Lost Ark: The Story So Far

To listen to me, you'd think I really didn't like Lost Ark at all but, if that was true, I'd have to be some kind of masochist. I downloaded it on Friday morning and by the middle of Tuesday afternoon I'd played for more than fourteen hours. There are mmorpgs I've praised that never saw that much of me.

Since I installed it I have, in fact, played far more Lost Ark than anything else. I've done my dailies in Guild Wars 2, I logged into EverQuest II on Saturday for about half an hour to look at the Erolisi day stuff and I pottered around a bit in Chimeraland but apart from that it's been Lost Ark all the way. 

Clearly I can't be having such a bad time as I've been making out, can I? So what is it that keeps me logging in? Perhaps its about time I made a list of the things I like about the game. There must be something.

And there is but I warn you, it's a controversial pick. I like the questing. And not just the Main Story Quest, either. I enjoy the side quests, too.

The general consensus seems to be that Lost Ark barely pays lip service to narrative. Kaylriene called the story "pretty dreadful". He also described the voice acting as "abysmally bad". Wilhelm was a little more generous. He thought the story was "kind of goofy", something that sounds vaguely acceptable, at least in my book but, like Kaylriene, he also had issues with the voice acting, which he found "stilted and awkward". 

Even Naithin, almost certainly Lost Ark's strongest advocate in this corner of the blogosphere, couldn't offer much in the way of praise for the game's story, settling for an eminently neutral "It exists. It’s… there. Doing vaguely story-like things from time to time."

If only the whole game was in Selfie Mode.

I have seen a couple of people stand up for Lost Ark's quest content, one of them being Aywren. She ends her First Impressions post with a lengthy section on "Story" and I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything she says, for example

"Lost Ark is a good few steps above many translated games that I’ve played in terms of localization."

"Lost Ark’s localization is fairly well done."

"The story has recurring characters that I remember when I see them."

Then there was Krikket, who had some positive thoughts to offer on Lost Ark's side quests:

"Lost Ark does have some pretty compelling zone stories"

I realize that amounts to some fairly faint and qualified praise so I'll elaborate just a little. I'd like to take on the question of the voice acting and whether it's any good or not first.

I've played a lot of localized, translated, imported mmorpgs. Not infrequently the words spoken by the actors do not match those on screen. Sometimes they don't even mean the same thing. It's not at all unusual for the line readings to emphasize the wrong words and sometimes it feels like the actors don't even understand what the words mean.

In a disturbing number of these kinds of titles it's all too easy to believe the voice work was given to unpaid interns, devs who didn't have anything else to do that day or pretty much anyone who happened to walk past the sound studio on the day of recording. Lost Ark doesn't suffer from any of these shortcomings.

I'll say it. If there are dwarves in the game, why can't I be one?

It's true that many of the performances are quite "back". Everyone underacts to a degree, even when the events are supposed to be momentous. I consider that a strength. Not to have to listen to actors who apparently inhale from helium balloons or gargle with broken glass before yodelling every line is a positive pleasure.

Best of all, so far not one single actor has tried out their famous "Scottish" accent, the one that goes down so well at parties after a few drinks and everyone says sounds just like Sean Connery - or is it Sean Bean? Not even the guy playing the Dwarven blacksmith. That alone should win Lost Ark's sound director some kind of award.

Lost Ark does do that thing where only the first line in every dialog gets a sound clip, something I always find distracting, but that seems to be industry standard these days. Voice work is famously expensive so you can see why it happens. I'd prefer either to hear the speech in full or not hear it at all but no-one's asking me what I want. 

So much for the acting. How about the script?

I thought about this one quite a lot. Naithin and I have been having something of a cross-blog conversation about whether or not Lost Ark looks prettier than most games or just pretty enough to get the job done. I said, and I quote, "I think Lost Ark is graphically functional for what it needs to be but to me it very much has the feel of an assembly-line construction, produced to a good standard following very specific, commercial directions."

The quest summaries are worth reading. Some nice lore and scene-setting in there, sometimes.

I do recognize the irony, having used those words to express just how unimpressed I am with what Lost Ark looks like, when I then turn up here trying to explain what's good about the game's writing by using much the same language. The writing in Lost Ark strikes me as solid, professional, commercial work. It's the equivalent of a decent press release or a filler article in a magazine. 

That's not nothing. Plenty of games wish they were that written that well.

It's nothing original, of course. The central plot is eerily similar to the plots of half a dozen imported mmorpgs I've played over the last few years. It's almost spooky how they all follow the same pattern. About the only significant difference this time is that my character doesn't wake up on a beach somewhere with no memory of who they are or how they got there. That probably got left on the cutting room floor with the missing ten levels, as Tyler explained in the comments last time.

Where Lost Ark wins out over several of those, however, is in its admirable clarity of purpose. Some of those other games undoubtedly have more intriguing set-ups with gnarlier plot twists and more surprising reveals but few of them are as clear and easy to follow. At level twenty-eight I can still remember who all the significant characters are, what they're trying to do and why. That's not something I could often say, this far into the story.

I particularly like the end-of-region wrap-ups that send you to say goodbye to some of the people you've helped. I think that might even be an original idea.

What's more, I even care a little. Not a lot, obviously. About as much as I might care about the current story arc in a soap opera I was only watching because I was stuck at home with my leg in a cast. Just enough, in other words, to keep watching to find out if what I think is going to happen next really does.

It's all good, colorful fantasy stuff, too: demons, half-demons, priests, princes, barons and wise women. Now I know there are dwarves in the game it can only be a few more set pieces before a dragon turns up. I could do without all the fights inbetween the speeches but the parts where I just have to go from one person to another passing messages, then sit back and watch some cut scenes, make for some very passable entertainment.

There's a little more to the writing than that, though. So far, at least, it's tonally appropriate to my own sensibilities, something I find more than a tad surprising given some of the observations I was making yesterday about the game's dubious gender politics. 

There's considerably less heroic posturing than I'd have expected, with the two main protagonists being more prone to self-doubt than would usually be the case. It's not just adolescent angst, either, even if both of them do look like they've come straight from an audition for the latest KPop boy band. 

The Nuremberg Defence.

The sequence when the would-be prince refuses to accept the "I was only following orders" defence from the man who just tried to slaughter a whole village worked partiularly well, I thought, especially when he goes on to send the man away for a proper trial to shouts of "Don't let him live!" from the crowd. 

A later sequence, when the prince, accompanied by my character, arrives too late to save the elderly knight, who raised him after his father died and who was "like a grandfather" to him, is unusually moving. Unusually, because the emotional weight is carried not by the dialog (There is none.) but by the animations. The prince stops to look at the body, then walks away, sits down and puts his head in his hands. It's solid writing and it has the intended effect.

There's a lot like this, not just in the main story but in the side quests. As Krikket says, the mechanics of those are very basic; "go here, talk to this guy, kill some beasties" but the quests somehow manage to convey a sense of the character's lives in one or two lines. 

Not going to work here either, buster.

I have a strong aversion to fantasy blockbuster prose, which is one of the reasons I always struggle with the idea that Elder Scrolls Online represents any kind of "good "writing, even for the genre. Lost Ark is much more terse and that suits my taste. 

It's also more demotic. Minor characters sound more like regular people than fantasy archetypes, although it's probably fair to say they still sound like tropes as often as not. I'm not claiming there's much depth but at least the surface is a little scuffed.

At the start, I did say it was the questing I liked, not just the quest writing. When it comes to gameplay, I almost always prefer tasks to quests, so all that going here, talking to this guy, killing some beasties Krikket called out suits me very well. Even better, in Lost Ark it's usually "talk to that guy just over there - he's about fifty yards away" or "kill some beasties, two or three will do. You'll find them about fity yards beyond that guy I asked you to talk to a minute ago".

That's a rhetorical question, right?

When I'm out doing quests like those, Lost Ark does feel like an mmorpg. The fights are small-scale, the mobs are tough enough to take a few hits, I have time to think about what I'm doing, pick my attacks instead of button-mashing and generally play the way I normally like to play. 

Similarly, when I'm doing the various quests that attempt to explain some of the game's myriad systems, I find I'm having a fairly good time. I don't want to learn how to use the systems - God forbid! I just like going from NPC to NPC clicking on things and reading the dialog.

The world of Lost Ark is very compact and very safe. The zones are tiny, there's no fog of war, everything you need is marked on the map, which even comes with a see-through version you can use as a kind of visual Sat-Nav. Even though most mobs are aggressive in theory, in practice you can stand within inches of them without them paying any attention and you can run faster than they can, even on foot. It's supremely easy to just ride through everything in your way, do the quest stuff, then ride back without anything interrupting the flow.

All of this makes for very easy gaming. The story parts are just about interesting enough to keep me awake and the task parts give me something to do with my hands. If Lost Ark was a regular 3D mmorpg, even one with action combat, I'd be saying some quite complimentary things about it instead of sniping and snarking about its flaws.

An unsettlingly moving moment. You had to be there, I guess.

For the sake of journalistic integrity, I should probably also confirm that I'm finding it less boring than I was. It's still not exactly what you call exciting but I will admit that so long as I can find quests to do it passes the time adequately. 

Given that the questing seems to me to be the best thing about Lost Ark, I'm very curious to know what the supposed endgame is, considering every levelling guide I've looked at advises people to do as few quests as possible outside the MSQ and to get through even that as fast as possible. Why? What's waiting at the end that's so great?

I suspect I will never find out. I might make it to the end but I wouldn't count on it. I'm determined to get my boat, at least. I might even want to finish the story to see how it all turns out for the half-demon priest and the diffident prince. And who knows, maybe by then the rest of the game will have grown on me and I won't be able to remember why I ever found it boring in the first place.

I'm getting that damn boat, anyway. After that, we'll see.

Journey's End or Are We Nearly There Yet?

I'm going to begin with a quote from Kaylriene's excellent post entitled "Losing My Way With Lost Ark", in which he nails a number of reasons why the game just isn't working for him the way it seems to be working for others.

"...I can only play for an hour before feeling a sense of ennui and aimlessness..."

Me too. It's a strange sensation. I find myself wanting to play but when I do I find it hard to remember why. Being bored while playing a game I chose to play is a very unusual sensation for me, possibly a unique one. I'm generally very good at knowing when I'm having a good time. When I'm not, I stop.

With Lost Ark, for some reason, I don't. I keep going. I've only played for six hours so far but I know I'll play some more today after I finish writing this. I'll probably play at least one session every day this week. There's an odd pull to the game that I can't figure out and that I don't much like. It almost feels like an unhealthy compulsion.

Partly it's that, as Kaylriene says, people who like the game a lot more than I do keep saying it gets much better, later. But how much later? Certainly not at level fifteen or eighteen or whatever my character's at right now. That mere fact that I can't even remember what level it is speaks to my lack of engagement. 

Really? Maybe you'd let the rest of us in on it, then.

 

Isn't it a lot to ask, that a player trudge through thirty or forty levels of tedium before the game gets good? Well, yes, but it's a demand many mmorpgs make. It would be unfair to single Lost Ark out for particular opprobrium on that score alone.

Kaylriene, at least, has the comfort of thoroughly enjoying the combat, which he believes has plenty to teach its supposed role-model and progenitor, Diablo. I don't have that lifebelt to cling to. 

I loathe the combat in Lost Ark. I have never liked ARPG combat since the first time I encountered it in Dungeon Siege, one of the most disappointing purchases I have ever made, so I wasn't expecting to but it's even worse than I imagined it would be. If I already objected to the fundemental concept of ARPG combat, the implementation here just gives me more reason to dislike it.

My starting point is that ARPG combat is infantile and inane. It's mechanical to a disturbing degree: faceless, souless mobs feeding themselves into the maw of your whirling weapons or blazing spells, like cattle mindlessly charging towards the abattoir gates. Making that process, as Kaylriene puts it, skill-dense, really doesn't improve matters. It just makes it annoying and fiddly as well as stupid. 

Listen kid, don't start complaining. At leas she lets you wear flats.

The odd thing about the way Lost Ark plays, though, is that during the side quests, when NPCs ask for the usual help with things they should be sorting out for themselves, the ARPG combat almost goes away. Instead of a counter that asks you to kill eighty or a hundred mobs, you're tasked with killing three or five. You fight them individually and it feels like any other mmorpg.

When Lost Ark is like that I quite enjoy it. There are still many reasons why I enjoy it less than most other mmorpgs doing the same thing but it is at least tolerable, sometimes even fun, for a short while. 

It's better still, when there's no combat at all. The best time I had with the game on Saturday, the last time I played, (I was working all day Sunday and then writing a blog post in the evening.) was when I was sent all over the first town to talk to various NPCs in order to learn about some of the game's many systems.

That, however, only happened after a bizarre and extremely unpleasant Main Quest sequence, involving a truly ridiculous amount of slaughter. The entire town was invaded by an army of demons and put to the torch. Literally the whole town was ablaze. The streets were full of demons and the buildings were all on fire. The townsfolk were cowering in terror as well they should have been. There was a face-off in the cathedral between the forces of Evil and Maybe-Going-To-Be-Evil-Later and then... 

I can't help but imagine a couple of seven-year olds gripping those characters, yelling "Pew! Pew! You're dead!", "No I'm not. You are!"

 ...and then it all stopped. The town was back to normal as if nothing had happened. To be strictly fair, there was some ambient dialog that referred to the events but there was no damage to the buildings, no-one seemed to have died. All the markets and the bars were open and it was business as usual.

The emotional effect that had on me was exceptionally confusing. I was very pleased the town was back to what it was. I had been expecting to emerge from the cathedral to a smoking ruin and the prospect was seriously pissing me off, so the relief was palpable.

On the other hand, I'd hated the whole event as it was happening. I found the fighting onerous and dull and it took far too long. Having gone through all that just for the whole thing to be wiped away as if it had never happened made me feel, even more intensely than while it was happening, that I'd wasted twenty minutes of my life, time I could more valuably have spent doing just about anything else. 

Would that be "hottest" as in "charred by hell-fire"? Or do you mean... wait, I don't think I want to know.

 

These are not the kinds of feelings for which I come to video games in general or mmorpgs in particular. In the case of Lost Ark, I feel the core problem is that it's two entirely different genres, roughly and thoughtlessly hammered together.

As Kaylriene says, that is "not a model for sustainable gameplay." He would like to get rid of all the mmorpg trappings and turn Lost Ark into a pure ARPG. I feel just the opposite. It seems to me that there might be a half-way decent mmorpg in there, somewhere, although I wouldn't go much further than that. I'd quite like to see it given the chance to breathe, without the ARPG combat buggering everything up at every turn.

Even then, though, I very much doubt it would be an mmorpg I'd want to play for long. I have almost as much of a problem with the graphics as I do the combat. I don't believe 2.5D isometric graphics are the best choice for mmorpg gameplay but given free camera movement I can just about get past that. With a fixed camera, though, it's really not a tenable proposition. 

Like almost every screenshot I've taken, this is from a cut scene. It's about the only time I can really see what I'm looking at.

 

There's an opinion I've seen expressed that Lost Ark is a beautiful game. Is it, though? I find it hard to say because I can't see most of it. It's too small to make out the details when you're fighing or travelling but if you stop and pull in the focus for a close look you can only see what's directly in front of you. 

About the only time I get any real idea what I'm looking it at is when I click on one of the Vistas, which work exactly like their namesakes in Guild Wars 2. Then the camera spirals and swoops and behaves like a normal camera should, adding insult to injury for a few seconds. For some reason, those panoramic views are always slightly blurred, possibly to obfuscate the generic and bland scenery they reveal.

I've also noticed already that there's some heavy reuse of art assets in the set design. I know all mmorpgs do it but it usually takes a lot longer than this before I notice. I suspect Lost Ark's no worse in that respect than, say, Black Desert or Bless Unleashed, or any of the other worlds where oil paintings lean in stacks against the walls of every market town but the lack of any opportunity to swivel the camera up, down or around to look at the environment as a whole only serves to emphasize the repetition. 

Okay, that's an art asset I can really appreciate.

 

The maps I've seen so far are also extremely linear. They remind me very much of the ones from the first iteration of Final Fantasy XIV, before it was re-tooled into A Realm Revisited. They're all mazes with hard walls to stop you straying. They might as well be dungeons with the roofs taken off. If this is supposed to be a world it definitely doesn't feel like one, more like a series of outdoor rooms.

It's true you are free to explore. I tried dropping the main quest and wandering around a few times. It's unrewarding. There's little to see and even less to do. Except for the NPCs offering quests there are no interactables in the environment. I understand gathering plays a part eventually but at this stage there are no nodes to cause the kinds of distraction Kaylriene complains of.

Other things he has bad things to say about include the community and the character animations. I can't comment on the first for the simple reason that virtually the only "conversation" I've seen since the moment I set foot in the game has been a seamless scroll of gold spam. Very occasionally a single sentence about something other than selling silver or gold will bob to the surface for a moment, before being swept away on the tide of illegal currency trading.

As for the animations, I quite liked the way my character moved until watched her walk away. At first I almost laughed. It was so outrageously camp. When you appreciate the context, however, as Kaylriene points out in some detail, it really isn't funny at all. It is indeed a "completely unrealistic, objectified, and very odd way to walk." Even if you don't find it subjectively offensive or gender-politically unacceptable, both of which I do, the fact that it's the only option available most definitely makes it objectively terrible game design.

All of these factors and many more make it seem extremely unlikely that, even if the game does ever, as promised, open out into some kind of free-roaming, gathering-focused sandbox, it would be one I'd choose to spend much time with. I already have a game that does all of that, but it also lets me choose from dozens more different body-types, decide freely on my own gender identity, walk how I please, including skipping, all while I swing the camera every which way so I can fully appreciate the beautiful world around me. How Lost Ark is meant to compete with all of that I can't imagine.

As for the seemingly never-ending torrent of systems and mechanics that Kaylriene describes as "incredibly overwhelming" and "a bit too much", I'm not quite so bothered about them. For my own tastes I'd separate those into categories of desire or disdain. 

The combat-related ones I find largely unappealing and unwelcome in their complexity but then I rarely find combat skill trees interesting in any mmorpg. The currencies are mildly annoying but I've seen much worse. Ditto the login rewards. The rest of the plethora of systems as outlined at some length in Kaylriene's post seem to me to be very much on a par with just about every other imported mmorpg I've played in the last few years. That's the genre, like it or not.

I don't even find the systems to be particularly poorly explained. Lost Ark probably does as good a job of it as most games of this ilk. The difference, from my perspective, is that whereas I've found the same things fascinating in other games, food for thought and the basis for numerous lengthy blog posts picking apart their complexities, in Lost Ark I can't seem to summon up anything like the same degree of enthusiasm. It has a lot of systems but so what? If I'm not engaged with the game in the first place, why do I care?

Lack of engagement and boredom, those seem to be the key identifiers. And yet I haven't stopped playing. Then again, looking back as I was yesterday, it's clear it generally takes more than a couple of sessions before I give up on an mmorpg altogether. I'm not sure Lost Ark is any more mysteriously tempting than any of those. It's just new and people are talking about it so it has a potency that doesn't relate all that specifically to its own merits.  

Based on prior experience, I'd say for me the tipping point lies some way ahead. I can be stubborn about these things so if I want to see whether the game really does change character once you can sail a boat and the world supposedly opens up, I'll most likely keep playing until I get there, if only out of sheer bloody-mindedness. I do feel, from what other people whose opinions I respect have said, that it would be unfair to come to a judgment before then.

I'd be happy to get to that point and find they were right.  It would be great if Lost Ark were to turn into a game I could really appreciate and enjoy. To arrive at a destination like that would go some way to justifying the hours I'd spent getting there. 

I'm as guilty as anyone for trotting out the old saw about the journey being more important than the destination but that does rely on the journey not being a crashing bore from start to finish. Sometimes its only the prospect of what might come when the journey's over at last that keeps you going to the end.

First Impressions, Second Chances

As I was reading back yesterday's Lost Ark post it occured to me that I often finish ""First Impressions" by making some bold statement about whether I'm likely to go on playing the game and if so for how long. I started to wonder just how accurate predictions like that tend to be and whether you can really tell from the first session whether you'll play a game for days, weeks, months or years.

Luckily, for once I don't have to guess. I can go back and check. That's one reason for having a blog.

I've been reporting my opinions on new mmorpgs since the blog started in 2011 but it appears I first started using the "First Impressions" tag about six years ago, when I posted about my experiences in Blade and Soul. I've used it for expansions and game updates as well as full games but for the purposes of this excercise I'm limiting my research to new mmorpgs (Or games that have been widely treated as though they were mmorpgs.). Most of the conclusions were drawn from release builds but there are a handful of betas and early access reviews in there as well.

I expect I missed one or two but I think this is most of them. Almost thirty titles. For most of those I seem to have restrained myself to a single first impressions post, which I've linked. Some, Star Wars: the Old Republic and Atlas, for example, I seem to have managed to turn into "first impressions: the mini-series". For those I've linked to the post from which I took the quote.

Here, then, in reverse chronological order, is what I concluded about the games, often with a promise or a prediction about how likely I was to go on playing them. I've followed that with a few words saying whether I actually did. I'm curious to know if it reveals anything that might make me consider how to approach these posts in the future. Let's find out.

Chimeraland - January 11 2022 - "I can guarantee this won't be the last post about Chimeraland. I don't imagine for a moment it's going to be something I play the hell out of for years but equally I can already see it's going to keep me amused for at least as long as it take me to figure out what the hell is going on, which could be a while. " 

I think we all know which way that went. For a few weeks immediately after that post, Inventory Full became the unofficial home of the Chimeraland Fan Club or it certainly felt that way. There are seventeen posts tagged "Chimeraland" here already and that count is going to keep on climbing. I may not play for years but I also have no plans to stop.

Elyon - November 5 2021 - "Whether I'll log in again remains to be seen. I wouldn't say, as I did with Tera, "Thirty minutes is more than enough." but I have too many other, more appealing options right now. Maybe one day."

I don't think I ever did log in again. I remembered absolutely nothing about the game until I looked at the screenshots in the post and even then I couldn't remember much, not even if I still had it installed.. Turns out I played it via GeForce Now, which does at least mean I could log in on a whim at any time. I have no plans to do that, though.

Bless Unleashed - August 11 2021 - "I like Bless Unleashed and that's my first impression. What my last impression will be, who can say? But no-one ever does Last Impressions posts, do they?"

No, they don't. Maybe I should start but if I do it won't be with Bless Unleashed because I'm not done with it yet. Last summer I played it most days for a few weeks and thoroughly enjoyed it. I logged in for the winter holiday event and I often think of dropping in again. If it had a control system I liked better, I'd still be playing it regularly but it's too far towards the "action" end of the action mmo spectrum for me ever to feel really comfortable.

New World (Second Open Beta) - July 21 2021 - "It does feel as though Amazon might have got this one right. I guess we'll know for sure come September."

We sure did! Quoted for irony. 

Swords of Legends Online - June 20 2021 - "Chances are I won't buy Swords of Legend Online right away but chances also are I will buy it, sometime."

Hmm. This one's interesting. To me, anyway. Until I re-read this, I'd actually forgotten how much I enjoyed the game when I played it. I did almost pay the full box price, too. The only reason I held back was that, as you can see from the cluster of "First Impressions" posts dated June and July, there was a lot of competition last summer. I really need to install this and try it again, now it's gone free to play. And I would, if only there wasn't still too much else going on.

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Generation - June 12 2021 - "I can't imagine I'll be devoting much time to this one. I'll probably give it a couple more goes then put it quietly away. Don't let that put anyone else off, though. This is definitely the right game for someone. Just not for me".

And that's almost exactly what happened. It's a decent mmorpg but I don't like the controls and the exploration is too restricted. I gave it a fair shot but it didn't stick. I've uninstalled it now.

Crowfall (Open Beta) - June 4 2021 - "With the beta set to run for another couple of weeks it's quite likely I'll spend a fair few hours as a Crow. I wasn't anticipating that when I downloaded the game but I'm always happy to be pleasantly surprised by the confounding of my misapprehensions."

I played until I hit the level cap and posted about my experiences in the game several times. I was still playing, on and off, as long as the beta lasted but after I hit the cap there wasn't really much to do. I never saw anyone do any PvP the whole time I was there. I followed the desultory reports of its sputtering launch for a week or two and then forgot all about it.

Elteria Adventures -  June 2 2021 - "For an alpha this looks solid. I'll be more confident about that when I've seen more but it's a convincing start. "

I went back and played a few times but I ran out of new things to do and stopped. Development seems to have stalled. The Steam page says "There's no recent activity from the developers of this title..." I might look into that later.

Valheim - February 11 2021 - "I guess we can look forward either to dozens of posts, where I eat my words and bang on about the game to the point of delirium or to never hearing me mention it, ever again. It's going to be one of the two, I bet. I just can't tell which, yet."

Three hundred and eighty-one hours played and counting. Mmmm! Delicious words. Eat them all up! The game I didn't want to play and didn't like much when I did turned out to be the thing that took up almost all my free time for a couple of months. I haven't played much since but the upcoming update looks interesting enough to get me back for a few sessions.

Genshin Impact - October 2 2020 -  "Since the game is free to play and genuinely so as far as I can tell, I can't see any reason not to give it a try."

Another one I really didn't expect to like but which grabbed me by the scruff and wouldn't let go. I gave it a good run at launch and I've been back a couple of times. I had screenshots from GI rotating as my desktop background all the way up to last week, when I swapped the folder for Chimeraland. I'm not done with Genshin Impact yet but as always it's finding the time.

New World (First Open Beta) - "I like New World a lot. At the risk of breaking that earlier NDA I'll confirm I always did. It doesn't do anything you won't have seen before but everything it does, it does well. It's solid, entertaining, accessible and polished. What more do you want?"

It's fascinating how most of my posts about New World's various betas emphasize how solid, stable and polished it is. I wasn't alone in thinking that at the time. What the hell happened? Despite all the bugs and breakdowns and foot-shootings I played for several hundred hours and I will certainly add to that over the next year or two, always provided Amazon don't throw in the towel.

Black Desert Mobile - December 16 2019 - "I may be back. I may not."

I was not.

WoW Classic - August 27 2019 - "When I finish this post I'm going to log in and carry on so I guess I must be enjoying myself. I might do my Guild Wars 2 dailies first, though. And log in to Riders of Icarus. Oh, and go do the first of the new Panda quests in EverQuest II. I don't think there's anything going on in WoW Classic that can't wait."

I found this very surprising on a re-read. I'd forgotten how lukewarm I was about the whole WoW Classic project. I only played at all because everyone else was writing about it and I wanted to get a few posts out of it too. Then I found myself completely drawn in and played almost nothing else for a couple of months. Never did get to sixty, though. I might go back for WotLK Classic, if it happens and if Blizzard looks like a tenable proposition to give money to by then. I still wouldn't play one of their games at the moment but the day is obviously getting closer.

Secondhand Lands - July 3 2019 -  "It is, after all, exactly the sort of quirky, original take on the established format that many lovers of the genre have been asking for for years, while roundly ignoring its existence. It would be shame, having found it at last, to let it slip through my fingers simply because of a lack of patience on my part."

Yes, it would, wouldn't it? Do I feel ashamed? Yes, I do a little. I have been back several times but I think I finally need to accept that things that were fun twenty years ago may not be fun forever. No fault of the game, just recognizing an uncomfortable reality.

Star Wars :the Old Republic - April 22 2019 - "I have already decided to subscribe to TOR for a single month to bump my account up to "Preferred" status."

I played the hell out of SW:tOR for a couple of months and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's WoW in space, what's not to like? I didn't mean to stop, either. Something else was happening and I put it aside for a moment and never went back. I often think about logging in again and carrying on from where I left off but - broken record time - there's just too much happening in the genre right now to look back.

Atlas - January 5 2019 -  "I've enjoyed learning what Atlas is trying to be, but as a PvE MMO, right now it's pretty much a bust. It's still a co-op survival game under the hood and that's a genre that's never appealed to me, no matter how fancy the paint job."

Astonishingly, to me anyway, Steam says I only played Atlas for six hours. I got a lot of posts out of that short time and in my memory it feels like it was a lot longer. For a long time I thought about trying again but last week I finally accepted it was never going to happen. Uninstalled.

Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse - December 16 2018 - "As a taster for the eventual MMORPG I'm not sure it really tells us much (it doesn't even feature the "hybrid" combat I wanted to see) but at least it doesn't raise any red flags...yet."

OMG! Remember this one? The standalone AoC spinoff Intrepid spun up out of nowhere in the heat of the Battle Royale craze. That got them yelled at. A lot. I quite liked it. I played it several times, more than I've played any other Battle Royale game, and I would have played it more if anyone else had. I remember logging in one weekend for some fragging fun and finding literally no-one else there to kill or be killed by. Then it closed down and we all pretended it had never happened. Still waiting for my Kickstarter-pledged beta access to Ashes itself, of course. How many years is it now?

Bless Online - August 21 2018 -  "Bless is in no way going to change anyone's mind about anything. If you didn't like previous Korean MMOs you're not going to like this one... If you're easily amused, like me, though, it's definitely worth giving Bless a go. I'm sure there are a good few more hours in it for me and the odd blog post, too."

There were. I played for a couple of weeks and got my character into the mid-teens. Then I lost interest and stopped. Then the game shut down. I did like Bless but I like Bless Unleashed a lot more. I hope it lasts a lot longer.

 Legends of Aria - July 13 2018 - "Let's give it the benefit of the doubt for now. Open beta is due sometime later this year. I might take another look then. Or I might just skip it. I don't think it's really my sort of thing. Might be someone's, though."

Completely forgot I ever played this. I did not try the beta. I did skip it. I can't remember what happened to the game after that... Ah, I just checked and it's on Steam, free to play, with a "Mixed" reviw rating. I'm happy with my decision to pass.

 Warframe - July 19 2018 - "I do quite like it so far..."

A more honest reading would be "I tried to like it..." Warframe is obviously an excellent mmo and several people whose opinions I respect absolutely love it. I just found it awkward and often annoying, plus the character models are absolutely hideous. I gave up after half a dozen sessions. I don't expect to play again.

 Auteria - April 16 2018 - "I may well be back..." 

I was but only a couple of times. I still check in on the website occasionally to see if anything new's happening. It never is. It's still running, though. And I still have it installed.

Stash - January 9 2018 - "I don't know whether I'm going to find the time to invest in this one that it certainly requires and possibly deserves but it's tempting. It may look funny but it's a proper, real MMORPG and that's not nothing, not nowadays."

Reading this again was surreal. I remember Stash by name but if you'd asked me what kind of a game it was I'd have said some kind of tile-based puzzle title. I'd forgotten it was any kind of mmorpg, let alone a "proper, real" one. It's vaguely coming back to me now. I did play a few more times but not for long. I seem to remember it being quite difficult. And slow. That would tie in with the old school mmo thing, I guess. Maybe I should take another look.

Secret World Legends - June 26 2017 -  "I don't like it. The overarching impression I was left with was one of disrespect. The Secret World was a unique and original creation: this is just another bash 'em slash 'em F2P MMO. What a shame."

I might not have liked it but that didn't stop me playing it. I've played SWL plenty of times since then. I got as far as Egypt, I think. Certainly well into Blue Mountain. I also ended up preferring both the slightly-easier combat and the somewhat simpler mechanics of SWL over those of The Secret World, although I can't really say I felt the diference was as great as all that. Still always on the table, both of them, although I don't suppose I'll ever do more in either than play the odd session and take some screenshots. Best costume designs in any mmorpg, ever. Worth logging in just to change outfits.

Shroud of the Avatar - May 13 2017 - "Even after nearly three years in Early Access this does feel like an alpha not a beta. Pre-alpha might be over-egging it but it definitely feels like there's a long way to go."

It was rough. I wonder what it's like now? Not planning on finding out.

Revelation Online (Closed Beta 3) - January 2 2017 - "It's a step up from Riders of Icarus, on a par with Blade and Soul, and definitely worth a look if you like this sort of thing. If you don't like this sort of thing though I wouldn't bother. It's not going to change your mind"

What!? Have I been hacked? Revelation Online is better than Riders of Icarus and as good as Blade and Soul? Who says so? Me!? If so, why did I play both of those near-daily for months at a time but RO only for a handful of sessions when it launched? Okay, I can at least remember playing Revelation Online but I couldn't tell you anything about it, whereas I could chew your ear off with tales from RoI and B&S. 

Riders of Icarus - July 10 2016 - "Riders of Icarus is by no means a bad game or a bad MMO but with so many others to choose from I'd struggle to come up with a good reason to play it rather than something with a bit more soul."

Then again, this was 2016. It seems I've changed more in the last six years than I realised. These were my first impressions of Riders at launch and I didn't cotton much to it. When I came back for a second look a few years later I had a much better time. As I've said before, I might still be playing it now if it hadn't been for all that kerfuffle when the game changed hands and I got locked out for months. I am starting to wonder whether it might be a good idea to go back for another look at all the mmorpgs I said I didn't like, first time around. Not that there are many of them. I do seem to be very easily pleased.

Black Desert Online - March 8 2016 - "The world is inviting, the storyline is intriguing and the learning curve is satisfying.... At this early stage it's impossible to judge the stickiness but I think I'll get the box price out of this one, at least".

I did. And then some. I've played a lot of Black Desert, on and off and I'm far from done with it yet. I often think of BD, when I'm playing other games that remind me of it and wonder why I'm not playing BD instead. Black Desert doesn't need my recommendation, though. It's done rather well for itself.

Blade and Soul - February 1 2016 - "I don't get the feeling this is an MMO I'll pursue for long but I've thought that about a few Eastern conversions and ended up pottering around in them for a good while so who knows?"

Not me, obviously. For a while, probably right after I said I wouldn't be playing it for long, became my main back-up game, the one I played when I wasn't playing Guild Wars 2. I still play, occasionally. I have a character I like, I'm slowly leveling her up and it's only because other games keep interrupting that I never get very far. I still think Blade and Soul is one of the best of the imports and I've never really understood why it isn't more popular in the West.

And there we have it. All the first impressions from the last six years. I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn, other than if I say I don't much like a game it probably means I'll end up playing it for months. 

On that basis, I guess we should expect a lot more posts about Lost Ark.

Lost Ark: First Impressions

After all my whining and whinging, installing Lost Ark turned out to be no trouble at all. The 72GB download took less than an hour, which was about a third of the time it took me to write yesterday's blog, so as soon as I'd finished doing that I was all ready to go. Well, once I'd had my lunch, that is. I wasn't that excited to get started that I'd miss a meal.

Getting into the game wasn't quite as slick as the installation itself. As several people have mentioned, Lost Ark's loading times are diabolical. Now, to be fair, absolutely nothing loads quickly on my machine these days. It takes a while for any game to get going. Just changing maps in Guild Wars 2 can take a minute or more.

Lost Ark makes other games' load times look exemplary. Even though I was expecting some delays, the first time I logged in I seriously thought the game must have failed to start. There was no sign that anything was happening at all.

Eventually the login screen appeared, asking me to choose a server. It's curious how this works in different games. Sometimes the server is the first thing you have to decide on, other times it's the final  click before you step into the world. 

Hmm. Wrinkles or freckles? Freckles or wrinkles? Wrinkles and freckles? No, that's a Saturday morning cartoon.

In this case there are regions to choose from, which is presumably why you have to make your mind up before you start applying blusher and plucking your eyebrows. Your character's eyebrows, that is. Unsurprisingly, given my location, the default choice was one of the European data centers. 

I didn't notice whether it was one of the old ones or the new Europe West they've just added. It didn't matter to me either way; I didn't want to play on any of them. I wanted to play on NA East, always my preferred option when available.

The good news is there's no hard region locking so playing on NA servers from the UK is allowed. The bad news is swapping regions requires you to log all the way out of the game and start over. That took another five minutes or at least it felt like it.

By the time I got to character creation I was already mildly ticked off and my mood didn't improve when I loooked at the choices on offer. Once again, since I'd read quite a few first impressions and early levels reports, I knew roughly what to expect: a small number of not very original classes, some of them gender-locked. 

What I hadn't considered was the choice of race. I just deleted a paragraph from this post in which I went on for a while, as I do, complaining that there were no choices other than humans but that's not true. Luckily, before I claimed it was, I thought about it and realized I hadn't bothered to read any of the descriptions in game, let alone read up anything about the races beforehand, so I thought I'd better check.

What is that thing around her neck? And those ears look suspiciously pointy. Don't tell me I rolled an elf without knowing it...

Just as well I did. There are two races in Lost Ark. I can say with complete certainty that I did not know that until I looked it up, not even after making a character and playing for three hours. Everyone looks human but some of the them are really elves. Yes, there are elves because of course there are. There are always elves. They're like rats. 

Elves can be either Mages or Assassins, which in fact means there are only female elves since those classes are both gender locked in that direction. Every other class gets to be Human.

There's a brief description of the classes and a difficulty rating. As Wilhelm points out, if you rate difficulty on a five point scale and then only use the middle section, you really have a scale that goes from one to three, just with funny numbers. 

The only Easy #2 is the Warrior, who can only be male. I was torn for a moment. I wanted to play the easiest class but I didn't want to be a hulking great oaf, which the Warrior in the demonstration video appeared to be. I looked through all the options to see if I could find any that combined both a gender and a class I liked but since I didn't really like the look of any of them that didn't help all that much.

Okay, that's the look I was going for.

I remembered a few people mentioning that the base classes don't really count for much because you start at Level Ten anyway and by then you're already into the Advanced classes. Why anyone thought that was a good idea is beyond me, unless maybe there was a period a couple of years back, when the game first launched in Korea, when you really did have to play through the first ten levels. EverQuest 2 worked like that for a while, right at the start, before everyone agreed making people play through a bunch of levels as a bland generic archetype, before they got to the class they would have liked to roll in the first place, was a terrible idea.

After a while I had it narrowed down to a choice of two: Sorceress or Gunslnger. Both of them were rated Four, supposedly making them the most difficult for a beginner to play, but then it seemed as if almost all the classes except Warrior weren't suitable for a beginner.

In situations like these, when in doubt, always go for looks. The Gunslinger looked cooler than the Sorceress, who now I come to think of it did look suspiciously elflike and not in a good way. If only my Gunslinger looked half, no, a quarter as cool as the one in the opening cinematic, from which all these amazing screenshots featuring what looks like the young Jane Fonda as Cat Ballou were taken. Sadly, she doesn't.

Which is not to say she looks bad. After what must have been at least twenty minutes diddling with the Advanced options, I had someone I thought I could live with (That didn't come out right.) She started out as a goth Audrey Hepburn and ended up looking like the pouty lead singer of a pop-punk band but I've played worse.

Can we play this game instead?

From there it was on to the inevitable, incomprehensible opening movie. In its favor, it was gorgeous to look at. To its detriment, I only watched it a few hours ago and I remember literally nothing about it at all.

For the next hour things got worse. A lot worse. I've been thinking about this for a while and I've decided it's not an exaggeration. The introductory segment of Lost Ark, what I suppose you'd call the tutorial, is the most boring opening to a new game I've seen in the last twelve months.

In that time, I've been through the same kind of thing in New World, Swords of Legend Online, Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, Chimeraland, Elyon and Bless Unleashed, just naming the ones I can immediately remember. I wouldn't say any of them were amazing but I don't remember any of them being so mind-numbingly tedious, either.

Before anyone jumps to the obvious conclusion, I am not talking about the story. I'm talking about the gameplay. 

It looks way more fun!

Contrary to a couple of reports I've read, the writing in Lost Ark is perfectly fine. There's a bog standard plot, the same one most mmorpgs use. It's been coherently translated for the most part, then voiced in reasonable English by professional actors who mostly understand the lines they've been given to read. As Aywren says, "While the story is nothing ground-breaking or tear-inspiring, it’s also not that bad." The story is not the problem. 

The tutorial is indeed so on rails I'm surprised there isn't a buffet car. It's just one guided task after another. After ten minutes you'll know how a sentient robot forced to work in an automotive plant would feel. 

Even then, my biggest problem with the gameplay wasn't the by-the-numbers "questing". It was the combat. Combat in Lost Ark, at least during the seemingly endless tutorial, manages to combine most of the things I enjoy the least in other games: super-complicated abilities with ridiculous levels of nit-picking detail no-one but a 1950s trainspotter could hope to remember, let alone care about. 

There are what feels like dozens of finger positions to learn, none of which feel comfortable because, as Wilhelm also observed, you're expected to use a bizarre and idiosyncratic choice of keybinds, most of which cannot be changed. Seriously, Smilegate? Who makes an mmorpg with fixed keybinds in this day and age? 

I guess not. This one it is, then...

Then there are the mobs that don't know when to die. They attack in gangs but after the initial assault's been beaten back there are always a few left standing, milliing around on five per cent of their hit points, forcing you to hunt them down one by one just so the bloody counter will tick over and let you finish the goddamn quest!  

The irony is, I love big fights in mmorpgs. I love massive AoEs and huge fireballs falling from the sky and whirling like a dervish with an axe in each hand, leaving dozens of baddies laid out all around me like the petals of a giant daisy.

This is not that. It's not anything like that. It's like fighting a series of really annoying gestalts, a dozen bodies with just one controlling intelligence. 

Did I say intelligence? If only! That might make things interesting. They just run in and wait to be slaughtered.  Kill one lot and then the next wave arrives and you have to do it all again. And then again. 

But that's how ARPGs work. People supposedly enjoy it. I don't. I never have. I don't imagine I ever will.

Wanna be in our band? We're looking for a drummer.

By the end it was getting so tedious that every time there was another fight, which fortunately wasn't that often, I wanted to log out and uninstall the game. I felt I was wasting not just my time but my life. If it hadn't been for the posts I'd read that said the beginning was bad but then it got better I'd have quit for the sake of my sanity.

Somewhat to my surprise, it did indeed get better, although it took long enough. Once I reached the first town the onslaught of instructions slowed to a trickle and I was mostly left to my own devices. Better yet, there's no combat in town. I was able to get my breath and look around for pretty much the first time.

Lost Ark is quite pretty. I wouldn't say it's anything special in the graphics department, at least not in the opening zones I've seen so far. It's a tad generic and even though the scale is hearteningly large, I always find the isometric viewpoint means my eye skates over most of the detail. 

It doesn't help that you can't move the camera. Usually you can swing the PoV around even in isometric games but if there's a way to do it in Lost Ark I couldn't find it. The combination of generally uninspiring views and an inability to frame a scene to my liking meant I took far fewer screenshots than I usually do, a sure sign the look of a game hasn't fully won me over. 

Finally! A town! Where's the bar? I need a drink.

Most of the pictures in the post, you'll notice, come from cut scenes. I thought those were of a good standard throughout, other than the way the characters mouths move in close-up. That's a horrorshow all its own.

As for the music, it was so intensely irritating I turned it down until I could barely hear it. That's very rare for me. I almost always leave in game music to play at the default volume. It has to be pretty bad for me to switch it off altogether and this didn't quite leap that fence but I certainly didn't want to have to listen to it. 

There was that bit when my character pulled out a flying vee guitar to belt out what sounded suspiciously like a Spinal Tap riff... It happened every time she used a teleport station. That certainly scores a few points for originality, if none for taste 

I'm aware that much of this makes it sound as though I hated Lost Ark. I didn't. I don't. It's... well, it's alright, I guess. I've noticed a number of people saying much the same. Wilhelm said "Lost Ark definitely has something going for it." Aywren said "I feel like it’s just something different to do on the side of my main game choices." Kluwes said "I don’t find myself with a burning desire to play but I keep launching it when I have some free time." Krikket (Who liked it more than many, I think.) said "I’m content to ride the monorail until the solo-friendly content runs out."

I'm not kidding, guys! Why didn't you make this game?

That seems to be about the size of it. No-one's paricularly crazy about Lost Ark, other than perhaps Naithin, the game's strongest supporter in this part of the blogosphere, but it'll pass some time until something better comes along.

People try it because other people they know are playing or they've heard it's the new hotness. They like it somewhat although they can't always put their finger on exactly why. They write a post like this one, full of faint praise and lukewarm complaints, say they'll probably go on playing for a while, then they go back to writing about other things. 

I played for over three hours in my first session. I did three levels, expored the city and the next two zones, upgraded some skills, picked up some better gear and generally enjoyed myself, once I'd put that terrible first hour behind me. I will definitely play some more. 

How much more I wouldn't like to say. The question isn't "Is Lost Ark worth playing?" It's "Is Lost Ark worth playing rather than all the other games I could be playing instead?"

I think that new game smell will be tempting enough to keep me logging in for another session or two. Whether that will last for long enough for me to get to the part Naithin thinks I'd like, well I'm not so sure about that. I guess, as always, we'll have to wait and see.

For now, it's in my Steam library and staying there. At least until I need those 72GB back for something new.