The new MMORPG Lost Ark brings a lot of innovation. So much that MeinMMO author Mark Sellner claims it feels like he is playing an MMORPG for the first time, even though that was actually over 15 years ago.
Hand on heart: How often have you started a completely new MMORPG and thought after just a few minutes or hours, “Somehow I have seen all of this before”?
This isn’t your fault, but rather because many Western MMORPGs rely on similar patterns and schemes. This doesn’t have to be negative because, as someone who has played Guild Wars 2 for a long time, I only need a little time to wrap my head around Elder Scrolls Online, New World, and others.
This drastically lowers the barrier to trying out a new representative of the genre, and I have always seen this as something positive. MMORPGs can actually be quite complicated if you have never played one before.
You can easily get lost between Gearscore, crafting, dungeons, world bosses, completion tasks, and various classes. It’s good if you have 15 years of MMORPG experience and already know how many of these mechanics work, right?
However, Lost Ark taught me otherwise. Although I have definitely played more than 50 different MMORPGs over the years, the Korean isometric MMORPG feels like it’s the first one I have ever played. It even gives me things to do that I have never experienced before. And that is really good.
Lost Ark might not reinvent many mechanics, but it applies them so differently that it still surprises me as an experienced MMO player. It feels as if I suddenly play an MMORPG for the first time or finally one that has been thought through.
In Lost Ark, I gradually loot better equipment and complete quests in a more or less open world, most of whose dialogues don’t need to interest me. But it’s precisely the tasks that I dwell on that make the game so good.
Too often, an NPC asks me something that I must answer correctly for the quest to proceed. These are not questions whose answers I already know, but often things taught to me in the context of this quest. If I wasn’t paying attention and don’t know the name of the very first Guardian, I’m out of luck with the questioner.
Of course, I can just restart the dialogue, but there are also moments when Lost Ark actually punishes me for not reading the dialogues.
Look closely, you idiot!
If you don’t read carefully what you are supposed to do in Lost Ark and how the following mechanic works, you will stumble. This happens to varying degrees of severity, but it happens. A mechanic that makes sense, but one that I am rather unfamiliar with from MMORPGs. In several thousand hours of Guild Wars 2, I can barely remember a handful of tasks for which I really had to listen.
In contrast, Lost Ark gently teaches me through dialogues to look more closely. If I don’t learn this, I will suffer later. Already in the first area Rethramis, I need a 500-year-old wine to complete the adventure folio.
In a dungeon, I then find a 499-year-old wine that I can consume immediately. If I do that, I receive an achievement that tells me I am an idiot – that’s literally stated.
The item is gone and my folio remains incomplete. So I have to go back into the dungeon and fetch the bottle of wine. Upon closer reading, I notice the item description. “Only an idiot would drink this valuable bottle immediately.” It also says I should keep it in my inventory for 2 hours.
If I follow the description, after two hours the 499-year-old wine indeed turns into a 500-year-old wine, which I can then drink to unlock the entry in the folio. But I also learned much more about the game through that.
From now on, I will scrutinize every item description of a rare item carefully because such mechanics caught me off guard quite often in over 200 hours. Sometimes I have to eat an ice cream within a minute, sometimes I’m not allowed to eat an egg in the first minute or after 3 minutes. The adventure folio constantly demands my attention in a way that MMORPGs rarely do.
This mechanic is pushed so far at times that it becomes uncomfortable. Its best and worst peak occurs on the continent of Arthetine. Here you are tasked with preparing the “Unknown Liquid XD-6353.” It consists of 6 different ingredients with very vague names.
The only challenge is figuring out which ingredients you need to buy. And that is much harder than you might think. While we need the item IX-ILIL121lIILI1, the game gives us 7 different items to choose from, which have almost identical names. If I buy the wrong one, I have successfully burned silver.
Lost Ark demands my attention here in a strange way that makes me both happy and sad. Because, although I look back now and think this quest is a masterpiece by Smilegate, I was incredibly annoyed while having to do it.
I had a similar experience with the side story “The Secret of Your Majesty” in North Vern. If I don’t read correctly here that I just interacted with the wrong item, I feel like I run endlessly across the map. I was so annoyed by this that I immediately wrote a guide for it as soon as I finished so that no one else would have to suffer through it.
But even here, I think back: “Damn, that was really well done.”
Other game mechanics in Lost Ark continue this approach and think it through. I constantly feel that the developers have gone one step further than in other MMORPGs. You can notice this not only in strange tasks and cooking recipes.
A good example is the Screamer engraving, as I like to call it. An engraving that gives you a damage bonus if you spam a sentence with five exclamation marks in chat. An apparently absurd idea, but somehow genius.
And then there’s a quest that causes an error message. That freaked me out at first, but then I realized that it was part of the quest and was intended. Lost Ark repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, known from films, with such inserts and addresses me as a player, not just my character.
These are relatively few examples of a whole lot of exciting tasks and mechanics that are usually not common. Lost Ark feels thus like the next level of MMORPGs, the big level-up of the genre. But not quite like the very first. There are still more things that ensure this.
The trick about the setting is that Lost Ark has none
When you open Lost Ark, you might think the game has a slightly Asian-flavored medieval fantasy setting. Well, that is simply a lie. This assumption starts to crumble when you take a closer look at the classes.
Because in addition to the classic warrior, assassin, mage, and archer, you can also expect classes like the Artillerist. He shoots little atomic rockets with a big artillery gun. Or the pistol lancer, who wield a strange combination of spear and rifle with a shield.
That doesn’t really fit the medieval fantasy you expected, does it? It becomes clear again on the continent of Arthetine. Because while we visit a rather medieval Europe in Luterra and a feudal Japan in Anikka, the capital of Arthetine, Stern’s Origin, shines in finest steampunk style.
And so I find myself shortly after as a greatsword-wielding berserker on a hoverboard. Gliding over a gravitational wave on the way to my battle mech. While robots throw laser discs at me. I then jump into the combat robot and shoot the genetically modified enemies with two machine guns.
But just a few hours earlier, I had found myself as a shrunk Mokoko in a town built within a tree, riding ladybugs through a world where crows were the most dangerous enemies solely due to their sheer size. Shortly after, a setting awaited me in Shushire that had little in common with the playful Mokokos.
Lost Ark relies on a completely different setting for each continent and island. This feels fresh and allows the game to experiment a lot. The premise of the main story: “Help, demons are destroying our world” works excellently in every setting, and Lost Ark proves this constantly.
Another reason why Lost Ark feels like my first MMORPG is precisely this enormous variety. While I feel on Anikka or in Luterra that I have experienced these settings and things before, this completely disappears in other locations.
Particularly Arthetine, Tortoyk, or some of the small islands offer me things to discover, causing me to stop and marvel regularly because no MMORPG has offered me as much variety in its presentation as Lost Ark does.
When I, as a seasoned hero, have to fight shrunk against a parrot with a pirate hat, it’s just genius. Or when later, I have to help a reporter exposing environmental pollution to save polar bears. Or that one time I was on the disco island and had to dance, or… you get the idea, there are many “or” in this listing. And so many more that can’t be included here.
This unique look and what I consider groundbreaking game mechanics make Lost Ark feel like my first MMORPG. And that is despite the fact that I have been actively playing MMORPGs for 15 years.
A LAN party made the experience perfect
When was the last time you had a truly genuine LAN party? One with real computers in a room, cramped together and without Wi-Fi or other substitutes? I thought the same thing and organized the “LostLAN” with my friends – because they were just as hyped about Lost Ark as I was.
This LAN was the best idea I had so far in 2022. Because sharing the joy of the game with a total of 7 other friends in the same house was a great feeling.
Many more joined us later over Discord, and we spent the entire launch week just gaming together. And some moments of that week made this MMORPG feel really new again, like my first MMO.
On February 8, we set up a countdown until 6 PM, which we presented on a large screen. We counted down the last 10 seconds until the launch, just like on New Year’s Eve, and celebrated just like that. That was just one of many fun moments, and many more were to follow.
Especially when we were all around level 35 and unlocked the engravings. Lost Ark is by no means a game that explains itself. So we pondered together in the middle of the night about how this mechanic could work. When we finally figured it out, we praised ourselves and continued playing. At least until the next group thinking project came up.
This feeling of collective joy and the fun of exploring a new game from scratch and being able to share every little discovery with others felt exciting. After more than 15 years in this genre, it felt like my very first MMORPG, and that’s really nice.
What do you think of Lost Ark so far? Have you played the MMORPG just as intensely as I have and does it feel just as fresh to you? When was your last LAN party? Or have I just convinced you to finally throw another one? Please let us know in the comments here at MeinMMO.
