I was a little late in picking up Lost Ark compared to the general MMO populace, and I admit that I lost my momentum in the game pretty early on. My main motivation for trying this game centers around the gathering, life skills and the ship feature.
So once I unlocked gathering and couldn’t figure out what to do with the stuff I was gathering, near the end of February, I found myself logging in for dailies, but not spending time moving forward in the story. The story hasn’t been terrible, but it’s also not capturing me, so Lost Ark tends to fall to the wayside of other games I’m playing, especially since FFXIV is my main MMO.
Other IRL things came up at the beginning of March (one day, I’ll write about it) and I had to re-install Windows on my gaming PC. This meant that I had to reinstall the programs and games I use.
I almost didn’t reinstall Lost Ark again – it’s such a big download… and I have recently learned that my internet speeds were capped at an abysmally low rate when it comes to large downloads like this (I have since fixed this). So that also put me off from picking the game up again.
On top of all of this, I’ve been hearing nothing but drama and sorrow for people playing at Lost Ark endgame. I’m not a raider or a dungeon runner by heart – I do these things in FFXIV because I have people who run these things with me and because I want to gear up decently. However, I only do as much as I must to cap Tomestones and I do not go out of my way to run these things otherwise.
It sounds to me like Lost Ark’s endgame is designed around almost nothing but dungeons, raids and gear upgrades. The whole gear upgrade system reminds me a lot of the RNG in BDO’s system, which I also have sworn off gear chasing and upgrades in. I’m just not interested in that kind of gameplay in yet another MMO – I can run raids and dungeons and upgrade gear in FFXIV.
I even tossed some questions off on Twitter about the variety of end game content and was reassured there are other things to do in Lost Ark. So I did choose to reinstall and I continue to log in for daily rewards – most of it chests of things I don’t even understand how to use (also reminds me of BDO).
The one thing that the devs did do that was of interest to me was giving players commemoration gifts. This was part of what they did to appease the folks who were frustrated about the struggle to gear up in relation to the ilvl needed to take on the newest raid (all stuff I’m not interested in). I also keep hearing how P2W the game is at end game, which is not a good look to me.
Anyhow, the gifts.
The gifts include absolutely ridiculous animal costumes – think your character wearing a Disney-ish mascot costume. Also, overly cute pets and silly-looking hoverboard mounts. All of these things are so absolutely out of character for the rest of the grim-looking game — at least, the stuff that I’ve seen so far.
But you know what?
At least the silly mascot glamour covers more of my character than the gear my female bard has been forced to wear thus far. Being a rat fan, of course I picked the rat costume – especially since those are the only ones that have true outfits associated with them. I wonder why only the rats have full outfits of the group… I do like the fancy coat and hat!
Thankfully, all of the skins were available to all of the classes – I was a little worried that skins might be limited to class or gender. There does seem to be some gender differences on some of the skins, but for the most part, it’s the same.
It’s sad and silly and completely out of place… but at this point, I’ve chosen to become a mouse bard in Lost Ark. Maybe one day if I get an outfit that actually looks decent, I’ll go back to being an elf. But for now, I’ll embrace the mouse and see if this inspires me to continue moving forward in the story.