No one logged in today because of Lost Ark

Been trying it. Not nearly as smooth as FFXIV. The story isn’t exactly dragging me in either. I’ll keep playing and see how it goes for a bit. I’m guessing the sales pitch is bound to happen pretty soon though. You can feel it.

Man, just played Lost Ark, it looks like it's one of those games that only gets fun after hitting max level and gearing up, I'm level 20 right now and gawd damn, it's boring as hell, even in the first dungeon everything just died so easily and you barely take damage. It managed to be more of a walk and talk to NPC simulator than FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by Hysorn

Man, just played Lost Ark, it looks like it's one of those games that only gets fun after hitting max level and gearing up, I'm level 20 right now and gawd damn, it's boring as hell, even in the first dungeon everything just died so easily and you barely take damage. It managed to be more of a walk and talk to NPC simulator than FFXIV.

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When you get to the first large-scale dungeon (iirc it's at like lv25) it'll be super cool. Way better than any of FF14's dungeons IMHO.

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Originally Posted by Skiros

When you get to the first large-scale dungeon (iirc it's at like lv25) it'll be super cool. Way better than any of FF14's dungeons IMHO.

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Might give it another try later I suppose, but I don't know, can't say I am enjoying the combat and much less the story, I'll see if I can convince some friends to play with me I guess.

I just tried it for 111 minutes according to steam...it felt "bad" the entire time.

I didn't log in to XIV today because I wanted to play Lost Ark. In hindsight, I should have logged in to XIV today.

I been on starbound!

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Originally Posted by Conundrum

I just tried it for 111 minutes according to steam...it felt "bad" the entire time.

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so did the first .... 80 hours of arr msq :3

I played it for most of the evening. Definitely a lot better than many other f2p mmos out there. Combat is pretty fluid, and fun - I went sorceress. I'll probably keep on playing it for now. It passed that 2 hour mark with me. The goal oriented aspects have helped. Overall, a decent diversion from FFXIV.

Global chat is pretty cringe though, I had to switch to the system tab. Everytime I would glance over it was.. pretty bad.

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Originally Posted by VirusOnline

so did the first .... 80 hours of arr msq :3

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Am I the only one who didnt find the ARR MSQ a complete snorefest? I thought it did fine introducing the world of Eorzea to the player. I hate how we devolved with such short attention spans where unless you see epic whooshy wooshy adrenaline pumping action 24/7 on your daily basis, its considered a bore in the everyday community. Its one of the reasons I couldnt get into the world of Lost Ark in its first few hours, so much weird "epic" set dressing nonsense thrown right into you like bruh can I just please start as just a random off the mill adventurer with the most basic of gear and skills and let me slowly get an understanding of your world please?

That being said though, Im in the minority here and yeah the first few hours of Lost Ark has much more "interesting" stuff going on but there's no sense of attachment to it imo.

I kinda recant my earlier posts in this thread. I have had a blast this evening in Lost Ark. The early content so far has been fun and ive met some great people on Galatur server. There seems to be a genuine desire from a lot of the community there to have a good game and community. The combat and systems start to make a lot more sense and the game literally has in game videos to explain each system to you. The story is still awful and it wont replace Final Fantasy for me, but its fun and worth playing.

This is probably whats hooking people a lot more with the game. Im spoiled with games having better constructed worlds but Lost Ark's appeal generally is more about its gameplay content which is what all it needs anyway.

I've looked even more into how is the gear progression for Lost Ark's endgame.... Systems upon systems of RNG that are expensive to boot! The way the rng systems have rng systems inside them made me feel like paying tetris would be more fun than gearing up for endgame. Second job vibes. Made me really glad we have FF's simple gearing system. Which is why I'll proudly stay a casual player. Which is a lot of fun. And the devs are dedicating 2022 to adding more casual content to the game, since they realize a lot of people have no interest in raiding.


One thing that horrorized me though is the global chat. Worse than league of legends. A lot of people saying really cringy and inappropriate sexual stuff, people arguing... and apparently if you don't skip cutscenes in dungeons on your first time people will flame you and even sometimes kick you from the dungeon. In there everyone is forced to watch cutscenes until everyone on the party accepts to skip, so you can imagine...

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

Am I the only one who didnt find the ARR MSQ a complete snorefest? I thought it did fine introducing the world of Eorzea to the player.

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Maybe. I think it does introduce the world well, but that doesn't mean it's not boring, and it contributed to me taking, I think, about 4 attempts to get into FF. It's not to do with attention spans, the story itself (i.e., as opposed to the lore) is just very boring and poorly presented. It's probably worse when you don't know FF.

Like, I'm not that picky on story quality but ARR is a very large amount of "OK, and why should I care?" Most factions look very one-dimensional for a while. I'd say about towards the end of ARR+ is where it actually gets interesting.

But, hey, opinions are like assholes. World introduction in games is not the easiest thing. It was panned a lot but the way Destiny 1 introduced the world was very much to my liking, intriguing and mysterious, and mainly lore focused so no need to skim through too much dialogue to see if a Scion is saying anything of use besides "let's go here".

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Originally Posted by Xaruko_Nexume

I kinda recant my earlier posts in this thread. I have had a blast this evening in Lost Ark. The early content so far has been fun and ive met some great people on Galatur server. There seems to be a genuine desire from a lot of the community there to have a good game and community. The combat and systems start to make a lot more sense and the game literally has in game videos to explain each system to you. The story is still awful and it wont replace Final Fantasy for me, but its fun and worth playing.

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It's great to have an open mind! :D

Personally I just think the big cinematic dungeons and raids are way cooler than FF14's, and god I wish FF14 will learn something from Lost Ark. Stuff like riding a siege machine, battling through hordes of demons, turning into little small dwarves and fighting on a dining table... I thought Pagl'than was cool but this is another level. Nothing will beat a dungeon like the Dead Ends due to its emotional weight but this game's dungeons are way, way more epic. Little touches like climbing cliffs, or pushing a lever desperately to get a gate to lower so you can run from the boss burning you to a crisp... these all add to the dynamism of a dungeon and heighten it cinematically that FF14 simply doesn't. FF14 is way too static.

I also really enjoy the job design in this game. Every skill feels meaningful and there's a lot of thought you can put into each skill, and I don't mean the customization, I mean the skills themselves. It's a system that is simultaneously complex enough for hardcore players to play with but also easy enough that new players won't be overwhelmed (I think).

Having strong competition can only be good for the game. I am wary of the P2W elements but the other parts of the game are things I hope SE learns from.

People are showing such a beahviour here, declare a game bad and a failure to start with just cause Korean. It's the same attitude people who only play western mmos have towards ffxiv tbh.
Also, even if you don't like a mmo as much as another, you know there's no rule saying you can only play one, right? You can play multiple and have fun and also not having a gatekeeping attitude.
I'm not playing LA and I also think it's too hyped, but I also know how much people have been waiting for it and how much they're loving it, and how it's basically there to stay. I just wish Elyon didn't have the opposite treatment.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

Am I the only one who didnt find the ARR MSQ a complete snorefest? I thought it did fine introducing the world of Eorzea to the player. I hate how we devolved with such short attention spans where unless you see epic whooshy wooshy adrenaline pumping action 24/7 on your daily basis, its considered a bore in the everyday community. Its one of the reasons I couldnt get into the world of Lost Ark in its first few hours, so much weird "epic" set dressing nonsense thrown right into you like bruh can I just please start as just a random off the mill adventurer with the most basic of gear and skills and let me slowly get an understanding of your world please?

That being said though, Im in the minority here and yeah the first few hours of Lost Ark has much more "interesting" stuff going on but there's no sense of attachment to it imo.

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I love ARR, it's the only expansion I did go through many times while watching cinematics still and reading. Like you I like down to earth stories, not epic stuff. Same thing with SB. Sadly as you said most people find non-epic stuff boring. I have the same with other games, I actually liked BDO story a lot while evrybody says it sucks, just skip.

I dont blame them for playing other games ffxiv endgame is basicly raid once per week then afk wait for S rank spawns if you have everything levled up allready.

I'm one of those people that love ARR... sometimes I'll create an alt and replay the beginning of ARR just because I like the early game so much... When I started playing I didn't read the forums/reddit or watched videos on it, so I didn't know that great things awaited after arr... after playing so many mmos where the quests are simply meaningless and made to skip, ARR's story was really nice and down to earh, it was cozy just being an adventurer and experiencing the world building of eorzea. I also loved stormblood. But not for the plot, but because it was the first expansion that focused on the friendship and companionship of the scions and you. It felt like going on an adventure with friends that can rely on eachother rather than what I felt was a very solitary experience in heavensward. Back then it felt like the scions weren't your friends, more workmates that valued you as an asset. That's how I saw it at the time at least. The same friendship was also present in shb and ew, which is the main thing that makes the msq after heavensward feel so different imo.
In relation to Lost Ark, it's kinda like ARR in a way... a very cliche story that isn't impressive on its own, but the presentation and the cutscenes are very nice

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Originally Posted by Xaruko_Nexume

I kinda recant my earlier posts in this thread. I have had a blast this evening in Lost Ark. The early content so far has been fun and ive met some great people on Galatur server. There seems to be a genuine desire from a lot of the community there to have a good game and community. The combat and systems start to make a lot more sense and the game literally has in game videos to explain each system to you. The story is still awful and it wont replace Final Fantasy for me, but its fun and worth playing.

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This game just has a bit of a different spark that kind of separates it from many other similar mmos. I have tried many Korean MMOs in the past, or others in the f2p genre. Generally, I will give each game a good try. As soon as I felt how fluid the combat was, I wanted to see more of it. It throws you right in with several, varied skills, and the animations are nice. The story is fairly generic, and the English VA is a bit.. hilarious, but, like other's have said, the combat and encounters are the actual reason for play. Now, I haven't done much, just the first bit through the game, took part in killing a world boss, did a few 'secret' treasure dungeons and regular dungeons. A game like FFXIV has a pretty heavy focus on the story, and the quality is definitely higher here in that regard, but I am still listening or reading through the dialogue. I like to have some context on the world state of a game. I expect most people are probably skipping everything in general.

In regards to pay to win, that could be a problem, not that I expect to get heavily invested in two mmorpgs, but it hasn't been as in your face or anything right at the start, and I appreciate that they actually have some armor sets with a different look outside of the cash shop, unlike Black Desert when I played that years ago. I actually bought some outfits for dark knight pretty much immediately, so my character wouldn't look so dumb.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

This is probably whats hooking people a lot more with the game. Im spoiled with games having better constructed worlds but Lost Ark's appeal generally is more about its gameplay content which is what all it needs anyway.

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Yeah, that's what I felt, I am usually the kind of person that plays some games with terrible gameplay mechanics *Cough running back and forth in the swamp because of some stupid quest in Witcher 1 Cough* just to experience the story. Lost Ark felt *decent* as far as gameplay goes (I hope combat gets harder during leveling but from what I've seen it only gets hard in the end game.) but the world really didn't interest me in the slightest.

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Originally Posted by snipski

I dont blame them for playing other games ffxiv endgame is basicly raid once per week then afk wait for S rank spawns if you have everything levled up allready.

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Events are the most mediocre things ever in FF too.

Basically talk to npc -X-Y-Z do fate or sometimes just nothing, get your items and everything can be done in 1 hour.

I might give it a try. Is there a free trial yet?

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Originally Posted by Skiros

Lost Ark

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Lost What?... sorry isn't that just the latest Korean Pay 2 Win? Like seriously you fear a P2W? lol.

Spent another chunk of time last night and my impressions really haven't changed much. They do some neat stuff in dungeons and with world design, but none of it really feels like it has a real impact on the gameplay. The story is still completely forgettable and vacuous. The quests are mindless and actually feel weirdly structured, though this really didn't hit me until I progressed a little further into the game. They'll give you a quest that basically says "Put out the fires with the water buckets!" And there will be 10 fires to put out but the quest will complete after you just do one of them. It's almost like they felt like they needed to have quests in the game so it's another checkbox they could tick off to skate by being called an MMO but actively do whatever they can to make you take as little time engaging with the quests as possible. While it's true that quests in MMOs can feel like pointless busywork, that time investment when structured and balanced right can also cause you to feel more invested and engaged with the world as a whole. In Lost Ark the side quests actually just reinforce how the the world kind of doesn't even matter because they are so fleeting and literally end before you even complete them. It's weird.

I'm still having a lot of fun just nuking stuff with my Sorceress, though, and I've progressed far enough to really be able to start building out personal skill loads out for both solo and group play. The combat really is easily where Lost Ark shines.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I might give it a try. Is there a free trial yet?

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It's Free To Play so no trial required. The official launch was yesterday (though the game was down pretty much all day for supposed server issues) so it might take you a bit to get through the queue, but they're adding servers continuously so it shouldn't be that bad.

Be aware that the game has...optimization issues, to say the least. Constant stuttering, it took several minutes just for the client window to show up after even starting it up, constant FPS drops...the game is fine when it's not stuttering, but it happened quite a lot for me. Also for some weird reason the process would not stop running after I exited the game, even after I told task manager to stop it, so I was forced to restart the computer just to get rid of the process.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I might give it a try. Is there a free trial yet?

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It's F2P, so you can try it anytime assuming you can find a server.

Dabbled a bit out of curiosity. Didn't really leave any particularly strong feelings, tbh. Potentially the isometric view just makes it not feel like being inside a world as I expect from an MMO/persistent world game. More PoE like vibes than MMO vibes. Chat of course is full of garbage and arguing about languages because what is moderation.

The localization is awful, though. Or, maybe all the NPCs were meant to sound that ridiculous, lol

I was curious about Lost Ark but consequently lost all interest upon finding out that their classes are genderlocked. Only women can use magic and be assassins? Seriously? The camera angle of the game is also a massive turn off, count me out. If it turns out to be anything more than just a passing fad I'd be surprised.

The gender locking is really weird, too, it's towards specializations, as well. Like, if you pick a male martial artist, it can be a Striker and that's it. If you pick a female one, there's the other 3 options. ???

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Originally Posted by aveyond-dreams

I was curious about Lost Ark but consequently lost all interest upon finding out that their classes are genderlocked. Only women can use magic and be assassins? Seriously? The camera angle of the game is also a massive turn off, count me out. If it turns out to be anything more than just a passing fad I'd be surprised.

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I thought it was just there would be one or two jobs locked to each gender not whole roles D:

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Originally Posted by jameseoakes

I thought it was just there would be one or two jobs locked to each gender not whole roles D:

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From what I understand there are only 2 classes that are not genderlocked, martial artist and gunners. But even they have gender-locked advanced upgrades so its just more needless restrictions.

The whole situation is ridiculous and as a result I do not consider the game worthy of my time.

Everything I've heard of Lost Ark, has me thinking it will go the way of Blade & Soul inside 3 months. Unless the MMO is a Subscription Model 1st, I have no interest in it. But on top of that I compare every MMO to City of Heroes. If it is better than COH in 2007 than I will play it, if it is not better than COH in 2012 I will forget it's name. Every piece of info I have heard about Lost Ark, falls in Standard Korean MMO pay2win model, which means it looks good, plays like an arcade game, has casino slot machine sound effects for premium stuff, gender locked, slut wear on the girls, Ego fantasy for the guys, story written by an EMO 9th grader who wants to be Sasuke.

So like... BDO, B&S, Astellia, Tera, Elsword, Lineage2, and others, Final Fantasy 14 has nothing to fear. I would say if anyone could get the rights to City of Heroes, and reboot that game it would be the real contender, not some generic Korean Fantasy MMO.

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Originally Posted by aveyond-dreams

From what I understand there are only 2 classes that are not genderlocked, martial artist and gunners. But even they have gender-locked advanced upgrades so its just more needless restrictions.

The whole situation is ridiculous and as a result I do not consider the game worthy of my time.

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Ewwww, I much agree with you there good to know I can safely ignore this game it sounds terrible

The truth is the vast majority of games are an ephemeral experience. There's nothing wrong with having fun with a game with no intention of making it your main game and putting thousands of hours into it.

If it's not your cup of tea that's fine, but let's not act like people are doing something wrong by enjoying their time with it.

https://i.redd.it/kwh5rrwtpre81.png

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

The truth is the vast majority of games are an ephemeral experience. There's nothing wrong with having fun with a game with no intention of making it your main game and putting thousands of hours into it.

If it's not your cup of tea that's fine, but let's not act like people are doing something wrong by enjoying their time with it.

https://i.redd.it/kwh5rrwtpre81.png

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Well said. But if the Lost Ark model is successful, and lets be honest it will be...Other gaming companies will start to adopt this model in the west.

> plays like an arcade game

I got that feeling pretty strongly with it... Nothing obviously wrong but weirdly off... you click things, get rewards, everything shiny. And, ugh, I hate the red dots on everything, "go look at this please", I already have to turn that crap off on my phone.

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Originally Posted by aveyond-dreams

From what I understand there are only 2 classes that are not genderlocked, martial artist and gunners. But even they have gender-locked advanced upgrades so its just more needless restrictions.

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Yeah, the gender locking is pretty absurd. Even the classes that do have multiple gender options don't really have multiple gender options because the male and female variants of the class just share an archetype more than anything. Their moves and skills (and even general aesthetics) are different even if they are both "martial artists" or "gun slingers."

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

The truth is the vast majority of games are an ephemeral experience. There's nothing wrong with having fun with a game with no intention of making it your main game and putting thousands of hours into it.

If it's not your cup of tea that's fine, but let's not act like people are doing something wrong by enjoying their time with it.

(img)

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Blade & Soul on release had excellent gameplay, was fun to play, they did a lot of things right, but what they did wrong ruined the game, it was fun for 3 months, wont go back. Same can be said for every Quality Korean MMO, they hit 90% of what everyone wants, but that last 10% usually will spoil the game for all except a specific subset of people.

Gender locking, Sexism, bad writing, Pay2Win, Slot machine mechanics, predatory cash shop mechanics. If you want an MMO to cost $2000 a month, and want your characters to look like something from a X-rated magazine than sure it's a game for you, if you don't want to spend 2k a month, and don't want to live the playboy fantasy it's not for you.

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Originally Posted by Xaruko_Nexume

Well said. But if the Lost Ark model is successful, and lets be honest it will be...Other gaming companies will start to adopt this model in the west.

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Too late for that I'm afraid.

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Originally Posted by Xaruko_Nexume

Well said. But if the Lost Ark model is successful, and lets be honest it will be...Other gaming companies will start to adopt this model in the west.

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Pay2win arcade style MMOs are the only games being released these days, and many of the older once great MMOs are now on that business model. I would say Lost Arc will have no effect on Western MMO models, as it is no different. It's a generic Fantasy Action MMO with lip service to RPG, it runs all the predatory pay2win mechanics invented by Korean and Chinese game companies, and it will hook a bunch of players for about 3 months, when it drops off the radar as the next MMO comes out. Every 6 months since Rifts there has been the "OMG WOW KILLER" MMO, and all but 3 are forgotten.

The three not forgotten: Guild Wars2, Star Wars TOR, ESO

Note FFXIV was never billed as a WOW killer, and ironically it's early failure and slow build up is unique in MMOs.

Also if you search the top rated MMOs of all time not many came out after 2011, the vast majority of the best rated MMOs were released between 2001 and 2011. Yet every few months we get the next great MMO hypetrain, and they have almost always disappointed.

Seeing how some of this game's fans are acting on other forums...I may actually die of schadenfreude when it's population numbers come crashing back to Earth after a few days/weeks.