After the final close beta came to an end back on June 3rd, the task of going through all that game play footage just fell to the wayside. During the beta, there was a short period at the beginning where I did manage to keep up (reviewing and uploading what I wanted). After hitting the level 30’s though, it turned into a losing effort.
Now that I am reviewing the rest of this footage one month later, I’m sort of like: “did I really do all of these quests and not feel somewhat bored doing them?” Because as I was scrubbing through each clip, my thought was “man, this is way too boring to upload.”
Don’t get me wrong. During the time that I was actually quest leveling my character, it didn’t feel or come across as mundane. As I’ve noted before, the designers found various ways to put twists on these quests including a lot of well transitioned instances and dungeons. Gathering, tasks, or delivery type quests normally had your character actually moving/using those objects for example. I guess my point is that the design attempts to immerse your character into the actual quests/tasks at hand and that while you are playing it, you as the player also feel more involved (thus making the game play feel less mundane in the process).
While reviewing this footage well after the fact, that aspect now detaches me from that actual moment of playing that character where I became very cognizant of the formula being used; most of the footage I’ve been pulling out has been in the vein of “level # instanced quest” followed by “level # quest dungeon” (rinse and repeat). The open world quest objectives are the ones that come across as uninteresting filler which makes those segments an easy decision to edit out (at the expense of not showing off the world environment which includes a lot of verticality/multi-level design).
Then there are lot of moments where I am overlooking the need to press a particular action key (F5) for an objective (in the process of reviewing the video, it looks clear as day but while I was playing, was easily missed because it doesn’t stand out like it should). Which led to the realization that the game still does have some conveyance issues. I realize in RPG’s that there is a very fine line between too much hand holding and none at all. Too much hand holding destroys any sense of discovery while the opposite comes at the expense of spinning your wheels. What should not be lost is properly conveying context or the objective.
Likewise, the mini map is not very helpful because of its weird scale (you can’t easily see multiple quest objectives on it or even know if you are headed down the right path unless you pop up the main map). I know that was an ongoing annoyance as I played but as I went through footage, I noticed how often I would end up heading in the wrong direction or running into obstacles. This mini map (while nice looking) ranks up there with Path of Exiles original fugly looking one before they revamped it with Oriath.
Finally, reviewing footage reminded me how terrible the horse mount is when performing a dash. While playing, it felt like it was quickly slapped in and just felt jarring in comparison to the rest of the well done animations. Watching it now; it looks really bad and made me realize even more how much I miss Devilian’s auto-run/auto-pathing (along with auto-mount).
What has really stood out though for the segments of quest instances and dungeons that I have pulled out is their average run time; 15-30 minutes. As of this writing, I’ve completed going through game play up until May 31st. While the servers were online for 12 hours, I played at most 6 hours except during the weekend. For the final 4 days though, the servers were online for 24 hours and I’m not exactly sure how many hours I played during that stretch. My point of bringing this up is the attention to detail by the designers in terms of the math (when doing content with gear that is in-line with that contents level) to create clear times that results in this average time sink. Again, while playing through the content, it felt very engaging where you don’t notice the time. But when reviewed after the fact, you realize the formulative approach that went into the design.
This isn’t anything new; my point is to highlight how the quests are designed to not feel repetitive, mundane, or extremely time consuming while you are playing. In most other games, this same thing cannot be said when leveling via the main line quest. But I can also see why those who played a lot during CBT1+2 decided to just “power level” by spamming dungeons and then going back to complete the main line quest (which needs to be done in order to unlock sailing and later, the ice breaker ship).
The other thing I became aware of after the fact was how much I partake in playing my character the “wrong way” while leveling up. I have this habit of playing outside the meta (especially when it comes to combo-based skill usage where your effectiveness increases by executing the proper combination of skills) when leveling characters in order to get a feel of each skill independent of the other. I did this in TERA, Devilian, MU Legend, etc and continued that in LOST ARK. So most of my leveling footage for the Soul Master is effectively inefficient in terms of DPS. I only begin to play more effectively as I get closer to level 50.
I will give my opinion about the Soul Master once I complete the uploading of all clips because the game play for the final level 50 quests (for the closed beta content) is pertinent to my thoughts about the class (especially heading into end game type content).
