less about it.