Lost Ark

Developed by Korean video game company Smilegate, Lost Ark is new to the global gaming world yet it already ranks at the top of the most played games on Steam for several years now. Initially released in Korea and Russia in 2018, Lost Ark has finally reached the shores of North America, Europe, and Latin America. The game, despite its crude monetisation practises, has managed to gain extreme popularity around the world, with millions of players playing as we speak.

What is Lost Ark?

If you’re into Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing games ( MMORPG), then you’ll probably like Lost Ark. Lost Ark offers a kind of game that we don’t often see nowadays. 

Developed out of Korea and published by Amazon Game Studios, Lost Ark is in the same category as Diablo or Path of Exile but with a rather more stunning world and way delightful gameplay. Lost Ark thrives in certain small things in the game, like when a sorceress changes the seasons under your feet as you channel your attack, or when riding a siege tower during a battle to clear walls of enemies.

Another captivating aspect of Lost Ark is its free-to-play MMO action RPG business model. Although it’s only been released in some select regions at the time of this writing, there’s no doubt that Lost Ark is a well-built MMO action RPG that is worth your time (and even your bucks if you prefer to shop and burn cash in the Lost Ark’s cash shop).

Because of its Korean roots, Lost Ark features certain Asian influences like oversized swords and armor and non-functional female outfits. 

As a free-to-play (F2P), the game has its own ways of monetizing the game although it’s not that explicit at this time, probably because the Lost Ark Store is currently a work-in-progress at this time.

Aside from terrible voice acting in the game, Lost Ark is generally the go-to MMO action RPG at this time and it’s hard to beat its stunning visuals for any other competition at this time.

Lost Ark system requirements

Lost Ark can run on a decent gaming PC. The basic requirements includes the following:

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 or Intel Core i3
  • GPU: AMD HD6850 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 
  • RAM: 8GB of RAM
  • Storage: 50GB 
  • OS: 64-bit Windows 10
Lost Ark System REquirements

If you want to play Lost Ark on higher graphics settings, you should ensure that your PC meets the recommended specs:

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 or Intel Core i5
  • GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 GPU 
  • RAM: 16GB of RAM
  • Storage: 50GB 
  • OS: 64-bit Windows 10

Lost Ark has partial support for controller play but it’s disappointing. I won’t recommend that you play this game with a controller at this time. It can be very tough managing your inventory and navigating the menus without a mouse and keyboard.

Lost Ark’s Combat and Gameplay

The gameplay of Lost Ark is easy. Anyone who has played any game on a computer that requires clicking and moving can pretty easily figure it out. To move around, you simply have to left click to a desired location. Attacking is as easy as moving but this time, you’ll have to use the right click of your mouse. 

Lost Ark combat

Mapping the abilities you’ve unlocked and the available consumables can be done by assigning a certain hotkey for each one. You can also assign a hotkey to your ultimate and movement of your class. If you’re new to this type of game, you’ll find Lost Ark very satisfying. 

Lost Ark’s combat mechanic may be simple but it’s not a walk in the park. Far from it. You’ll have to know the strengths of your specific character and class so you can adapt to the fast changing environment during fights. You must develop your combat skills early as enemies will almost always attempt to swarm and surround you. If you have a Berserker class, being near the action is where you thrive but if you have, say, a Gunslinger, you’ll want to put some distance between you and the swarm in a hurry. 

As an MMORPG, Lost Ark wants players to grind and unfortunately, there’s no shortcut for this type of leveling process. You can however, make the grind a little less dull by buying Royal Crystals to upgrade the look of your character. Royal Crystals are the in-game currency that you can buy with real-world money to purchase items in the game store. With Royal Crystals, you can choose skins and mounts for your character and at the same time obtain Pheons, which is another form of valuable in-game currency.

Unless you have cash to burn to make your life easier by buying items and some perks like Crystalline Aura, you’ll have to learn to be content with the steady humdrum of some Missions. It’s the nature of the game and missions often follow a predictable pattern of kill quests or fetch quests, resulting in a somewhat boring play sometimes. 

In order to make quests a little faster, you can also teleport between zones by paying a small fee. 

Lost Ark Review: Many diverse classes

There are 5 classes in Lost Ark: Mage, Gunner, Warrior, Martial Artist, and Assassin.  Each class has its own various subclasses that specialize in a specific type of combat. Mage has two subclasses — Bards and Sorceress. If you go for the Warrior class, you have refined subclasses like Berserkers, Gunlancers, and Paladins. The Martial Artist class has four subclasses — Striker, Wardancer, Scrapper, and Soulfist. Gunner class also has four subclasses — Gunslinger, Artillerist, Deadeye, Sharpshooter. And finally, the Assassin which has two: Shadowhunter and Deathblade.

Lost Ark Classes

Keep in mind that some classes are interestingly gender locked. While the Martial Artist class is strictly not gender-locked, if you pick a male Martial Artist, the only available subclass for you will be the Striker. All the rest of the subclasses are only available if you initially picked a female Martial Artist.

Once you’ve chosen one, you’re thrown into the action right away. The initial mission serves as a quick orientation that will teach you the basics of the game. Your character starts this mission with unlocked skills in order to survive. 

Combat in this game is exciting as you try to move past massive groups of enemies. Even at this early part of the game, you’ll realize that Lost Ark is a superb dungeon crawler and better than Diablo in almost all aspects. 

As you play and gain enough experience, you can use the points you earned in upgrading your skills. As you gain and upgrade the levels of your skills, some can become extremely effective, making the game more fun as you go along. With upgraded skills, the grind does not feel a grind anymore and frequent monster hunts, chaos dungeons, and the distance between raids no longer becomes tedious. As far as upgrading skills, you can only max out a few but despite that, each fully maxed skill can truly be devastating.

Lost Ark’s Story: Tales of Arkesia

To be honest, originality in terms of its story is a part where Lost Ark is lacking. The character that you pick is the chosen one to destroy the ultimate fantasy demon. If that does not sound all too familiar for you, I don’t know what world you live in.

The ultimate quest that you want to do is to all the seven pieces of the Lost Ark, which has the power to vanquish all the demonic powers in your world, Arkesia. Before the events of the game start, there was once a demon lord named Kazeros who invaded Arkesia. With the power of the Lost Ark, the forces of Arkesia managed to defeat Kazeros and bound him underneath a volcano.

The mystical Lost Ark was split into 7 pieces and each piece was distributed throughout the 7 contents of Arkesia. But now, Kazeros is once again getting stronger and about to break free from his chains under a volcano. You are the chosen one to stop him once and for all by finding all the Lost Ark pieces.

Lost Ark Arkesia

During the early game, you’ll have to team up with Father Armen in order to defeat the demon Kharmine and his hordes. Both you and Kharmine descended from the same demonic lineage called Delains. 

As you continue with the game and with your quests, you’ll have to combat more powerful demons, all the while dealing with low-level mobs as well as take on the main questline. Both the side quests and the main questlines are absolutely brilliant in the sense that they keep you running through Arkesia.

Overall, the worldbuilding and lore in Lost Ark is great despite the sometimes half-baked dialogue that your character and NPCs have. Lost Ark feels a generic story though 

Lost Ark Review: Graphics and audio

Lost Ark is visual candy for the MMORPG genre. Its world is filled with delicately designed forests, creatures, and sights. On the design level, Lost Ark is clearly a winner. Character creation and design is a totally different story though.

The character creator menu is decent but your character looks soft and blocky. While this can no way affect how you play, enjoy the story, or go on to obtain your quest objectives, it would have been nice to also a more modern ARPG look on this one.

Lost Ark Vista 1

That said, Lost Ark’s animation appears outdated, something that belongs to MMORPG games in the past decade. Your character will sometimes continue to walk even though you’ve already stopped moving.

The soundtrack sounds okay, doesn’t overwhelm and seems to fade into the background at the right moments when you play. But that’s the only thing that makes the audio aspect of this game acceptable. Voice acting can be improved… a lot. I don’t know if the Korean version of the audio lines are excellent but as far as the English version is concerned, the audio part is definitely not great.

Play with Friends or alone

Lost Ark is primarily a MMO action RPG, which means that you’re supposed to play with other players but despite that label, you can play the game on your own if you wish. Lost Ark has a lot of contents for a solo adventure and you can grind them for hundreds of hours. You can opt to play the main story all by yourself, or you can join a group, or create one and together wade in to many dungeons throughout the game, kill challenging bosses, or do some raids once you’ve unlocked them. Group dungeons are more fun when taken together with your party although the endgame raids are the best part of the multiplayer aspect of Lost Ark. That’s where the truly formidable bosses are mobs are. 

Lost Ark PVP

If you hunger for more PvP action, there are a handful of modes that you can join:

  • Team Deathmatch,
  • Team Elimination, and
  • Free-for-all.

When going a for any PvP mode, all players will have the same upgraded gear and stats for balance and equality. PvP is the ultimate test of your skills as you battle other players with equal equipment and level.

Lost Ark Review: Verdict

Overall, Lost Ark is a lot of fun. If you fancy the game for its multiplayer aspect, which is undoubtedly amazing, you will be surprised that playing solo is equally entertaining. 

The game’s visuals can keep you hooked for hours although the story is bland and mundane, to say the least. The good thing is, you’re probably here for the action and less for the story. The core of this game is action RPG after all.

That said, there’s plenty of action to keep you addicted to playing this game. And you can keep learning for hours on end on how to become more effective with your character. It can feel very rewarding once you learn the rotation of your skill cooldowns and the what’s the best approach to use them in all situations.

Lost Ark is definitely a massive adventure game and it’s the main reason why it was easily catapulted to the top of the Steam charts. 

How to fix common Lost Ark issues?

Lost Ark has been around since 2018 in Korea so it’s not an entirely brand new game at this time. That makes it less buggy when it was released in North America and in Europe but still, the game has been reported to have caused significant troubles for some players. 

Below are some of the commonly encountered major issues with Lost Ark.

SOLVED: Lost Ark crashing

As a PC game, there can be several factors that you should look into when trying to figure out why Lost Ark may not be working normally and crashing on your computer

Here are the solutions that you can try:

  1. Ensure that your PC meets the system requirements.
  2. Verify if the Lost Ark servers are up and running.
  3. Get rid of damaged or corrupted game files.
  4. Check for interference from third party applications.
  5. Install the latest graphics drivers on your machine.
  6. Update Windows OS.
  7. Don’t overclock.
  8. Disable overlays.
  9. Run Lost Ark on Clean Boot.
  10. Run Lost Ark as admin.
  11. Ensure that the mobile game is Set to High Priority In Task Manager.
  12. Try playing on another server.

SOLVED: Lost Ark won’t launch

Aside from the crashing issue, some people are also having trouble loading the game. For me, this is a much more serious issue as you can’t even see the game in the first place. 

If Lost Ark does not appear to load at all group dungeon and you have no idea how to fix it, here are the solutions that you can try:

  1. Ensure that your PC meets the system requirements.
  2. Verify if the Lost Ark servers are up and running.
  3. Allow your game through Windows Firewall
  4. Verify integrity of game files
  5. Update your graphics driver
  6. Run Lost Ark as an administrator
  7. Turn off unnecessary programs
  8. Repair the system files
  9. Run Lost Ark with DirectX11

SOLVED: Lost Ark “could not connect to game” error

The “Cannot Connect To The Server” error is one of the most prevalent issues that many Lost Ark users are experiencing right now. The error message is frequently accompanied by a code like W0x2-0PELPWN1N2NT or W0x2-SPELPWN1N2NT.

These are the solutions that you can do if you are unable to connect to the Lost Ark servers due to “could not connect to game” error:

  1. Restart the game and Steam client.
  2. Verify Lost Ark servers are working.
  3. Troubleshoot your internet connection.
  4. Check your firewall settings.
  5. Repair game files.
  6. Install the latest network drivers.
  7. Use  a different DNS server.

SOLVED: Lost Ark low FPS

One of the common issues that MMO games like Lost Ark encounter is FPS drop or low FPS. When you experience FPS dips or a poor frame rate while playing, there may be several variables to consider. Some people’s major cause may be hardware-related, which implies they’ll most likely need to replace their gear.

Others may have poor game performance owing to inefficient coding faults or specific software bugs.

Check out solutions below to determine which ones will assist you in resolving the problem.

  1. Check for game updates.
  2. Restart your PC.
  3. Install the latest graphics driver.
  4. Ensure that your PC can handle the game.
  5. Use lower graphics settings.
  6. Run in Windowed or Fullscreen mode.
  7. Select Auto settings.
  8. Disable security software.
  9. Use High Performance in Power options.
  10. Play Lost Ark with Admin access.
  11. void downloading when playing.
  12. Install Windows updates.
  13. Use a VPN.
  14. Repair the game files.
  15. Do not overclock.
Lost Ark 1

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Is Lost Ark Free to play?

    Yes. Lost Ark is definitely a free-to-play game. It has always been this same business model when it was first launched in Korea in 2018 and just recently in North America. 

  2. How many classes are there in Lost Ark?

    There are 5 major classes in Lost Ark — Mage, Gunner, Warrior, Martial Artist, and
    Assassin
    Each of these major classes has their own subclasses. Some subclasses are gender locked too.
    The Mage subsclasses are: Bard and Sorceress.
    The Gunner subclasses are Artillerist, Deadeye, Gunslinger, and Sharpshooter.
    The Warrior subclasses are Berserker, Gunlancer, and Paladin.
    The Martial Artist subclasses are Glavier, Scrapper, Soulfist, Striker, and Wardancer.
    The Assassin subsclasses are Deathblade and Shadowhunter.
    Lost Ark has a total of 16 subclasses, with seven possibilities for male characters and nine for female characters. There will be a brief tutorial specific to the class you pick. With two exceptions — the male Martial Artist and female Gunner each have only one subclass — you'll have two or three possibilities for your character's specialization, depending on their class and gender.

  3. What’s the best class to use in Lost Ark?

    There’s no best class in Lost Ark. The answer lies on the playstyle and the skill of each player in the game. That said, you should pick the class that best suit your playstyle. For example, if you want to play a damage-dealing character, you should consider getting the Berserker as it’s easy to play and it can also dish out a lot of damage while being in the thick of a fight.
    If you’re more into fast melee combat, then getting any of the Martial Artists can be a good choice.
    For those who wants to play at the fringes of a fight, a Gunner can be a good pick as most of the subclasses can dish out damage in range. 
    If you want to play as support to your team, your best pick should be the Mage class, particularly the Bard. she can provide tons of healing for the team and even help in weakening opponents.

  4. Will Lost Ark come to console?

    At this time, there’s no definite update if Smilegate is planning on releasing Lost Ark to consoles. As far as we know, the game is mainly designed for PC online but if its partial controller support is any indication, there may be a chance that the game will also be available in PlayStation, Xbox, or even portable devices like Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch.