Now that Lost Ark has been out in open beta for 2 months, the picture has become much clearer as to the positives and negatives of the current design (some of which Smilegate has acknowledged based on player feedback).
Back on December 12th, the developers put out a fairly extensive note regarding changes made during that balance patch as well as responding to the feedback they’ve received where the game is lacking and/or could use improvement.
On December 29th, they posted (as promised in the above update), details of some of the changes they are planning including improving items (and how they are acquired), improving the experience for alt characters (account wide adventure book/achievements as well as revision to the island Heart system where some of them will be available to alts on the same server).
Some quality of life improvements are also being planned for (separate warehouse for materials and cosmetic items, additional user interface to provide more information on things like Mokoko seeds, island Hearts, Giant’s Hearts, etc), improved cursor visibility (yes, it really is terrible), and several other changes as mentioned in the note.
While these upcoming changes are great, much of it still doesn’t address some of the issues that exists at end game. As I’ve written previously, the attention to detail in terms of starting off from scratch through the leveling, is incredible. But that is from the perspective of going through something which is fresh and new for many. Looking at this through the lens of the typical MMO player though, it can be a “once is enough” sort of thing where some of the cinematics and cutscenes end up “getting old” after the 3rd time (not all can be cancelled).
This design works well for those who enjoy story, lore, adventure, exploration, and a sense of discovery (so someone like myself). The studio obviously has designers who were very keen on this aspect (which is why they used that “for all RPG fans” line) and they did put a lot of effort into trying to make these a core part of the design. This is why there are hidden Mokoko seeds, secret areas, the world/adventure questing system where some of those quests take you sailing across multiple islands and continents in order to unlock songs, emotes, NPC affinity items, island Hearts (many of which are critical to continual end game progression).
But as I noted before, this kind of design tends to come across as a time wasting sink for a lot of players who don’t really care about the actual story and exploration aspects. This is why a lot of designers don’t spend a lot of time creating such puzzles because a guide will become easily available on the net within a few days. Lost Ark was no exception with this original Korean site which focused on Mokoko seed locations, this Korean guide and map site, English world map site, and a similar site that also has guides named MokokoArk (and there are others out there). More to the point, players that actually enjoy adventuring/exploration and who also try things by trial and error aren’t common now.
The designers anticipated some of this by creating a coupon system for the Epona’s Daily system where once that daily was completed at least once, the player could use a ticket (which is periodically offered as a login reward but can also be purchased from the cash shop) to auto complete it as a convenience. Sailing between islands takes several minutes and the designers tried to offer activities which players could take part in while moving between locales (like trawling, diving for treasure, saving stranded sailors, etc). The reality is it does take a lot of “grinding” to get any substantial loot from the ocean. For myself, one of the most frustrating parts is not coming across many shipwrecks (I’ve come across a total of 3 to date and none were in the dangerous zones where they are supposed to be more common, but I’ve never actually come across one yet). Farming those wrecks are one of the methods to get an important song and while there are other methods (like an Epona’s daily where you need to kill a chicken boss as a chicken where it spawns at only certain times), the reality is that most of them aren’t that engaging (it’s just an obvious time consuming grind which belies the attention to detail that was given to some of the pre-max level questing).
This is another issue with the design where some islands (or the quests which take place on them), occur at specific times or intervals. Some islands will only appear once every few weeks and can be frustrating if you happened to just miss getting there. To be more blunt, there is a lot of waiting around in order to accomplish these quests and many of their designs require repeating them multiple times in order to unlock a further quest chain or to get a certain amount of “tokens”which aren’t listed anywhere unless you head off to another island where you can see the amount you have when talking to the NPC (I’m going through this now trying to get an emote by doing an Epona’s daily for that island in order to get the 45 “marks” for them to buy it from the NPC). NPC affinity “leveling” is another grind that currently feels mostly useless because their purpose is more or less going to be tied to the housing system (which hasn’t been released yet). It’s a grind mainly because of the limited means of acquiring affinity items (unless you buy the cash shop affinity chest).
Epona’s Dailies are also limited to 3 per day (or +1 with a coupon that is occasionally rewarded or can be purchased from the cash shop). And this is where my most stinging criticism of the game is; most everything at end game is limited in this manner where you can see the math that went into coming up with this system for gating progression (it begins to feel mechanical after a certain point and not very engaging). This is on top of the item level gating and resulting grind to increase that item level in order to do what is a limited amount of end game content. Again, I realize this is not unique to Lost Ark (it’s common with other MMO’s but the end game gating for Lost Ark is reminiscent of other Korean designed MMO’s).
Basically, the pre-end game aspect of Lost Ark is very detailed when it comes to the story part of the questing (and yes, in between some of those story instances and quest dungeons with the cinematics, are the mundane fetch and gather type of quests that are filler between the more interesting parts of the main questing). The designers spent a lot of time in this area where it (at least for me), made the leveling process feel more like you were actively taking part in the actual story. For other players, this design is seen as less than favorable because the objective for them is to hit max level as quickly as possible in order to item level grind. With regards to the end game progression, like many other MMO’s (including a lot of other Korean ones), this turns into a grind of a few dungeons or raid content, and upgrading gear in order to unlock the next tier (rinse and repeat). I guess the linearity of it is even more stark because how vastly different the game feels from pre-max level (even Devilian and MU Legend didn’t feel that drastic of a change to me when transitioning to their respective end game grinds).
Myself, I got the “island gear” set which once fully enchanted, gets you to around item level 385 (majority of players running end game are now well into the 400’s with many hitting the 500’s). I stopped once I got a little past 300 because it doesn’t make sense for me to invest that amount of time on an account that is in another region.
Yes, there is still a lot of content that hasn’t been released yet including the guild progression and guild versus guild system, the housing system, larger battlegrounds/sieges. All of this is content that will probably come with/after the official launch though. That isn’t stopping them from releasing actual expansion content though since they are adding a new “episode” with the unlocking of the Rohendel continent (part of which was available for the magician prologue). I do feel they need to at least release part of the guild progression system during this OBT period in order to give players an idea of its importance (while also allowing those guilds to actually grow since member count is limited by guild level; all guilds are currently locked to level 1 where 30 is the maximum amount of members).
As for the PvP (arena and open world), it is an aspect of the game which I am not interested in so I haven’t delved into it (except when I tried stepping onto one of the PvP islands to try to do an adventure quest there and ended up in a hellfire of attacks from others camping the way in where I just launched my own AoE’s and quickly exited back to my ship before I got killed).
Finally, the game still doesn’t have a lot of cosmetics to provide more differentiation/personal customization (which is not easy to do with an isometric camera where you are normally zoomed out from your character). Devilian and MapleStory 2 handled this fairly well but I honestly feel nearly zero attachment to any of my characters in Lost Ark since they come across looking all the same/fairly generic.
I know that part of my initial positive feedback about the game was based on the journey to end game. I also know the game is missing other important content (the before mentioned guild system, the larger battlegrounds, the player housing system) which is crucial to really making the game feel more complete. There was a time that I was hoping that this would be the game that I would want to sink a lot of time into. The current end game state and the unavailability of the player housing system has moved the needle into the “wait and see” portion (plus I also realize the potential changes that could be made for the western version whenever they decide to pursue it).
