In the test, Lost Ark convinces with phenomenal battles, an incredible amount of content and an exciting story. But there are still a few questions left unanswered.
When Lost Ark was first announced in 2014 with a stunning gameplay trailer, we were amazed. Completely surprisingly, Korean developer Smilegate presented us with every action role-player’s wet dream: huge hordes of monsters, brilliant skills and a beautiful game world.
At the time, no one really knew what kind of game Lost Ark was going to be, but everyone agreed on one thing: that it had to come to us as soon as possible! But it took over seven years until we were officially allowed to begin our adventure in the game world of Arkesia here in Germany – and for free, because Lost Ark doesn’t cost a cent, it’s Free2Play.
Previously, Lost Ark was successfully launched in South Korea, Russia and Japan and we could only look over enviously. But those days are over now and we were able to test the western version of Lost Ark extensively for you even before the Early Access launch
Table of Contents
Looks like Diablo, but plays very differently
Whoever sees game scenes from Lost Ark for the first time will certainly think of action role-playing games like Diablo – after all, you also move your character through the game with a mouse click in the iso-perspective and sometimes dismantle huge hordes of monsters with magic and force of arms. But that’s it for the similarities
Instead of a classic action RPG, Lost Ark is a real MMORPG à la World of Warcraft. And that starts with character creation, where perfectionists can spend hours tweaking the appearance of their character and fine-tuning every little detail: A whole 15 different classes are on board for the EU release, each of which offers its very own play style. Warriors, archers, mages, martial artists and rogues are available in different variants.
However, you don’t have to consider the typical MMO trinity of tank, healer and DPS when making your choice. All classes deal enough damage, similar to Guild Wars 2, but classes like the Paladin, Pistol Lancer and Bardess, who can support their party with shields and other support skills, will be welcome party members.
The best fights of the genre
As soon as you enter the game world Arkesia for the first time, after a skippable tutorial, you will immediately notice that the basic gameplay features of Lost Ark are of an extremely high quality. Above all, the battles, which are without question THE most important element in a good hack & slay game, are completely convincing. We even go so far as to say that they are among the best we have ever experienced in an MMO or action role-playing game.
Whether you’re a sorceress or a warrior: The casting of your skills always works as smooth as butter, the elaborate animations and effects give you a great feeling of power, and you probably can’t get enough of them, because dismembering enemies is just incredibly satisfying.
The skills still pop just as impressively after 30 hours of play as they did the first time around – if not more so. Each skill can be strengthened with talent points and then has an even more impressive impact. You can also use this system to further customise your heroes to your own preferences.
For example: The Shadowhunter can transform into a powerful demoness after charging her ultimate class ability. But she doesn’t have to if you don’t want to. Instead, you can adjust her skills so that the charge bar of her Ultimate does not fill up at all and she is stronger in her human form.
Overall, the battles are much more tactical than in Diablo or Path of Exile: All skills have cooldowns and need to be used well-timed in order to perform powerful combos. The blunt spamming of a main skill, which your entire build is designed for, does not exist here.
Another big difference to classic action RPGs is the loot system: In Lost Ark everything revolves around your item level. You increase this by creating new equipment with higher values. There are no big “aha” moments like when you equip unique items in Path of Exile that can completely change the way you play.
Instead, you keep checking your inventory to see if there’s a little arrow pointing upwards on any part of the loot you’ve found. This way you become stronger, but it is not really noticeable – which is also due to the fact that the enemies in the semi-open game world are very easy to defeat.
Story staging as a highlight
But before you even get to the point where you can slaughter your way through hundreds of monsters per minute in the end-game dungeons, you first have a long way to go, as in every MMORPG, because the story and quests are waiting for you first.
The story of Lost Ark is quickly explained, if you don’t want to spoil too much. A long time ago, the god Regulus created two worlds: Arkesia stands for light and order, Petrania for darkness and chaos. While the game world Arkesia grows and prospers through the power of the Ark, a mighty artefact of the gods, Petrania suffers and sinks into chaos.
The demon king Kazeros, ruler of the underworld, therefore invades Arkesia with his legion and the country sinks into war. The gods get fed up and smash the ark, distribute its parts over the seven continents of Arkesia and imprison Kazeros under a volcano. After 500 years of peace, the other demon lords now want to free their leader – and to prevent this, the players must find all the pieces of the ark and put them back together again.
Your adventure begins in the kingdom of Rethramis and you will quickly notice why Lost Ark is much more World of Warcraft than Diablo 3. The leveling process looks just like in any other theme park MMORPG: The story, which is continued with content updates, takes you across various continents through the very varied game world. You will cross forests, deserts, ice worlds and even futuristic steampunk zones on your way to level 50, where you will complete hundreds of quests.
However, the quality varies greatly. First the positive examples: Many missions in the main storyline drive the story around the search for the lost ark forward again and again with opulently staged battles and cutscenes set entirely to German.
The instanced story dungeons, which you can complete alone, with friends or with random players, were a particular highlight. So if you like a story that unfolds in real time before your eyes and you don’t want to read about it in some books hidden in the game world, Lost Ark could be exactly to your taste. Assuming, of course, that you’re not put off by a certain degree of anime pathos.
Random side missions
Less convincing, however, are the side quests that you can take on anywhere in the quest areas. Every now and then there are some creative ideas, such as when we infiltrate an enemy base dressed as a demonic clown. But the overwhelming majority are genre-typical diligence tasks of the type Kill 10 enemies, Collect 5 plants or Walk from A to B.
At least we have to give Lost Ark credit here for implementing the side quests in a smart and user-friendly way at all times. Whenever we have a side quest, it can be done near the next main quest or on the way to it – and none of the tasks usually takes more than a minute or two.
If we have to kill 10 enemies, they always stand around in groups of five. In this way, Lost Ark manages to make the grind – the constant repetition of similar tasks – often not feel like a grind at all. Not every MMO manages that.
The entire adventure up to level 50 and the associated start of the end game took us around 18 hours. If you really do all the optional missions and spend a lot of time with the countless side activities, you will need much longer – or shorter, if you leave them aside. You’ll get the most experience by completing the story tasks, of which there are plenty at any given time.
Either way, you’ll never be short of variety, as Lost Ark is packed to the brim with activities: You can search for well-hidden mocha seeds all over the world, pursue crafts such as mining and fishing, explore small islands with extra quests in your pirate ship and add new buildings and decorations to your personal fortress.
You don’t have to do all of these things, but they will reward you with all sorts of cool stuff like pets and mounts, consumable items like healing potions, and even smaller permanent bonuses that make your character stronger.
Is Lost Ark really Pay2Win?
Even though Lost Ark has turned out to be an outstandingly good and polished MMO in our opinion, it all stands and falls with the in-game shop. If you can buy tangible Pay2Win advantages here with real money, you can virtually forget about the game right away despite the missing price tag – no matter how great and pretty it is.
Fortunately, however, publisher Amazon Games is aware of the fact that Western gamers react extremely sensitively to any form of Pay2Win and has significantly defused the ubiquitous shop in Asia for players here.
At least in our test version, which according to Amazon corresponds to the release version, we discovered at most small Pay2Progress advantages – additional trials for Chaos dungeons or Guardian raids, as can be purchased in other regions, are not available in Europe.
The shop mainly contains decorations for your fortress, which can be upgraded in the course of the game, as well as various pets. You can also earn some of these pets via twitch drops. The pets grant smaller passive bonuses, but other pets with the same bonuses can also be unlocked by playing.
Only the Kristallaura – the thirty-day premium status for the equivalent of ten euros – stands out. Although almost all of the bonuses included here are more or less irrelevant, you are ten percent faster when researching new fortress upgrades and completing fortress missions – the Lost Ark equivalent of WoW’s mission table.
How decisive this advantage really is in the end, however, we cannot yet make a final judgement. In addition, the aura unlocks some of your pet’s comfort functions, so that you can access services such as the letterbox or auction house from anywhere in the game world. Practical, but not decisive for the game.
Potential problem areas in the shop
There are currently only two circumstances that cause us some concern. Firstly, there is the currency exchange: Here, players can sell royal crystals, which they have purchased for real money, to other players for gold. And of all things, this gold plays a major role in the endgame, because it can be used to buy important upgrades such as engravings in the auction house.
But here, too, it remains to be seen under live conditions how heavy this feature really weighs. In World of Warcraft, players can buy the so-called WoW tokens for real money and then sell them on in the game for a lot of gold – but this is not a big problem there.
On the other hand, there is a second in-game shop in Lost Ark, Mari’s Secret Shop, whose offer changes every 72 hours. Here you can buy upgrade materials for blue crystals, which you can get in exchange for royal crystals, in-game gold or as a quest reward. Otherwise, you can only get them from the end-game activities. However, the supply here is severely limited and by just playing we get significantly more resources than can be bought. Nevertheless, players who invest their real money will progress faster in the endgame – even if only minimally.
The bottom line is that we can already say with great certainty that Lost Ark does not contain any direct Pay2Win. Especially because in PvP – the only mode in which you compete directly against other players – all stats are standardised anyway. Therefore, the choice of class here is based more on personal preferences than on balancing:
In Lost Ark, those who invest real money get comfort features and slightly faster progress in PvE. Stronger equipment can’t be bought directly and those who want to progress in the endgame have to play well enough anyway to be able to defeat the increasingly challenging content.
What can you expect in the next part of the test?
Since we were only able to play Lost Ark on a virtually empty test server, we are currently only giving a rating tendency. However, we will jump directly onto the hopefully not too crowded servers for the headstart release on 8 February 2022 to give you a final impression and to answer the last remaining questions.
- How important are the in-game shop, Mari’s secret shop and currency exchange really?
- Is PvP fun too?
- How good is the end-game content such as Abyss Dungeons, Dice Dungeons and Abyss Raids that can only be played in groups?
- Can the hunt for a higher and higher item level and the necessary daily gameplay loop be motivating in the long run?
Until then, we can confidently recommend Lost Ark: The basic gameplay does a lot right, there’s more than enough content to keep you busy for weeks, and even without spending real money, anyone can reach their goal here.
Preliminary score box
Editorial conclusion
As a die-hard Path of Exile player, I have been waiting for Diablo 4 or Path of Exile 2 to finally bring a breath of fresh air to the genre. Playing through the ten acts of the (for me) totally worn-out PoE campaign every three months feels like work.
But then came Lost Ark, which I hadn’t really thought about until the first beta last summer – and now it has completely captivated me. Of course, Lost Ark is not a real action role-playing game, but a genuine MMO with battles from the iso-perspective. And I do miss a bit that I can’t suddenly find a super rare unique item with a lot of luck.
But developer Smilegate still does a lot of things right and you notice the qualities of this game in the first few hours of play. My only concern is the in-game shop: In its current state, it is extremely fair, but what’s to stop Amazon from moving into Pay2Win territory in the future? In any case, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this game won’t be ruined by this at some point.
I can tell you: I was afraid of Lost Ark. It had to do with the usual clichés (“Eww, Japanese anime characters!”), but also with the fear that the in-game shop would offer a similar number of benefits for purchase as in the Asian versions. In the end, only one fear proved true: the one about my free time. Because Lost Ark is good. Really good.
My sorceress unleashes a firework of effects that no other hack & slay offers me, I feel like a bloodthirsty Gandalf on speed and saw my way through the hordes of monsters as if there were no tomorrow. The gameplay is just great and there is so much in this game – completely for free! Treasure hunting, sailing the seas in my own pirate ship, building my own base, dungeons, bosses, a surprisingly cool story, wow.
If you can cope with the unusual start (every character immediately enters at level 10) and are content with the fact that Lost Ark doesn’t really challenge you before the endgame, then there’s no reason not to sink into this excellent MMO for the next few weeks. Unless you’re scared?!
