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Lost Ark

Lost Ark is a 3D fantasy MMORPG with action RPG style combat and a huge world to explore. Set sail on your own ship to discover new regions and battle powerful bosses with a raid party. Lost Ark offers a feature-rich gaming experience combined with stunning visuals and skill effects.

Publisher: Amazon
Playerbase: High
Type: MMORPG
Korean Release Date: November 07, 2018
Global Release Date: February 11, 2022
PvP: Arenas
Pros: +Satisfying action oriented combat. +Huge variety of collectibles. +Solid PvP design. +Excellent late game content (raids).
Cons: -Moderate learning curve. -Poor leveling experience. -Generic story. -RNG upgrade system can be frustrating.

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Overview

Lost Ark Overview

Lost Ark is an MMORPG that combines the fast paced gameplay found in action RPGs like Diablo 3 with the sense of discovery and immersion found in open world MMORPGs. The game features both open world environments and instanced raids like those found in traditional MMOs. Players will even be able to discover unique islands in Lost Ark as they explore the World Map abroad their own ships. While the game launched in South Korea back in 2018, the Western launch happened years later in February, 2022.

Lost Ark Key Features:

  • Set Sail for Adventure – explore the world on your own Ark to discover unique areas or hunt for treasure!
  • 15 Playable Classes – Play as a Warrior, Martial Artist, Gunner, Mage, or Assassin. Each class has multiple job advance options.
  • Raid Bosses and Cinematic Dungeons – team up to defeat powerful bosses on interactive battlegrounds.
  • The Colosseum – challenge other players to combat in 1v1 or 3v3 PvP matches.
  • Tripod Skill System – mix different skill elements to perform different variants of the same base skills.
  • Mini Games – take a break at the local tavern and challenge players to a monster card game or keg drinking contest.
  • Live Your Life – mine, fish, dig for artifacts, chop trees, and practice other life skills to collect valuable resources.
  • Island Ownership – conquer and manage your own island as you see fit.

Lost Ark Screenshots

Lost Ark Featured Video

Lost Ark Gameplay Introduction: Welcome to Arkesia

Classes

Lost Ark Classes

  • Warrior - The traditional heavily-armored melee class in Lost Ark. They can specialize and become a Berserker, Paladin, or Gunlancer.
  • Martial Artist - The monk-like class of Lost Ark. They can specialize and become a Striker, Wardancer, Scrapper, or Soulfist.
  • Gunner - The rangers DPS class. Gunners can specialize and become Gunslinger, Artillerist, Deadeye, or Sharpooter.
  • Arcana - a ranged DPS specialist equipped with arcane magic imbued cards. A card roulette feature allows her to pull from a number of available cards to cast various skill altering effects.
  • Mage - The spellcasting class in Lost Ark. They can specialize and become a more supportive Bard or a DPS focused Sorceress.
  • Assassin - The lightly armored high DPS melee character in Lost Ark. They can specialize and become Shadowhunter or Deathblade.

Full Review

Lost Ark Review

By, Toby Tephet

Lost Ark is a free-to-play Korean MMOARPG. It originally came out in South Korea and has been gradually releasing localized versions globally. It is co-developed by Smilegate and Tripod Studio.

Classes

Lost Ark has many classes with different playstyles to choose from. Unlike traditional MMOs, the healer and tank classes are much less prevalent. There are no threat mechanics, so the bosses will randomly lock onto a target for a few attacks before switching to their next target. Some classes have the ability to taunt, which will cause the boss to target them for a couple of seconds, but these taunts are on a long cooldown and as important as taunt mechanics in other MMORPGs. The support archetype in Lost Ark is less about constantly healing hurt allies and more about casting party-wide shields in anticipation of party-wide damage from the boss. These shields are on a long cooldown, so the other party members will need to avoid taking damage and will not be able to rely on supports to keep them alive. They primarily bring utility and damage buffs to the party. The rest of the classes are a wide range of different damage classes. One of the biggest strengths of Lost Ark is how unique each class feels.

A big downside to the classes in Lost Ark is that they are gender locked. On a positive note, the customization outside of gender is very good. Players have a lot of control over how their character's face looks and it’s very easy to make a character that fits your vision.

Upon finishing the initial campaign, players can create more characters that skip the story content all together, jumping them right to end-game. This makes the barrier of entry for trying other classes in end-game content much lower. I personally have three characters that I play daily and it’s a nice change of pace between all of them. The core gameplay loop actually encourages playing multiple characters as dailies and other time-gated rewards are on a per-character basis.

Leveling Experience

The leveling experience is by far the weakest aspect of Lost Ark. Many of my friends bounced off the game before hitting max level. I normally play for upwards of 12 hours on a new MMO release, but I found myself closing the game after 6 hours. The leveling process ended up taking me around 15 hours spread over the first week. Compared to other MMOs, the leveling process wasn’t very long, but it had some mind-numbing issues. Essentially the leveling process consists of 50% hitting the G key to scroll through the quest dialogue, 20% picking up an object and moving it 3 feet away because the quest giver apparently has a broken back, 20% playing telephone with two NPCs 3 feet apart, going from one to the other delivering messages, and 10% doing kill quests. You will get a quest to kill 5 to 10 mobs in an area, then you will go to the area, gather those 10 mobs quickly, and cast one spell to kill them all. It will take approximately 10 seconds to do so. The entire leveling process offers zero challenge and is incredibly repetitive. This is unfortunate because the combat in the game is one of its biggest strengths. The action oriented combat makes dodging enemies and landing attacks feel rewarding, but it alone can't save the mind numbingly boring leveling experience.

Throughout the leveling process players will traverse 4 major areas on the starting island before unlocking sailing, which opens up the massive world of Lost Ark which contains countless small islands and 5+ major islands. Upon reaching the fifth island North Vern, players will unlock end game content and begin the end game grind.

The best reward upon completing North Vern is two Power passes. Power passes essentially allow players to boost a new character all the way past Shushire (the island after North Vern). This allows new characters to skip all the early leveling content and jump right to end game. Besides these 2 power passes, players also unlock the ability to create more Powerpasses in their Stronghold for gold.

Currency

One of the most confusing parts of Lost Ark is all the different currencies. The primary currency is silver, which players accumulate passively through most of the content. The most valuable currency is gold. All gold generation is time-gated behind certain pieces of content (dailies, weeklies, etc). Players can also gain gold by buying it with Royal Crystals (the premium cash shop currency) and selling items at the auction house. Outside of silver and gold, players will also get a bunch of content-specific currencies.

Pay-To-Win
Pay to win is a very subjective thing. Lost Ark allows players to convert real money into gold, and then they can use that gold to buy better equipment. There were multiple streamers who spent upwards of $4000+ in the first week of the game to get to the item-level soft cap. This is quite clearly pay to win, but in the end, anyone willing to spend thousands of dollars is only depriving themselves of the full Lost Ark experience.

Most of the meaningful PvP in Lost Ark is normalized so that every player is on the same playing field gear-wise, so there's no pay to win in that regard. The average person may spend a bit of money to get over certain hurdles in their end game progression, but overall most people will be doing content to progress. Realistically, the PvE endgame of Lost Ark is the progression itself, and there are many different systems to play through. Paying to skip the progression is definitely not the route most people will want to go.

A lot of you are probably wondering if the game heavily incentivizes you to spend money or if it has a lot of artificial barriers that encourage you to spend money to get around. The biggest quality of life purchase you can make is the Crystalline Aura. It is essentially a subscription service that you buy monthly that unlocks many perks. A big one is the two extra bifrosts which are essentially custom waypoints you can drop around the world and teleport to every two hours. You will have 1 bifrost to start off with and will unlock a second one during endgame progression. The other big quality of life benefit is the pet functions. These include being able to access your mailbox from anywhere, repair your equipment, and access the auction house. If you do not have the repair unlocked, it can be very frustrating if you are doing a dungeon and die so much that your gear breaks. If this happens you will have to abandon your run. Depending on what you’re looking for, there are other purchases you can make that are very convenient, like fast-tracking research and dispatches.

I personally played through the whole endgame without spending any money outside of the Crystalline Aura. I am enjoying the game a lot so I will most likely make some skin purchases, but outside of that, I have not personally found the game to heavily incentivize spending real money. Overall I think the monetization is very fair and I have no issues with it.

Endgame

The endgame content loop in Lost Ark is simple yet fun. Players do time-gated content to farm materials then use those materials to hone gear (upgrade) which increases item level. Content in Lost Ark (dungeons and raids) are locked behind item level requirements, so players need to constantly grind through daily and weekly content to farm upgrading rewards.

Honing
Honing is the process of upgrading gear in Lost Ark and it plays a crucial role in the game's progression. The first few levels of honing are guaranteed successes, but higher level equipment has increasingly lower odds of success. This is a very common progression system in Korean MMOs, and can be frustrating with some bad luck.

Chaos Dungeons

Chaos Dungeons are dungeons that players can complete twice a day on each of their characters. They are three-level dungeons that take a max of fifteen minutes each and will give a lot of crafting materials. The dungeons themselves aren't particularly challenging are mostly involve killing tons of monsters, which is very satisfying.

Guardian Raids

Guardian Raids are group content where you team up with up to 3 other players to try and kill a guardian. Guardians are big bosses with a lot of health and hard-hitting abilities. Similar to Chaos Dungeons, you can do two guardian raids a day for rewards. These tend to be a bit more difficult as these giant bosses often have heavy hitting attacks that can 1 or 2 shot players.

Abyssal Dungeons

Abyssal Dungeons are weekly dungeons that are much more similar to traditional MMO dungeons. They include common monsters and a large map which culminates with a boss encounter. Players can do these once a week per character.

Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, and Abyssal Dungeons are the three biggest sources of honing materials. I personally enjoy Chaos Dungeons and Abyssal Dungeons a lot, but the Guardian raids have been hit or miss. Some of them have felt like I am hitting into a damage sponge for 15 minutes and are not very engaging, while others have felt much more engaging.

Horizontal Content

The endgame of Lost Ark has a lot of content that doesn’t directly progress you through the endgame but will give you small incremental power or other unlockables like dances and emotes.

Islands

There are over a hundred small islands spread across the world that you can visit and do specific quests for. These are normally interest encapsulated stories that I enjoy doing when I have free time.

Adventure Tome

You also have an adventure tome that tracks your total completion in each continent, the more you do, the more fun things you unlock.

Rapport

Rapport is time-gated content where players can build relationships with various NPCs for rewards. While there are many NPCs in-game which players can pursue, there's a daily cap on progression here.

These are some of the bigger endgame activities players can do once they finish the story. Overall I find it very easy to just do various activities a day and progress your character and your total completion percent. I’m enjoying the overall progression a lot and it’s what really sets Lost Ark apart from other MMOs I’ve played.

Final Verdict - Great

While the leveling experience in Lost Ark leaves a lot to be desired, the game more than makes up for it with its fun end game content and satisfying action oriented combat. I've already sunk over 200 hours into Lost Ark and I have been loving the game. I love players multiple characters and just the sheer amount of meaningful side content has me hooked. Lost Ark is solid MMORPG that's well worth checking out.

Screenshots

Lost Ark Screenshots

Videos

Lost Ark Videos

Playlist: Lost Ark (Preview)

System Requirements

Lost Ark System Requirements

Minimum Requirements:

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 and higher (64 bit only)
CPU: Intel i3 or AMD Ryzen 3
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 / AMD HD6850
RAM: 8 GB
Hard Disk Space: 50 GB

Recommended Requirements:

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 and higher (64 bit only)
CPU: Intel i5 or AMD Ryzen 5
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (or AMD equivalent)
RAM: 16 GB
Hard Disk Space: 50 GB

Music

Lost Ark Music & Soundtrack

Coming soon...

Additional Info

Lost Ark Additional Information

Developer: Smilegate Tripod Studio

1st Closed Beta Date: Late 2015 (Korea)

3rd Closed Beta Date: May 23, 2018 (Korea)

South Korean Open Beta: November 7, 2018

Global English Closed Beta: Nov 4, 2021

Western Release: February 11, 2022

Development History / Background:

Best known as the developer behind the immensely popular (at least in Asia) shooter CrossFire, Smilegate has been hard at work on a much more ambitious project. Lost Ark offers a mix of open world gameplay and instanced raid dungeons. The company has stated that Lost Ark will eventually make it to the West, but China is next in line after the Korean release schedule is finalized. The South Korean open beta launched on November 7th, 2018.

Amazon Game Studios announced in June that they will be launching Lost Ark in the West sometime in Fall 2021. The game's closed beta in the West launched on November 4, 2021 and the game launched globally in English on February 11, 2022 (head-start for founders pack owners began on February 8).