(About me section, skip this if you want to go straight to feedbacks)
A little about me.
I’ve been playing MMO’s all my life. My first mmo was Tera, which I played hard core(HC) for 5 years. I then swapped to FFXIV, which lasted for another 5 years which I also played HC. Since then, I’ve felt that most MMO’s I’ve tried haven’t fulfilled that MMO itch. Looking at Lost Ark gave me a little hope that I would find another MMO that I can sink my free time into.
When I play an MMO, I tend to become extremely invested. Since the beta for LA started, I accumulated over 80 hours and have reached 550 Ilvl. The game exceeded my expectations, but that doesn’t mean it’s flawless. The rest of this post will go into detail of many things I think Amazon games needs to work on before release.
Feedback (In order of importance IMO, 80+ Hours Beta and 550 Ilvl)
1. Optimization
I’m currently running on a Ryzen 7 5800x and Nvidia 3070 with 16GB RAM and Evo 970 SSD. Every game I’ve tried has ran perfectly, with an exception of Cyberpunk. Most issues I’ve seen while running everything on low:
- Minor freeze when I dash using mount
- 10 seconds to load textures and bring my fps to a stable rate when entering new areas or TPing
- Minor freezes every couple of seconds when I move around a map
- FPS dipping when lots of effects are showing up on screen
It surprised me that I was unable to run Lost Ark smooth with the specs that I have. I’ve searched up solutions which lead to disabling gsync but nothing really worked. I did notice conversations on discord and reddit that mentioned that Lost Ark runs on DX9 and that the new GPU’s don’t support it anymore which makes sense. (I don’t know much about GPU’s and the inner workings of Direct X). Game performance means a lot to me and it’s usually a deciding factor in most games I play. I’m hoping that this get’s noticed by the devs and that it can be fixed by release. (Crossing my fingers; it’s a huge problem).
2. Gearing and Progression
I have to say that the gear progression feels amazing. The systems that are in place like engravings and the gear upgrade really made me feel like I was actually trying to work with my gear. I’m able to change different aspects to fit my needs and what I wanted. Coming from FF14, the gear progression was linear and didn’t express the player at all. Lost Ark does it really well and I hope it continues to in the future.
3. PVP
Not much to say. It’s pretty flippin fun.
4. NPC voice over spam
Every time I ran into an NPC, it would spam the same voice lines over and over which become slightly annoying for when quests required me to pass them multiple times in a span of a couple minutes. I know the voice overs are still in development, but it is something to keep in mind.
5. Text of some abilities and engravings are incorrect or just get cut off
Some of the translations and texts are incorrect and don’t explain abilities well enough. An example of this is that the ATK power engraving shows -ATK speed even though it’s supposed to be -ATK power. Also, some windows have text that just get cut off due to it being longer in English. It’s clear that some work needs to be done to polish the text.
Overall my experience in the game has been pretty positive. My friends who are not huge MMO fans got just as excited and addicted as I am. Lost Ark is by far the most fun I’ve had in an MMO and I’m ready to enjoy it with others.