Lost Ark First Impressions: Not Bad.

This has been a long time coming.
I keep getting asked by people “when’re you gonna do a Lost Ark video?” and my answer was… well, I’d recorded footage for it but kept getting preoccupied with other videos.
So here we are. Now do let me preface this by stating two things:
1.) I only made it to level 15 in this initial impressions video and have every intention of doing a follow-up to level 30, then one going beyond that.
2.) To play Lost Ark right now, you’ll need a VPN, just like Ascent: Infinite Realm. The VPN that I and a lot of other people that play these MMOs use is ExitLag.
Why ExitLag? Because it works. I’ve been using it for months now and have had no issues with it. It’s fast, works in the background and provides boosts to MMOs like Final Fantasy XIV, Blade & Soul and even WoW.
I have a link to that in the description and pinned comment if you wanna try it out for free.

Lost Ark is perhaps the most hyped up, highly anticipated 3D fantasy MMORPG in recent memory. I think the only game that was equally as anticipated was, perhaps.. Blade & Soul? No, maybe Black Desert? Yeah.
The game features a large open world that is fully explorable by both land and ship. While land exploration is more or less similar to what you’d expect in any traditional MMO, naval exploration is a little different.
While sailing the world you’ll come across various unique islands scattered around the sea that is supposed to provide players with a sense of immersion and discovery.
In my opinion, although the game is open-world, the areas themselves are not as openly traversable as Black Desert or World of Warcraft.

Pretty damn good, actually. If you could only say two things about Lost Ark it’s that it’s not only beautiful, but has amazing combat.
I chose to go the Magician class because I like to shoot fireballs at people and they’re often a much more visually appealing class to play.
You get to fling fireballs, electrocute things, turn enemies into popsicles.. I mean what’s not to love about the mage class?
Lost Ark was no different. You have a variety of skills to use for every class that all differ quite significantly making, from what I experienced, each class feel pretty unique in their own right.
You get to fully test our your character and their class before choosing it so it’ll give you an idea of what to expect at higher levels. Thankfully, otherwise I probably would’ve ended up with something I didn’t enjoy.

So as of recording the footage, there were 4 base classes. The Warrior, Magician, Fighter and Hunter. Upon reaching level 10, you gain access to 3 new advanced classes.
Warrior had Berserker, Warlord and Destroyer.
Magician had Arcana, Summoner and Bard.
Fighter had Battle Master, Infighter, Soul Master and Windowman. No I didn’t name these so I can’t be held accountable for how ridiculous they sound.
Hunter has Devil Hunter, Blaster and Hawkeye.
There have been several other classes mentioned such as the new Lance Master, Assassin and Specialist, each which have their own advanced classes as well. But these were the classes available as of a few weeks ago.
One thing of note is that the classes are all gender locked, something I still don’t understand in this day and age. Why do we need gender locking? Is it so difficult to make all classes available for both genders?

Two of the most important parts of every game are how well it plays, and how good it looks.
Character customization is definitely a large part in how good a game looks. This is especially true for MMOs.
Games like Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 thrive on their fashion communities and I couldn’t imagine either game without them.
You’ll be happy to learn then that not only is the game beautiful, but you can make equally as beautiful characters. Perhaps some of the most beautiful fantasy characters in an MMO.
I mean Black Desert has very realistic looking characters, but Lost Ark.. man they absolutely nailed the fantasy theme. Just take a moment and look at how beautiful the base models of the Magician are.
Unfortunately there aren’t as many options as in some MMOs so making your character look truly unique, having your own unique style.. might take a little more work as you have a lot less sliders to craft your little bit of perfection with.
There are also a lotta outfits to play dress up in but honestly, what South Korean MMO doesn’t offer 200 super amazeballs outfits for purchase from the store?

There’s plenty of content in-game and Smilegate, the team behind Lost Ark are adamant about releasing large updates every other month that add in new continents, classes and well, if you watch our Weekly Byte of MMORPG News videos you’d know.
There are instanced dungeons, large raid bosses, mini-games, a plethora of professions to master and heck, you even get to own and manage your own island.
PvP on the other hand is an unbalanced mess at times, pitting people of largely differing item levels against one another – something that has infuriated a lot of people interested in it.
PvP takes the form of 1v1 and 3v3 matches in the Colosseum – and for the most part, looks like a lotta fun.
So if you can deal with the latency issues and unbalanced match making I’m sure the PvP would be a blast.

Lost Ark is an undeniably beautiful game. It plays a lot more like Diablo 3 then it does something like Black Desert and honestly, shares a lot of similarities with games of its kind then it does traditional MMOs.
The combat was highly enjoyable, trying to learn my skills admittedly took a little longer than I had imagined it would but in the grand scheme of things there really aren’t that many skills to master.
My main issues with the game were the fact that I had to use right-click to move my character. I couldn’t find an option to change that anywhere which meant there was no WASD to use.
This, to me, felt incredibly clunky as it was almost as though, at times, I was pointing and clicking where I wanted to move with the mouse like I used to in older MMOs in the past.
There are a lot of pros to the game and there are definitely some noticeable cons. But all in all, I still feel like the game turned out pretty good.
I’m going to reseve final judgement of the game for when I hit much later content, but as of right now, I’m still excited to get back in.

But that’s just my opinion – my first impression of the game. What do you guys think? Did you enjoy it? Do you enjoy it? Are you looking forward to eventually trying it out or do you even want to?
Let me know in the comments below and let’s talk about it!