As everyone should know by now Lost Ark was released during the past week. The doors to early access opened to those willing to open their wallets on Tuesday while the freebies were allowed in on Friday. I was one of the former.
It's been a bit of a roller coaster ride for me. I wasn't really that interested in the game to begin with but was convinced by friends. When I got in the game it felt kinda lackluster early on. As the days went by though I started liking it more and more. Enough to spend every waking moment during this past weekend playing it.
Creating my Shadow Hunter
It's always rough choosing a class in an MMO. I watched a few videos before the game launched to get a grasp of the different classes. That didn't really help make the choice easier as no classes really spoke to me. The coice was ultimately made during the character creation and it fell on the Shadow Hunter.
Classes are gender locked in this game meaning if you pick the Shadow Hunter you can only be a female character. The character creator is quite extensive with sliders for pretty much every part of a humans face. I spent some time in there creating a badass looking lass. The upside down cross under her eye being the crown on my masterpiece. I also had to keep that pink hair color that I've used for my character in FFXIV.
I also wanted to have the same combination of heterochromia in the eyes but I messed that one up.
Kinda lackluster
I mentioned already that I found the game kinda lackluster. That's mostly because the early game is quite underwhelming. The first thing that hit me is the fact that you start off with a full set of skills. Right from the get go you have six pretty overpowered skills at your disposals. Enough to pretty much one shot every enemy you find. I do get that it's maybe supposed to be that kind of game but I did wish for a bit more character development that this. You do however unlock a few extra skills as you level up.
The next part that hit me was the story. It's just so mediocre and uninteresting. It takes a good while for the story to pick up to a level that's at least somewhat enjoyable. Luckily I'm still able to keep up with the story even though I'm skipping through it quite quickly. That's thanks to the text being bitesized and not walls of text that you have to read. I wouldn't have had any clue what it was about if that was the case.
It does pick up town as you get to around level 30 though. There's some pretty huge and badass scenarios that are some of the coolest I've done in games like this. Like some proper Lord of the Rings Helms Deep scenarios.
Current progress
As you would guess from someone who played 30 hours of a game in three days I have made a bit of progress. I'm currently level 49 which is one level away from the max. This is all without rushing. Had I rushed I would have been 50 long ago and already started doing endgame content.
Instead I've been taking my time. I like to explore the zones and look for collectibles like Mokoko Seeds and filling out my Adventurer's Tome. I've found close to 150 seeds so far on my journey. I consider this a decent haul seeing as there's a total of close to 1200 in the game. These doesn't give you any gameplay benefits but you get some cool vanity items when you reach certain milestones.
The Adventurer's Tome on the other hand does give you a lot of helpful stuff. In here you get everything from revive items, to potions, to mounts and cards that enhance your character. The Adventurer's Tome gets filled out as you do the main quest, kill special enemies, take down world bosses and find vistas and other collectible throughout the world. For a completionist and ingame collector like me this is just perfect.
A hellscape of dailies?
From what I can gather the endgame of Lost Ark consists of a lot of daily tasks if you want to progress. Speaking from experience from other games I can say for certain that dailies will be the end of me in this game. Even if that will be the case I plan to keep on playing this game and having fun in it for as long as I can. As soon as I stop having fun I'll simply quit.
I also had to take an involuntary break today due to the queue times. I normally log in through Remote Desktop from work so that the queue withers down by the time I get home. I miscalculated that one today and logged on to early. By the time I checked back in the queue was up to 15k people which should take the better part of around 5 hours to go through. By that time I would already have been sleeping in my bed for an hour. Perfect chance to actually do some stuff on Hive which I've been mostly neglecting this past week while I've been nerding away.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.