In the high-demand space of MMOs, small twists on the formula can make a significant impact. New free-to-play MMO Lost Ark leverages the familiar tropes, bugbears, and trends of the genre, but wraps them in an action-RPG approach that feels welcoming to neophytes – and, specifically, fans of Diablo or Torchlight with less skin in the MMO game. Whether it will maintain novelty months from now is harder to discern, but there’s considerable content in this package, even before diving into its myriad premium unlocks.
Lost Ark’s narrative is probably one of its weaker elements, which may have to do with a fairly workmanlike translation of a trope-filled narrative. Individual players embark on a journey through the land of Arkesia, essentially filling the right-place, right-time, right-person trope over and over again through the considerable single-player-ready questline. Practically every story beat is familiar and predictable, and the generic NPC conversations don’t do much to enliven the narrative, as they’re mostly fluff to quickly click through on the way to the next objective.
That being said, Lost Ark’s cinematic interludes and set piece quests are impressive and dynamic in their own right. It’s a game where a sizable number of its dungeons and main questline touchstones boast a unique gameplay wrinkle or some eye candy at the least; a dungeon delve through tombs may require a special gameplay-altering artifact, while a staged castle siege sees players vaulting onto ramparts and commanding a ballista against hordes of demonic enemies. These signature moments add much more charisma and engagement to the game than its simplified, numerous, and rather rote side quests.
There’s a suitably massive world to crawl with diversified areas and biomes, and while enemy mobs have a healthy range of size and visual flourish, they mostly amount to simple cannon fodder. This means that getting from one quest to another takes players through hordes of near-instantly replenishing creatures which provide minimal experience points or reward (let alone danger), as well as some accessible resource-farming mechanics. Hidden Mokoko seeds grant Lost Ark a nice hidden-item-game quality which further differentiate it from other MMOs, but leveling up characters is mostly down to cashing in quests in sequence.
The combat remains the main draw, and it’s one of the game’s finest contributions to the genre. The netcode is top notch, and combat for each of the game’s classes offers plenty of room to experiment. For now, Lost Ark‘s range of classes and related subclasses offer a lot of diversity – despite being arbitrarily gender-locked – and each of them treat combat in their own way. Martial Artists inject the game with a snappy beat ‘em up feel and are yet different from the Warrior classes’ weightier movesets. Gunslingers are highly mobile and can swap between three weapons on the fly while their fellow Artillerist subclass prioritizes heavy attacks and AOE crowd control.
Most every class benefits from combo-linking moves into each other, and though individual stats don’t leverage experience points as in, for instance, Amazon Games’ other recent MMO draw New World, skills can be unlocked, upgraded, and configured level by level. It’s more a matter of deciding which spells/skills/actions string together best, and anyone drawn to this creative approach to individual ability design will enjoy how easy it is to respec and save different loadouts, and Lost Ark encourages the use of alts with its Roster Leveling system.
Speaking of systems, Lost Ark has a slew of different mechanics, all of which are laid out in due course through the main story quest. At the approximate midway point is some PvP, which can be approached solo or in group, and the customizable Stronghold home base allows players to design and command an island fortress, complete with missions, item crafting, and cosmetics. As with some other game elements, most of these diversions are completely voluntary outside of their initial introduction, but there are gameplay boons to be had from wooing NPCs with Rapport or scouring the maps for Mokoko seeds.
Anyone discouraged from those popular concerns of free-to-play MMOs will find that Lost Ark is gentle in its pay-to-win leanings. There are predictably seductive premium purchases to be had, but most of them revolve around time-savers and special mounts/skins, and hopefully there’s some more free Lost Ark content to come. The architecture of the game seems geared towards dutiful endgamers with decent daily rewards that won’t require dozens of hours a week to maintain. Past that, the early stages of its arrival look promising and there’s considerable content to devour at launch, all for free. Lost Ark is easily worth the download and feels remarkably fully-formed, but it should really thrive with new world events and additional endgame content.
Lost Ark is out now on PC. A digital Steam preview code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.
