izigame.me

I’m going to write this review in the hope that new players gets a basic understanding what they’re gonna get into. At the time of writing, I stopped playing the game almost 2 weeks ago. Today I logged in to take a snapshot of my character screen (like a souvenir) then I uninstalled. This is going to be a thumb-down from someone who have spent 2,000 hours in this game... yeah, I’m going to be *that* kind of person for once.
Lost Ark is a game that gives you a lot of thing to do but you’re not going to particularly enjoy it. If I have to give an honest opinion about how much I enjoyed Lost Ark in the 2k hours I’ve played, I’d say maybe 20% was fun while 80% was a waste of time. The game WANTS you to waste that time so that you get to the good part.
Reminder: I’m writing this for NEW PLAYERS. So, existing players who gonna read this and comment (I won’t disable comment, criticize within reason) just keep in mind that your/our experience from launch and the experience of someone new today is going to be a stark contrast.
The story is just your average MMORPG shtick. Very likely you’re going to stop paying attention at the poor English localization half hour in the game and you’ll start mashing your G key (thus the meme you might have seen already). You’re going to press G for the next 12 hours or so if you’re fast and you don’t get too sidetracked. Else you’re looking about 15 hours of G-spamming.
The story is not compelling, you get an occasional cool cutscenes which pretty much tells you everything you need to know then you are sent on your way to do the tedious of story question: Go to X, speak with this NPC, spend 1 minute to go to Y, Speak to this NPC, go back to X and speak with that NPC again, rinse and repeat ad-nauseam.
You do the above for 12 – 15 hours before you hit “Tier 1 gear” at which point you start shifting in what’s gonna be your daily routine for the rest of your Lost Ark career.
The progression from T1 to mid-T3 is going to be brutal for you. It’s a dead zone, YOUR dead zone. There’s only bots wherever you’re going and the content you can do barely has players to help you with. This is literally going to be a phase where you’re going to spend roughly the next 100 hours (realistically it’s going to be closer to 200 hours) to get in a decent spot in T3. “Decent spot” is an always moving target as the game gets new content and the playerbase keeps moving forward. How tedious it’s going to get there all comes down to how merciful (or in touch with the playerbase) the dev is feeling is feeling at that time.
As you settle in your daily routine, you’re gonna realize how much RNG is involved in various aspect of the game and how much of it purely waste your time in a way you’re not going to enjoy. Imagine an important item locked behind a collectible that have a low chance to drop three times every week. You might get it on your first try, you might end up getting it on your 20th week (it’s a thing: ask anyone about the “Moake” hell and how group of friends gets their item drop while others are still left behind after 3 months still killing the same boss).
Gold is going to be your most valuable currency but the one you farm is going to have trash value. Why? Bots. Oh that Schoolgirl skin you see people walking around in? You can get it in the cash shop for $40 OR you can spend 45,000 gold to purchase it in the auction house. What? You’re only making 3,000k gold week? Well, tough luck! Save for 15 weeks and hope that inflation, caused by the disgusting amount of bot, is not going to make the price rocket to 60k by the time you get your 45k. Oh, you can’t even save that gold because you actually need it to hone your weapon, armor, to purchase mats, to buy dungeon/raid chest, etc, etc. Guess you’re out of luck!
Bots are rampant. About 4 months ago, I thought bots were at the worse point (looking at the price of RMT) but oh boy how wrong I was. RMT price is currently half of the price of what I thought was the worse point 4 months ago. What does that mean? The current of the game in terms of botting/RMT is TWICE as worse as the time that I thought it was worse. Inflation is at an all time high.
If you still manage to push through all these barriers and somehow manage to get your character high enough for the end-game raid content then congrats! Also; tough luck. No one gonna take you in their raid. The game is such a huge time sink that there’s very few who are willing to spend the time to fail with you in a raid because you WILL fail and you HAVE to fail to learn but the likeliness of having 7 other people who are either happy to teach you or fail with you is so low that you’re going to be spending quite sometime in the party finder just to go nowhere.
This game was fun back when it launched. Having a huge group of actual people running beside you in-world was such a breath of fresh air. It was fun, everyone was learning, everyone was talking. The current new player experience is a dead zone that I don’t wish upon anyone. The end-game is brutal once you reach it not because of the content difficulty but mostly due to how you’re going to get filtered out. Everything in between is a huge waste of time aimed at squeezing play hours from the players.
"Lost Ark respect your time.": So we were told, turns out it doesn't.
"Lost Ark is alt friendly.": When the game foundation is built upon having multiple characters, this statement is far from the truth. There's so much things to do to make this game alt friendly but dev outright refuse. One of the biggest offender is materials such as Shards which are character bound. If this was an alt friendly game, Shards would never be bound. Neither Guardian/Destruction/Leapstones would have been bound.
Lost Ark doesn't respect your time and is possibly one of the worse case of botting I have ever seen in an online game.