I’ve always had a soft spot for MMORPGs and while Lost Ark is no exception to this, it does feel like it’s extremely underwhelming compared to the hype it had gotten on release. Here is our full Lost Ark Review.
Lost Ark is co-developed by Tripod Studio and Smilegate. The game got published by Amazon Games. It was released on December 4, 2019, in Korea with a worldwide release in 2022, for PC on steam.
The game is honestly really forgettable and I had to really think back a lot about what the story actually was. The only thing the story had over other MMOs is that it had more cutscenes than I expected, and those visuals did look epic. I like that there are actual cutscenes and not much reading needed to actually follow the story. Mostly because I hate reading and love listening and looking at things.
The story left me a bit disappointed and I didn’t end up finishing and going through the full game, I just got bored and the story didn’t interest me at all. It felt like I was playing Tera all over again, but the bad part of it in the beginning, but was this whole game.
Empty, linear, and filled with bots. The Massively Multiplayer part just feels missing from this MMO. The flow just wasn’t there when I compare it to some of my favorite MMOs like Neverwinter. There are not that many quests per area that feel like they fit together but feel more like some random fetch quests that you need to do for barely any reward. The maps feel too linear to get something done while the world is there, but it’s just 1 big line you have to go through in the end.
During my few days of playing, the world felt empty, quest areas with no people in it, from a starting area I expected to see a lot of people constantly running about and doing their thing and learning the game, but no, it was empty and lifeless. Later on in the game, I did actually see some people… or so I thought, but again, no, it was just bots doing some random quest. I stood there AFK trying to punch down a barrier for 1 hour for some collectible that I didn’t even end up getting, but during that time I saw hundreds of bots doing the same thing over and over again.
Probably the most positive thing I could say about the game was that the visuals and gameplay are actually pretty good. The visuals didn’t blow me away or anything, but it had a nice polar opposite feel to every visual, the good is very light and the area’s reflected that. When I went to a more “evil-ish” area it felt dark, grim and full of danger. Games try to do this all the time, but in this game, I felt like the area, music, enemies, and bosses all perfectly fitted together like parts of a Rolex, if 1 part was off, the whole area felt like there was something wrong with it, I mainly noticed this when I got to the part where I got my own little village to take care off.
Just like the visuals, the gameplay was fine, mainly the combat was good, it had a really nice flow to it, every attack felt like it had a nice combo and while I usually love playing on console, the buttons didn’t make me confused at the start, like some MMOs did when I first got into them, or into them again like MapleStory.
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