This is a “bust the budget” sort of cinematic trailer on par with Blizzard Entertainment ones. I recall the Legacy of the Void trailer (and how long [~1 year] it took their animators and cinematics team to complete that final rendering). Of course, hardware and software tech has continued improving since then, but it still takes a lot of money to get something like this through the production pipeline. And this trailer is 6 minutes long (the Legacy of the Void opening cinematic was half that length).
With that said, the in-game isometric camera REALLY does a disservice to how good the game world (and game play) could’ve been (yet another LOST opportunity) especially taking how important the development of Elgacia was to Lost Ark’s previous director, Keum Kang Seong Hyung (Gold River) (who remains in an acting advisory/PR role until a permanent replacement is found). But that decision (fixed quarter view isometric camera) was his (and this affects everything including how graphical assets are made, how controls, combat, mob AI, pathing is done, etc).
While doing the summer event, I did finally complete the Elgacia MSQ (on my aeromancer), and wasn’t really impressed by it (the story was a typical “everything is not what it may seem to be” sort of trope where what you thought was right, might not be because of what you’ve learned/what higher level propaganda was pushed onto you). The limitations of Unreal Engine 3 (despite all of the custom extensions Tripod Studio had to write to make the client present what it did) really shows with the engine generated cutscenes (not to mention the client FPS drops in various parts of the zone). And then you have the above type of cinematic (meant to generate hype) that is a far cry from what the current game engine can present unless they utilize something like Bink to show a non-game engine rendered clip.
I said it before; Smilegate RPG/Tripod Studio really should invest that money into moving to a modern engine (and as part of that, reconsider the isometric camera or make it an option along with a 3D camera/WASD control; that is doable since Mythos showed that such a design was possible back in the mid-2000’s). That game started with an isometric camera view with click to move/combat/actions, but after a few quests, you unlocked the ability to change the camera view to 3D where you could move with WASD (see this video near the ending). Lost Ark’s earlier precursor Devilian was planned to have a similar capability, but that work was never completed (it had both mouse and WASD control, but the camera could not be independently moved while fully zoomed in since that aspect had not been implemented). But lot of the assets were completed inside/outside for that possibility (like the inside of this house structure).
I used to be a fan of isometric style camera games (especially when I was mainly into ARPG’s), but both TERA and ArcheAge really changed my view when it came to world immersion and exploration (later Guild Wars 2 and Genshin Impact really highlighted how explorable verticality really opened up that part of the game play). Which is why Lost Ark (as an MMO-ARPG) continually feels lacking and more like an ongoing lost potential (which the above cinematic cannot compensate for).
