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Lost Ark Rocks!
ConstantineMerus
Member EpicPosts: 3,338
I've been waiting for this game for a very long time. You know how you build up anticipation and expectations. It is here finally, and I gotta tell ya, I am fucking loving it!
PS. By being here I meant the CBT.
PS. By being here I meant the CBT.
Constantine, The Console Poster
- "One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Carl Jung
Comments
Can't use dxvk because of EAC either which resolves the performance issues in the KR & RU versions.
1) They implemented full screen mode as a window that you can drag around the desktop. Most games call that windowed mode. It also doesn't cover the full screen.
2) I've seen black bars cover part of the window during cut scenes to preserve the desired aspect ratio. Lost Ark is the first game that I've seen implement them to cover part of the screen during normal gameplay. I've read that some very old games used to do that for newer monitor resolutions, but this isn't a 2005-era game, is it?
3) Some keybinds are changeable, but a bunch of them are hard-coded in and unchangeable.
4) They made cut scenes unskippable, so that you have to sit there and wait for some minutes at a bunch of different intervals, and there's no way around it.
5) The game has official controller support, but it does not work at all. I'm used to controller support being wonky in PC games, but I think this is the first time I've seen a game where it does absolutely nothing at all. This actually doesn't matter, as even with controller support that worked, the game would be unplayable without WASD-like movement. But it's still really weird.
Is the meat of the game any good? I actually don't know. But my past experience with games is that some games are high quality and polished throughout, while others are buggy, broken, and otherwise shoddy quality throughout. I don't think I've ever seen a game that had so many warning signs like that up front, but ended up actually being decent once you got into it.
Lost Ark #1
2) Hmm, that's weird because I am not getting those bars. Do you have an ultra-wide monitor? There's an 21:9 aspect ratio--check that out to see if that would fix it.
3) Yep, and for the life of me I can't understand why.
4) There are a lot of cut-scenes in this game and most of them are skippable, a minor percentage are unskippable during only the first clear, and they will become skippable with your future alts.
5) That sucks. I can only hope that they would implement that in the future.
Well it depends on if you like this sort of game. For me:
A) Fast paced action combat is a given, a lot of flashes and hacking and slashing, Eastern style, some people don't like that, but I played eastern RPGs and Hack and Slash games all my life, so I like that part.
C) You can zoom in, and see your character, you can see the detail of your gear, and there is a selfie-mode! I don't know, I kinda like to see my toons which usually in ARPGs are pretty much generic.
D) Character customization is great.
E) Spells and abilities have good mechanics and are well-thought, not only they would work with each other well, but there is a nice synergy between all classes.
F) There is a meaningful crafting. Fishing is fun. Trade skills are a game of their own, and are complicated enough for such a game.
G) Boats!
H) Housing!
I) Game not just encourages, but sorta demands creating alts. Some people might not like that. But I love playing alts, so when there is a benefit would make it extra fun.
J) NPC interactions. There's a Rapport mechanic, which is sorta fun. Add a bit more depth to the experience.
K) Dungeons: are not generic, besides a couple at the beginning, the rest are well-designed and got their own mechanics and boss fights. The hard mode starts getting hard around level 30, can't be really zerged anymore, although not that punishing neither.
L) End-game: there is a meaningful end-game, with raiding, in large groups, and much complicated battles.
M) Card Collecting: you collect cards, you get benefits and stats. You get to enhance them and such as well.
N) Performance and well polished: I am running it on high settings 1440p on a laptop that is about 10 years old. Of course the graphics aren't really ground breaking, but they look nice and runs really well.
O) Seasonal contents: since launch in Korea actual features and contents have been getting released each season.
P) Misc. Items: not just healing and buff potions but also stuff like grenades and such.
Q) Collectibles. Lots of stuff to collect.
R) Big world. Yes each zone is a small map, mostly narrow corridors, but the world is very big. World is a 5x5 grid, each grid has about 5 areas.
S) Mounts.
T) Teleport system.
U) Pets, especially that they collect the loot for ya. Thank heavens.
V) Gear slots: 18 effective slots. And 11 for skins.
W) Multiple types of character stats.
X) Great classes, and a lot of them. Not all are available on CBT. And they have changed them a bit for this version.
Y) Very tolerable cash-shop. My mate played it for 500 hours on Russian server so far, without spending a single dime, leveled many alts, and have cleared all hard raids (I think). So of course there are stuff to spend money on to make your life easier, but all seem avoidable.
Z) Various types of group content: World Boss, Guardian Raid, Challenge GR, Chaos Dungeon, Abyssal Dungeon, The Cube, Platinum Field, Secret Maps, etc.
Stay tuned for more alphabet lessons!
Back to napping.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I've been relegated to playing Bard because of League of Legends World Championship pick'ems... for those that have seen "The League", I was the Sacko and this is my punishment.
With 3D rendering the way it is, it's actually not very hard for developers to support arbitrary resolutions. The two big gotchas are scaling things that are fundamentally 2D (typically the UI, though that's everything in pixel graphics games) and handling extreme aspect ratios in a sane manner. 27:16 is an unusual aspect ratio, but it's between the 4:3 that was common for years and the 16:9 that is common today, so it's hardly extreme.
The bigger problem is that developers don't have arbitrary monitor combinations available, so it's hard to test everything. A lot of programming errors that are immediately obvious and easy to fix if you can test for them can be really hard to find if you can't test. Instead, you get "works on my box" syndrome, and they have to rely on users with different hardware reporting ways that the game breaks on other hardware. That's part of the point of a beta, after all, so I reported it on the Steam forums, and had people coming in to say it's all my fault for not using whatever resolution they're personally using.
On the unskippable cut-scenes, that's a really weird design choice. I wanted to jump in briefly and see if I could make the controls comfortable. But instead, it's, now you have to sit through a lengthy cut scene and can't skip it. And then another long cut scene. And then another. I played 48 minutes one night, and think I did exactly two battles in that time, other than the weird test where it asked you to choose an advanced class. Granted, part of that time was fiddling with controls before trying them in combat, but still, making players wait through several lengthy cut scenes is a terrible way to introduce new players to the game. If they make the cut scenes skippable later, then that makes the decision even weirder, as someone would have had to manually choose to make those initial ones unskippable.
I'm not trying to tell everyone else that they should hate the game. If you enjoy the game, then good for you. But to me, it felt like the most broken intro to an MMO that I'd seen since Aion. And Aion had the "excuse" of sorts that the developers had long since deprecated the original introduction to the game and ceased caring about the new player experience.
The other answer is that it's generally a mistake for developers to say, I personally use these exact controls, so I'm going to assume that everyone else who ever picks up the game will use exactly the same controls. Rather, developers should seek to make their controls configurable so as to allow players who want to play differently to do so comfortably. This can mean different personal preferences, different physical hardware, or even working around physical limitations. There's no real drawback to doing it, other than the developer time it takes, which is basically a rounding error out of a budget of $10+ million.
The best game I've ever seen at this was a very old game called Infantry. The game had a huge number of actions to bind to keys, but every single one of them could be bound to absolutely any arbitrary combination of up to three keys or buttons. I bound exiting the game to something weird like RCtrl+Tab+F12, just to make sure that I'd never hit it accidentally.
Obviously, there are some limitations to how far configurability can go. In some games, it's intrinsically the nature of the game that it relies heavily on fast, precise analog motion, so you can't make that playable without an actual mouse. But Lost Ark isn't one of those games. A highly configurable UI would have made the game available to more players, but the developers decided not to go that route.
I didn't get it, at all. Maybe it will be better once they get the onboarding/intro worked out.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Even when they have buttons for some activities the tool tips don't always tell you what those buttons are so you have to hop around in settings.
Otherwise it's pretty good. I don't feel like keyboards have any advantage over controllers with this game either, so I might even play competitive modes.
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
As bad as point and click with a mouse is, it's a whole lot worse with a controller. Using a thumbstick to move a mouse pointer so that you can click on something is slower, less precise, and probably ergonomically worse than using a mouse to move a mouse pointer so that you can click on something.
If they ever fix #3 I would be much more inclined to give the game a good go after release.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
When I use my XBOX controller it pretty much autodetects everything immediately. I can even swap back and forth between controller and keyboard and it pops up a little window saying I've switched to a controller every time I do it.