izigame.me

Although it has been almost a month since I quit this game, I'm going to write this review in the hope that new players will have a basic understanding of what they are about to get themselves into. Not saying that you shouldn't TRY the game (it's free so why wouldn't you), but I hope that by the time you reach the point in the game where you feel like you need to swipe your credit card or start feeling the need to keep playing the game even at the cost of neglecting your real life responsibilities, you'll be able to make an educated decision on whether you want to keep p(l)aying or break yourself out of the vicious cycle that is Lost Ark's gameplay loop.
TL;DR Lost Ark is a well-polished game with amazing action combat, fun classes, and stunning visuals. However these pros are only meant to draw players in whereby they will fall prey to the dev team's intentionally predatory pay-to-win mechanics, slog through hours of doing the same repetitive tasks on six or more characters every day, get verbally abused or gatekept by a toxic elitist community, or get randomly banned from the game for no reason. This game is not intended for your average Joe who holds a 9-5 day job and only has 2 hours on average to play games every weekday; it is targeted to either single rich people who have no other responsibilities or dependents and can afford to throw truckloads of cash at the game, or single poor people who have no other responsibilities or dependents and can afford to play this game for 16 hours every day.
Korean MMOs are notorious for their top tier gameplay, stunning visuals and graphics, punishing amounts of grinding, and pay-to-win mechanics designed on the philosophy that rich people should always dominate poor people in every aspect of life. Lost Ark unfortunately is no exception to this doctrine. As a new player, upon starting the game you will immediately be wowed by the game's fantastic graphics, polished zones, and fun action combat. But don't be fooled; you are the fish that the devs want to catch and the pretty graphics and amazing gameplay is the bait that they use to hook you in. The story of this game is mediocre and is mainly just generic medieval fantasy garbage that you've likely seen in many previous MMOs or other RPG games. The bad guys of the world are even just generically named as "demons". After reading through a few lines of story dialogue you will very soon become lost and confused with regards to where the story is going and eventually you'll just end up skipping the majority of the quest dialogue.
The early game from level 1-50 mostly consists of you following the main story quest while doing countless numbers of generic "kill X" or "fetch X" side quests. In between there are dungeons that you will both run through as part of the main story or optionally as part of a side quest. These dungeons are well designed, but unfortunately you won't be able to team up with anyone to run them because the early game is completely devoid of real human players. Your only companions at this point are the hundreds of bot trains that run around each zone with impunity.
Reaching level 50 as a new player will likely take anywhere between 8-40 hours of gameplay, depending on whether you're speedrunning through each zone or taking the time to stop and smell the roses. Once you hit level 50 you'll enter what the game refers to as "Tier 1" of progression. There are currently three tiers of progression: 1, 2, and 3 (the current highest tier). This is where you will establish your daily routine for the rest of your Lost Ark, which will consist of doing your daily two Chaos dungeon runs, daily two Guardian runs, daily three Una's tasks (which are again either "kill X" or "fetch X" quests), and weekly three Una's tasks (which are again mostly just "kill X" or "fetch X" except scaled up).
The progression from Tier 1 to Tier 3 has been streamlined since the game release but is still quite a chore to slog through, especially since at this point in the game you are unlikely to have encountered a single human player. Guardian runs are nearly impossible to solo as a new player and will basically be unplayable as there are no human players to run them with. Chaos dungeons are just braindead solo instances where you mash as many buttons as you can to kill as many mobs as possible while picking up loot. You will log in to do your dailies but once your dailies are done, your vertical progression for the day is capped and there is nothing you can do except wait for the next day for your dailies to reset.
For the next 50-100 hours you will slog your way from T1 to T2 and T2 to T3 by doing the same repetitive daily routine of chaos dungeons, fetch quests, and kill quests. The whole time you won't meet a single real human player until you reach T3. But T3 is also where the real grind starts. You thought what you were doing up until this point was repetitive and boring? Nope, you're in for the grind of your life. This is also the point at which the predatory pay-to-win mechanics of this game start to show. Upgrading your gear is RNG-based, and as you go higher not only does the chance of succeeding drop significantly lower, but the cost of each upgrade attempt skyrockets to the point that farming your dailies on a single character will not be enough to make any sort of meaningful progress in a reasonable timeframe. You will have two choices at this point: 1) create alt characters and push them to T3 so you can farm more dailies on each character (daily rewards are per character, not per account) to get more materials to upgrade your main character; OR 2) pull out your credit card. Most players will do a combination of both, resulting in them not only spending an unhealthy number of hours playing the game every day but also an ungodly amount of money on the game just to overcome the artificial barriers put up by the devs preventing you from participating in the best content that Lost Ark has to offer, which is the Legion Raids.
By the time you progress far enough in the game to meet the minimum requirements to run your first legion raid, you'll find that nobody wants to take you because the majority of players in this game are already far ahead of you and don't have the patience to teach you the raids, which are actually quite challenging and require you to fail a few times so you can practice. After all, the players that still play the game at this point are hardcore gamers who have 20+ alt characters that they need to farm dailies on every day, so every minute that they spend teaching you and not farming their alts is a minute where they are not making gold. The barriers to playing the most fun content in this game are so high that it is impossible for anyone to surmount them unless they play with a large dedicated group of friends or are willing to empty their entire bank account.
If you still have not quit the game by now you will most likely be forced to when AGS (the publisher of Lost Ark) permanently bans you for violating their code of conduct. The ban will happen randomly and without warning, your appeal will be automatically denied, and no explanation for the ban will be given. This is because Lost Ark has the worst infestation of bots and RMTers that possibly has ever existed in an MMO up to this point, and AGS is so incompetent that their efforts to lessen the problem have only ended up making things worse. Legitimate and innocent players get banned on a daily basis while blatant RMTers who have been around since the game's launch stream themselves buying out the entire Lost Ark economy in broad daylight and still go unpunished. All of your time, effort, and money invested in the game gone in an instant with no chance to get it back.
By all means, try this game out but don't let it hook you in. It's worth a few hours of your time but nothing more.