There is a lot of truth to the comment a player made regarding levels 1-10 where it is a bit of a snorefest since that is primarily the prologue for each primary class. It’s pretty much a story quest which eventually brings you to the point of selecting your actual sub-class (at level 10). On average, it takes around 45 minutes to complete for first timers (maybe shorter for those of us who have been through it before).
Because Smilegate RPG received feedback about this, they addressed this by adding the ability to skip the prologue and jump straight to level 10 and the sub-class selection.
(Left) Skip, (Right) Continue
They are rewarding players who go through the prologue though with a cosmetic item (bunny ears). While many previous CBT players are rushing to level cap and endgame, for first time players, I don’t really recommend that because it’s missing part of the adventure and discovery experience crafted by the designers at Tripod Studios.
Yes, some of the main line quests early on come across as mundane (especially after the initial class specific prologues) but it really picks up post level 20. The Wall of Glory castle siege as mentioned in the article, is something that a player needs to experience for themselves because as I wrote in my own video about that, it really immerses you into the game where it makes you feel like you are taking part of an actual cutscene.
After the whole Diablo: Immortal thing, there’s some prior Diablo III content creators who are actually trying it out (they managed to purchase accounts the other day before both OBTGames and NewGameWay ran out of stock again (since there is now a more secured means of verification which they now have to go through in order to create them). While this is still primarily an MMO with ARPG like elements, the amount of content plus sometimes crazy mechanics is going to probably throw these folks for a loop.UPDATE: it’s hilarious watching Quin69 in Morai Ruins with the Diabloesque looking boss that has 3 separate phases.
To be honest, the demand for this game increased a bit more than originally anticipated as they’ve now had to add a 7th server (from a load balancing perspective, 10-20K players per server is normally the average for this type of game but they have probably been able to increase this to 30-40K when looking at the queue numbers). Myself, I’ve been in a 12K queue for the server I am on.
If Smilegate wanted to, they could really seize on the opportunity right now by committing to a western release. But considering their deliberate approach towards getting to this point, I doubt they will go down that route; I am pretty sure they are focused right now on stability and ironing out the remaining issues during this stress testing phase of the OBT and then for the home market once they feel comfortable with a much broader marketing campaign in Korea (and after that, their concentration on China for their partner, Tencent).
The one thing I am looking forward to unlocking is the housing system (since it’s completely new content that wasn’t available during the closed betas) plus being able to take more time with exploring and discovering those locations when sailing.
Even though there were the usual launch day problems, there also hasn’t been the sort of major outages or in-game issues (like NPC’s bugging out) so Smilegate has to be commended for what has been a fairly smooth soft launch even though part of the player population are from folks playing outside Korea (where there are the usual suspects who are also raging that “LOST ARK is ruined” because these foreigners are taking up slots from actual Korean players).
