Back in May, I commented about this podcast (the future of Lost Ark) making the rounds then where they were discussing whether or not the upcoming update at that time, would be favorable towards making the game more newcomer friendly (and thus help to increase this new player retention) and/or to help with bringing back and keeping returning players. My personal take on that was “NO”.
And sure enough, that update did not really cause an huge uptake in the player numbers (at least what can be judged by the concurrency numbers at that time which is also really only useful for trend analysis since it cannot really tell you what the total number of active players is) since the root issue with Lost Ark isn’t what is being addressed (what I wrote about in that above). Still, the trend for Lost Ark has been continually downwards which really isn’t the sort of trend you want in terms of concurrency over time (more on that towards the end).
Smilegate RPG has been holding these periodic seasonal updates in South Korea to cover the games progress and plans; the most recent was LOA ON Summer 2023 (held in June), where it was absent from the former game director, Keum Kang Seong Hyung (Gold River); his last formal appearance was at the “Dear Friends” concert last year. In his place were three of the designers. What I will say is not all designers and developers are made for PR, and trying to cover Gold River was too much of an ask for someone like him who is pretty good at that sort of talk.
While Gold River is an excellent communicator who displays a great deal of empathy (as exemplified by this recent AGS interview regarding his thoughts on Elgacia); empathy which resonates with the player base (something that is highly unusual for directors of these sort of titles across the gaming industry), Lost Ark’s over all core design (the good and the bad) has been mainly his. For those who never played KR at launch, the end game design was mostly non-existent. We are talking capped at Tier 1 with those Tier 1 Guardian Raids being the end game content for a very long time. And the enchanting system was completely different; it was severely gated behind T1 Acrasium that was Epona (Una for AGS) dailies limited (unless you bought that limited crate from the cash shop that provided more). Chaos dungeons were originally more difficult versions of some of the story mode ones (so it turned into a slog for many players). Additionally, there were a lot of things that were not roster wide including a lot of emotes, a lot of songs, and some island souls. The entirety (including a lot of back and forth sailing and Oceanliner wait times) was a designed time sink for players (due to the lack of end game content as well as a method to increase time-in-game metrics and other PC bang related systems).
Obviously, they overhauled that greatly before the game was launched in other regions. I still consider the QoL aspects something that many other games could learn from. But the one thing that has remained fairly consistent is the item level treadmill once the first raid content was released. And for someone like myself, that is something I am not into. And when you are looking at player retention, having the game highly focused on mainly delivering mostly end game raiding content, does little to keep a lot of newer players around. Mind you, I haven’t even talked about the RNG aspect of ability stone faceting, getting all your Tripod skills setup, gems, and engravings. If that wasn’t the case, Smilegate RPG as a whole, would not be continually talking about ways to make the game more new player friendly.
But the focus is always on how to get new players up to item level/raid content ready quickly, instead of bringing up the other more casual friendly game systems that could use some fine tuning. They haven’t even looked at refining the rapport grind with NPC’s (it’s a tedious chore that I know has cash shop mechanics) where you have limits with how much emotes and songs you can do per day (yes, I know some use the “one shot” trick with rapport items if you never did reach certain thresholds with them). My point is this is an example of what could be a casual friendly system, that has an unfun design to get them leveled up.
They do have some resources to burn when you look at the Moko Island content or the Mokoko’s race on the Maharaka Paradise island. I am actually flabbergasted from Gold River’s speech at LOA ON (from what I read in a translated transcript) where he said they plan to tone down the use of the Mokoko because their cuteness is sort of at odds with the “high” fantasy they are trying to portray. IMHO, this type of less than serious side content is exactly what the game needs. It’s one of the reasons I have been logging in everyday just to do the Mokoko race for the Mokoko transformation outfits that are part of the rewards. If not, there would be ZERO engagement with me right now. But once this ends, my engagement will drop back to that.
The Mokoko obstacle race (where you transform into one – image below where a bunch of us ended lining up like that for a group shot) is so cute and good IMHO, that it could be the basis for an entirely different game. Smilegate RPG IMHO is missing out on easy merchandise money by not leveraging this as part of the branding since physical merchandising of this sort has only been limited to South Korea (where some of it is sold on eBay for ridiculous amounts). And when you are talking about game modes, the Moko Island one is like an old school side scroller style where you are this Mokoko hero, while the Mokoko race one is with a 3D view but without full camera control or full WASD movement (the cursor keys are used but this could still be turned into a full 3D/WASD thing).
Which brings me back to the lack of immersive feel resulting from the fixed isometric camera with the other parts of the game. If they can give the hubs and strongholds a movable 3D camera and WASD movement, it would give the social aspect AND your entire property, a much more immersive feel. And that would count for something that everyone including casual potatoes would find enjoyable a lot more than what currently exists. I also noted before how life skilling isn’t really engaging; it’s just an activity you to do for materials and such. But it has one of the worst stamina systems (you burn through life energy far too quickly) along with tool durability (where you don’t even want to use the legendary one due to what it takes to restore that durability fully). And none of this part of the game is being addressed in all of these updates to try to make the game more appealing for newer players (and retaining a significant portion to at least keep up with the outflow).
Instead, it’s more of the same focus of making honing easier/less costly (as covered by AGS’ summer update letter). Related to this was Smilegate RPG’s summer update event (LOA ON) where the multi-region calls to reduce the amount of dailies/weeklies type of activities across multiple characters (which is to support the raiding content), wasn’t really addressed. And as a result, the KR player base was up in arms after the keynote (which went into contagion mode in other regions). That uproar resulted in a followup live stream that had Gold River leading the talk. While he reiterated he was not returning as game director (a role that caused his health to deteriorate over the years), he is currently taking on a role as the primary point of contact/communicator until someone permanent can be selected for game director (since trying to have three game designers be PR talking heads hasn’t been the best approach).
The part that I found amusing with how the large parts of the player base viewed this public appearance, was that Gold River would “save the game”. The issue as I mentioned higher up, is that many of the games core issues including the “homework” aspect of dailies (which includes running raids across multiple characters), has been most all of his design vision for the game. The gating, the need for alts for generating gold/silver and funneling material up your character chain, the item level grind for primarily raid content; this is what his core focus has been besides the story/lore and the technical details of getting a lot of the cinematic visuals to work in an isometric game. And he misses the point about Mokoko’s being a nice release from that same old grind (plus they represent only a small part of the immersive breaking stuff the game has when you look at some costumes and mounts).
While Lost Ark has decent catchup mechanics for gearing compared to a lot of other KMMO’s, it’s also uninspiring because the rest of the game is missing out on what some casual players are looking for. Power passes and Hyper Express events literally means the early game is left by the wayside (where they don’t even have to bother enhancing/streamlining parts of it). Since most of the games story is conveyed in written text format, it is safe to say the larger majority of players skipped right past it. Again, casual lore lovers would eat this stuff up, but the games design (and often times slow ramp with leveling, isn’t the most conducive). Some parts of the MSQ for example could be better streamlined (including slightly faster leveling) to not feel like a drag. But the focus on veteran players (and thus the ability to skip it with passes, events, and/or knowledge transfer, means they don’t have to even revisit that part of the game (to make it appealing for an actual new player).
As I mentioned in my prior post (regarding Lost Ark), I can easily potato in ArcheAge (which leans on the hardcore PvP side when it comes to its core game play). I could also easily potato in TERA (Lost Ark incidentally seems to have inherited that games toxic end game community) even though it didn’t have a lot of casual friendly PvE content, lack of crafting, and had an ok gathering system (fishing was somewhat enjoyable though). But for some of us, cosmetics were part of TERA’s end game activity as well as continued exploration. And both being 3D camera increased the immersion a whole lot when it came to those casual activities, or even when partaking in casual/solo combat.
I bring up the “toxic community” angle because there is that same “git gud” and “study video’s to learn mechanics” aspect in Lost Ark. To be clear, toxicity is just part of online gaming. What I am referring to is this elitist outtake where some veteran players do not want to see parts of the game become more casual friendly/accessible. So when you have a portion of the veteran players being absolutely toxic (you know the type; the ones that are telling other to “kys”) to a new player when they fail a mechanic for example, no one should be surprised when new players say thanks but no thanks (more so when the game develops this culture of gatekeeping).
And that is the sort of reputation Lost Ark has developed, where getting new blood into the game and retaining them is becoming this struggle. None of this is being addressed with any of the updates except to keep veterans who are sticking with the game appeased. But some of these same toxic players, are the most vocal ones complaining about this lack of new players (or the lack of retention). And most of the feedback that Smilegate RPG ends up hearing, is from this exact same player base (veteran raiders) versus the other more larger demographic of players who span the ultra casual to less than hardcore demographic <- this is what the new player demographic in Lost Ark is missing because that feedback isn’t even making it to the company.
The end result is concurrency that shows a consistent down trend with only occasional spikes (though most haven’t been significant since June 2022) after significant content updates.
Source: https://steamdb.info/app/1599340/charts/
We don’t know what percentage of the concurrency numbers were bots, but that aspect did inflate the numbers for a bit. Still, the game is averaging over 20K players concurrency daily which is still decent for a KMMO in the west (at this point since launch). AGS as the western publisher isn’t doing the greatest job though at getting this sort of feedback either since they don’t really advertise their titles to reach a broader audience (and their community engagement is woefully lacking outside the usual social media and the Twitch demographic).
Basically, Lost Ark is this huge echo chamber where Gold River himself isn’t going to save this game from eventually dropping below 5k (digit) concurrency, and becoming like what most KMMO’s end up turning into (which is a really small core group that spends money to keep the game alive). The game made bundles at launch in most every region; part of that money really should be going into updating the game engine since UE3 even with all of the custom extensions they did, is showing signs of the strain (yet they talk nearly nothing about core foundational upgrades). And getting that sort of stuff accomplished is non-trivial since it’s going to be a complete client rewrite (plus if you want the higher graphics fidelity, will need expensive graphics work done).
As far as the Elgacia content which was recently released, I only started the main line questing. I know in his interview (as well as his final speech at last years concert), he made a big deal about this continent since its design was key to accomplishing his dream of releasing a game like this. I cannot fault him for that (since he was able to bring this dream to actual fruition globally). For myself as a player though, I haven’t found the story remarkable (and I haven’t reached any of the combat parts yet).
Genshin Impact is the polar opposite when it comes to story/lore because a lot of the MSQ is actually vocalized. And there is actual meat to a lot of the dialog. Then that story is not constrained by a fixed quarter view isometric camera when playing. You don’t know how many times I have personally heard someone ask with regards to Lost Ark, how do you move the camera/why can’t I move with WASD? There are a lot of players who don’t care about such technical design aspects of a game (and think 3D is standard); thus the game ends up losing some of these MMO players who prefer a full 3D movable camera view of the game world. But this is the design Gold River insisted on (and explained why to Korean players years before the game launched there). So it is what it is since I know this part of the game will never change because the game and lot of its assets are not designed to be switched into that type of camera view.
Still, I look at how much lost (pun intended) potential this game had. I was originally very skeptical years before launch (when the first trailers were shown) that they could accomplish some of the visuals with the actual game play (and I was wrong on that part). I then thought this would end up replacing Devilian for me as a game I would enjoy playing often. But it turned out to be the exact opposite given the above core design (despite being way more refined and having way more content). Lost Ark was missing this personality (Devilian by its offshot TERA Jr. nature, drew on that quirk when it came to each of the classes). And that made some of the buggy combat and game mechanics fun in this oddball way (helped by the fact that you could also use WASD and the mouse at the same time for movement/combat).
But I know folks like myself are generally in the minority in terms of providing feedback from the casual potato demographic. Plus I also realize (after spending 2 years doing that on the D3 forums), that your feedback is going to mostly end up in a virtual wastebasket because community management has to go through culling through so much feedback, that anything they do gleam out of that, gets distilled in a far simpler list of bullet points (sans a lot of the in-depth qualified details). That’s why I write way too long stream of conscious style garbage like this on a blog (since I can just type it out without having to worry about brevity or complete clarity).
