During the tail end of a live broadcast (May 13th KST), Lost Ark’s Game Director Keum Kang Seong Hyung (aka Gold River in the west) announced he would be stepping down as game director due to unspecified health issues.
His announcements comes at around the 51m15s mark. According to his message, he has been putting his all into the game since it’s inception over 10 years ago. He feels this has contributed to his poor health, but at the same time, acknowledges the positives (including being able to grow with fans of the game; this is especially true in South Korea where feedback of the original release in 2019, paved the way for the changes that exist today).
He mentioned he had surgery during the summer of 2021 (which required rest in order to recover), but due to issues with the game, he continued working to deal with them. During a broadcast in December 2021, he was unable to rehearse for it, and had an ambulance on standby during the actual broadcast (where he provided a huge amount of information, since he originally expected it to be his last update as director). With the impending launch of the western region (as well as wanting to see the Elgacia continent update that is now live in Korea), he continued pressing forward despite his ongoing health issues.
He mentioned he has no regrets (even if it did affect his health) since he was able to share Lost Ark (it’s story and characters) with the world (noting how much loved the Mokoko characters are), and is grateful for the love he receives back in return (he feels this is undeserving for someone like him).
Personally for myself, I’ve written about my own issues with the game. I chalk it us as simply not being able to please everyone (I would love this game to have the sort of attachment that I found with Devilian and TERA, but it just currently isn’t there). Still, this was his long dream, and he made it into reality with a global audience. That is nothing to sneeze at as he truly did leave a dent on the universe with Lost Ark.
His final day with the studio will be December 2022. However, a new leadership team will be taking over content updates beginning with the next major update. He affirms this team will carry on what he started. The outro trailer is sort of a tribute from him to the fans of the game to keep on dreaming (he helped write the lyrics for it). This puts into better context the OST of the song that was released a few days earlier.
Game OST’s are something I always enjoy (this one is no exception); while the game itself hasn’t materialized the way I hoped it would for me, the music in this game is still one of the best.
There are some folks in the community who feel that his stepping down, won’t be good for the game. Over a longer term period of time, I am going to have to agree with this assessment. Short term, it’s not a problem because there is that strong connection with him and the new leadership team that will take over. But over time, people leave and team make up/chemistry changes. Eventually, that binding connection disappears, and new leadership will want to have more of their own ideas pushed to the fore.
One of Gold River’s strength was listening to feedback. He also never said the game was perfect (as he alluded to, the initial game play at launch, was ok); he’s actually been on record several times stating that he nor the game, are perfect. That sort of sincere humbleness is a rarity (it’s no surprise why many Korean streamers were emotional after hearing this news because part of it goes beyond the game). Basically, the new leadership will have some big shoes to fill in order to keep current fans of the game, happy.
Yes, I know that as director, he’s not the one doing all of the actual designing and coding. That is part of the irony of this because most of that original design team (the ones who worked on all of the production until at least Shushire), are no longer with the company (due to Smilegate’s former personnel policies that forced resignations under different circumstances including longevity). However, he as director, set the direction (and as one can imagine, the amount of energy required to get new teams onboard and following key decisions). He took the fall for most of the initial end game systems (acrasium gating). I personally felt that if the original design team was still in place, the end game design would’ve been much better since we saw glimpses of that in CBT1 (even though cap was level 30) and CBT2 (in CBT3, it changed for the worse). I can see this as being stressful in order to make sure all these different groups of people, are inline with the vision he had set forth.
I personally wish nothing but the best for him, and that he recover from his health issues.
