As a followup to my prior 2 month look back, I knew the item level treadmill would end up having the same effect that it had on me during the original KR soft launch (where I tapped out just prior to the release of Rohendel). While Smilegate RPG eventually reworked the original grind (acrasium gated by dailies or paying for cash shop boxes) with the current system (honing materials) that is in place (to make it much less obvious than how it was before), it is still the same designed treadmill. While I’m not completely tapping out, my play time has dropped to less than 8 hours across an entire week (I basically do enough Una’s to get my weekly tokens for gold, gold adventure island, a couple of chaos dungeons (not surprising, my rest bonus on all level 50+ characters are always capped now).
I don’t see this changing with the May update where they will be releasing the first legion raid. There is something about the design of the game, that makes me feel detached/disnegaged from it. It’s not the fixed isometric camera since I didn’t have this issue with Devilian; I still feel the entire exploration component of Lost Ark, would’ve been better served if it did have a movable 3rd person over-the-shoulder camera view. It’s also not because there isn’t anything to do; there is, but a lot of the horizontal progression are mindless and tedious grinds that can’t really be called engaging content. It’s just something more than this that I haven’t been able to put my finger on and articulate.
And this is unfortunate because I initially thought with the rework and additional content (which I had not experienced on KR, and therefore has been new to me), that it would fill a hole (I’d been playing both Genshin Impact and TERA less and less by the time that Lost Ark launched here); a hole that is going to get bigger with TERA PC’s sunsetting next month (the private servers and my own 92.03 setup, have a end point when it comes to actual new content). The one feature I was really looking forward to (housing aka strongholds), turned out to be a bit underwhelming (there is currently no indoor house you can customize and decorate on the inside; everything is outside and while I’ve seen some spectacular setups, it also reveals the disadvantages of instanced housing).
Side point: Yes, I know it’s odd to mention TERA in this context given how the recent updates have not been actually enamoring; but it still represented something that could be checked out, even if it was going down the wrong path. We’re at literal end game now. I did logon to console last week but don’t intend to put in any time there since I prefer playing on PC (it would have to be a blockbuster content update to make me change my mind; I don’t see that happening with the remaining produced content console will have access to, nor do I have a current generation console to check out the “enhanced” graphics version when or IF that actually releases).
Digressing and generally speaking, I may be looking at the prospect of really having nothing to play that I actually enjoy (ArcheAge Unchained is going to academically come to an end when my game time expires) in the next few months (for the first time in a decade); Lost Ark’s dailies grinder/item level treadmill does not do it for me. As a result of that possibility, my new hobby (which I mused about recently) could end up being tinkering with my TERA Offline setup. I still have other unfinished hobbies like my Devilian-Info site, and trying to get the Devilian character models out of Blender into something else, so this might finally be the huge block of open time to finally tackle those.
