Lost Ark Review (Valadaya)
It is important to start with that I do not review games. Though I am making an exception for Lost Ark.
Many players found they either started the game due to hype, friends asking them to join, or they had been tracking it since its Korean and Russian release. Once you start playing the game it is simple enough the combat system is kind of similar to ARPGS, not new but something different. This is where many players will praise the game for combat being smooth and refreshing. You level quickly enough and the dungeons seem fun as you progress a B list story. You are awed and impressed with the in game visuals and the feeling that you're making progress. Then you hit 50 and everything shifts ever so slightly. You now are at Vern and you have shifted away from gathering gear to honing the same set. Nothing too drastic, the mats are not awful and the success rates are 100%. North Vern is now completed and for the first time you get a notification that you must hit a certain gear level before you can progress, something is starting to feel off but you can not put your finger on it. You manage to gather mats with daily quests that are very repetitive, running chaos dungeons which are mat pinatas, and you play around on islands or do events that have no real purpose other than to get you more mats/shinies.
After a decent effort you finally hit the required gear level and you have felt the sting of the honing failures but it is still not overly painful. You get to Rohendal and you feel even more like something is off, things you got in the habit of doing now are just not able to be done any more. You can not really gather Makoko seeds as easily and starting to realize the fun combat is starting to feel a tad repetitive. Another notification that you must further hone your gear and this is when that feeling starts to actually manifest into something tangible. Your gathering mats for a chance to improve your gear and the success rate is dropping rapidly. You ask around for methods on how best to gather these mats and are told this is an Alt friendly game. So you spin up some alts, burn those two nice Vern power passes and have two more level 50 characters at your disposal. That feeling grows even stronger, each of these new toons also needs to hone gear, but why did you already spend weeks doing it on the first character you made. So you start gathering mats on them to pass to your Main, only to find out not all materials are roster bound, that seems like a problem. Now you're logging in daily on multiple characters to gather the mats that are tradeable and after you have enough you spin the honing wheel to lose most of them.
Now you're finally on your way to Yorn, you soldier through it because by this point you're no longer exploring islands or doing much else than gathering materials to keep your gear score going up. Vindication, you get a new set of gear that causes that very strong feeling to finally be put into a word "Dread". The game is no longer hiding that almost everything is RNG, especially honing which is a mandatory exercise you can not escape. Also the frustration starts to build as you realize those alts can no longer help gain materials because they are still Tier 1 and can not help you anymore. Do you grind them up to help with Tier 2 or do you focus only on that one character. Tier 2 honing is just as rough as Tier 1 and you're doing it again with higher material requirements. By the time you hit Feiton you have come to understand nothing else in this game matters as much as gathering materials to fail at honing your gear.
The promise of great things to come is what your peers tell you while the developers tell you to go at your own pace. The dungeons are kind of pointless now because they are just there to do once or twice for low amounts of honing materials. Say you finally get your character to the coveted Tier 3, guess what you're starting the gear honing grind again and now it is even worse than before. If you want to log in every day for login rewards, do dailies religiously, participate in events only there to feed your material addiction, and just repeatedly get told your feelings are wrong. Maybe Lost Ark is for you. Spelling out these things is only to encapsulate the reality that the publisher/developers decided for greed or ignorance to force NA/EU to toil in Tier 1 and Tier 2 for now. All you have to do is watch videos from Korea and see that this is not what new players on those servers experience. The focus is to get players to Tier 3 so they can all enjoy the same content together and not telling them to play at their own pace. Yes there are Pay to Win aspects, but everyone says it can be avoided with time and the game does not force you to do that if you're willing to stick with it.
Between an underdeveloped community that can be toxic only a month in and some of the worst game support you will ever experience for an MMO. The Western Lost Ark NA/EU release is horrible. Yes there is something that could be great about this game, but that is not what was delivered, and right now there is no road map for it to get where other regions already are. The largest issue I have experienced is the honing rates and it is clear the publisher/developer are not willing to address this because that is not the vision they have for NA/EU.
I recommend to anyone considering this game "Do Not Waste your Time". Three hundred hours in and a good chunk of money spent to try to support a game that promised to be everything it is not right now. Sure the game could become great just like other regions, it is not currently, and the longer folks stay or keep joining will only further encourage the continuation of the horrible state that is in major need of improvements. At this point it is obvious that NA/EU are getting the worst version this game has to offer. I understand this was long and thank you to those that made it to the end.