Lost Ark: a free MMO that hunts Diablo on his land?

Game news Lost Ark: a free MMO that hunts Diablo on his land?

Published on 11/08/2021 6:25 PM

It was not because Lost Ark started its development in 2014 and it has been installed in Korea since 2018 that it has lost interest in the eyes of western gamers. Because of this, Amazon decided to bring this free-to-play MMO to Europe and North America in the next year. And before the closed beta, which will run from November 4th to 9th, we got to try this title for a few days, which might well make people forget that Diablo IV is in development.

Lost Ark is therefore a free MMO that has taken an action-RPG / hack’n’Slash approach to developing its gameplay. Simply put, you control the movement and basic attacks of your character with a click and the rest of your 8 activatable abilities are distributed to the keys of the keyboard. There is no aiming, your shots will be based on your character’s positioning.

One of its main strengths, besides its aesthetic qualities, is that it allows great flexibility in the development of the character.. While the European version is certainly missing some of the classes that already exist in Korea, you already have the choice between 15 different classes, which are divided into 5 archetypes. And after that, you can modulate the talent points to make them stronger, or change them whenever you want to adapt to the configuration of the different fights.

On the structure side, however, the game is rather classic. If it’s pretty massive with its 7 zone filled continents, you know the game is not an open world. Each neighborhood is a fairly small corridor map, and the zones are linked by a simple black overlay. It is not very annoying and on the contrary, this structure makes the back and forth less painful, especially since you are equipped with a mount very quickly and since portals are scattered all over the world.

Then there is the question of the economic model. The store was closed during our preview and the game has built a reputation in Korea for being paid to win. But Asia’s relationship to free-to-play games is very different from that of the West. We also hope Amazon keeps its word as it has announced that it will be working with the developers to adapt the game’s business model to the new lands of Lost Ark. All items should therefore be available for purchase using in-game currency, but it will really be necessary to wait for the game to be released to find out. From our point of view, it never seemed necessary to pick up your wallet at the beginning of the game, even though we know that it usually doesn’t happen until much later.