My interaction with Lost Ark has developed in a weird way during the past couple of weeks. Once the game had clicked with me I really wanted to play as much as possible, which unfortunately turned out to be not all that much because of the long queues. However, the shorter those waiting times – and, consequently, the longer the available time to play – became, the less I’ve actually played.
One reason for this is that I’m pretty big into Arknights and Warframe again right now. Most likely that’s a direct consequence of the second and more important reason though…my excitement for Lost Ark has waned just about as quickly as it had built up.
Here’s why.
As others have said right from the start, the questing- and leveling-process is very, very linear and really not engaging at all. The combat’s fun, yes, but everything around it gets boring quickly. In other words, the game’s a clickfest not only during combat, but also inbetween battles. The most recent CarbotAnimations video depicts this quite accurately:
Hilarious as this is, while actually playing the game it’s really not fun at all. Great set pieces still pop up regularly, but those don’t manage to make playing not feel like a chore either.
A week and a half ago I reached level 50, but my hopes that more gameplay-variety would present itself at that point were smashed as I learned that I apparently still needed to quest through two more continents first. Yawn.
Then there are the forced solo instances I already talked about last time. When I was playing on my own I took offense at those only on principle because the Striker is a very solo-friendly class and, well, I was alone either way.
Whenever Lakisa and I played together their frequent occurrence really started to bother us though. Neither the Bard nor the Artillerist are much fun to play solo (in our opinion at least), and, more importantly, why are we even playing together, in an MMO no less, when we are forced to chew through every bit of somewhat challenging content ( I say challenging in a very loose sense of the word here) on our own anyway? Seriously, this design choice sucks. Wilhelm and his group aren’t too fond of it either.
Now I’m going to talk about gear score for a bit. This will undoubtedly make a certain kind of player, of which there seem to be quite a few in Lost Ark, call me entitled, a crybaby or something along those lines. Or it would, if any of those people would actually ever read this. I don’t care either way.
I knew going in that Lost Ark is designed with a heavy emphasis on gear score, and I fully expected that fact to become a source of irritation or even annoyance for me sooner or later.
What I didn’t expect was that something as innocuous as a Mario Kart style racing event would push my blood pressure to dangerous levels long before I’d even reached a point in the game where my gear score actually mattered a damn.
You see, by participating in this little event once a day you can earn a heap of event currency with which to buy lots of goodies, blue and purple engraving books among them. This is really big as the latter specimens of the more sought after engravings are very rare and thus very expensive on the auction house. Players who now buy these off the event shop to actually use them will be very happy, and those who don’t need them anymore will earn thousands and thousands of gold by selling them to others.
But here’s the thing: when the event went live those rewards came with certain gear score restrictions, pretty high ones too from where I’m standing. At first I thought those values were needed to use these – but no, you couldn’t even buy them if your GS was lower than required.
Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Dividing the playerbase into haves and have-nots by gear score might be acceptable when it comes to normal gameplay (personally I don’t like it under any circumstances, but that’s a topic of its own), but c’mon you guys, GS-locked event rewards? Really?
You’ve probably noticed that I’m using the past tense here. That’s because Amazon and/or Smilegate reacted to the massive community backlash by removing these GS restrictions from all types of engraving books in a hotfix last week. For honing materials and such those requirements are still in place though.
Now, to give credit where it’s due, at least they have listened and made a (partial) change. Still, in my eyes the event shop’s first iteration has clearly shown what kind of design philosophy the people at Smilegate have for their game, and what they expect from its players: grind up that GS or fuck off.
Does this mean that I’m quitting? No, at least not yet. For now I’ll continue to push through the story until I can finally start to participate in proper group content. I sincerely hope that the oft-repeated claim “it gets much better at endgame” really applies in this case.
One thing is certain though: there has to be a serious amount of fun gameplay on offer to make me engage in any kind of gear score grind. I guess I’ll know soon enough whether that’s the case or not.
Mailvaltar 