First Impressions With Lost Ark

Do you like Diablo? Are you still bummed out that Blizzard is still being a bunch of pricks towards its employees? Then, boy, do I have a suggestion for you. I started playing Lost Ark after I got a hankering for a Diablo-style Action RPG and remembered that I played the Closed Beta for this way back in November. Plus this was the big thing that seems to be going live today (I’m writing this in advance) because I’ve spent a good chunk of the last few nights before bed just playing in the early access period that’s been going on. Based on how it’s blowing up on Steam, I think a lot of other players are also in the mood for a game like this right now.

I feel like I need to get this off of my chest before I can continue: Why is it that there are still MMO-style games that insist on locking specific classes to gender? It makes no fucking sense because it can seriously hamper players' methods of self-expression of their characters. It limits the number of combinations that you can mess with within character creation, and on top of it all, the idea of playing against type, even if the types shouldn’t even be there, to begin with, is fun. I love the idea of a big meaty man being the spellcaster or a small, waify girl carrying a sword that’s roughly twice her size and being the barbarian because she’s literally too angry to die. It has a tendency to just pull me out of the experience every time I think about it and in a world where Final Fantasy XIV exists, a game that lets any character be any job the player wants, it’s inexcusable as far as I’m concerned.  But enough bitching about the character creator and how nonsensical gender-locking classes are, there’s a video game behind that hurdle.

Lost Ark can easily be summed up as “What if Diablo, but with a lot of the social features and some of the group content of MMORPGs” and on that front, it feels like an interesting experiment. The use of these features to basically group players together at the later levels to do dungeons and even raids is an interesting concept for an Action RPG and I think that’s a cool idea, but the game doesn’t force you to go down that route if you don’t want to, which is nice. Having played the prologue twice between the closed beta and early access, I can tell you that serves as a nice wetting of the beak for seeing if you want to continue. It gives you the gameplay basics and then an advanced class once you hit level 10. This can be an issue when tied into the aforementioned character creation because these advanced classes are where the bulk of the gameplay variety comes from and I just wanted to be a big, burly spellcaster, you cowards. Sorry, I got out of pocket there. I went with the Paladin for the Warrior because it’s been a while since I was a righteous defender of the innocent. You got sword skills and you got magic skills, and on top of that, you got this special meter in the middle that fills up as you kill stuff and you can toggle on a super mode that made you either wield your sword more effectively or make you holy magic stronger. The other classes have this kind of mechanic as well and it’s nice to see the Overcharge mechanic from Torchlight 2 being used in more games, it’s a nice feature.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with Lost Ark in the long term, but for now, it’s a neat little distraction until The Witch Queen comes out (I know I keep bringing it up, but I want that new expansion content in Destiny 2 so badly). It’s a thing I can turn my brain off and grind to while listening to music or a podcast for a couple of hours before bed. And honestly, sometimes you need a game like that in your life.