Worst game I have ever played in my life. Combat is complete trash in this game. Magic rules the game. Bows suck no reasonable way to kill things actually at range with the bow and no way to slow incoming enemies. Bows are WAY too weak.

Melee combat is complete trash. Mobs lock on to you and if you try to roll away they will glide along the ground in their swing animation until they hit you. There is literally zero skill involved in trying to parry with a shield. If you have any sort of swing animation going on then you can't parry. However the enemies can swing at you through their flinch animation from being attacked.

Simply holding your shield up does NOTHING for you. The hit is blocked by the shield but you still take the damage unless you get a perfect parry. Every creature has multiple attack animations all at different speeds so you'd have to play the game for 50 hours in one area to reasonably be able master how to parry the creatures in that area.

So combat just isn't worth being involved in.

As far as the survival side of the game goes. There is literally zero survivability involved. Food/water is WAY too easy to get so it basically just becomes a chore that you have to do pretty frequently instead of being a valuable game mechanic.

Building in the game is terrible currently. Constant camera issues with trying to place building pieces. They attempt to use the valheim structural integrity system but it is poorly implemented. Not that the valheim one is all that amazing to begin with. It is a janky system that could be so much better if done properly.

I have thousands of hours in Ark Survival Evolved and many thousands of hours in the survival genre in general and this is easily one if not THE worst survival game that I have ever played.

Unless you are getting into this game just because it is named Runescape then I suggest avoiding it at all costs.

Even after their changes to the combat system it is still complete crap. This dev team doesn't understand what a good survival game is all about. They are clearly being expected to throw out some shovelware just to have a survival game under their umbrella without having developers that actually enjoy survival games.

I don't personally see this game ever getting any better as both of their "major" updates haven't done anything to fix any of the glaring issues that the game has at all.

Dead game is dead.

This game is a buggy piece of crap. 3 hours spent gathering materials for a large rover to have the thing disappear for ZERO REASON. Quick google search shows that this has been an issue in the game for YEARS and this crap company is too lame to fix it or even have backup saves so you can reload in an attempt to recover your lost items.

How do you make a game like this and have a bug that is this much of a huge deal and not fix it for YEARS? Don't buy this game. Avoid it and it's crappy DLC.

Game is garbage. Has been out for quite some time and their new season is a giant train wreck. Servers lag constantly, game is extremely new player unfriendly. Made it into the 3rd phase and completed all the content the game had to offer even though most of it was extremely buggy.

One of the first bosses that you could get access to when they released hard mode you couldn't even finish the fight because it would bug out if you had 2 or more people in the group. Took days for them to fix it. They literally didn't even bother testing their own content, happened to anyone who tried to do this in a group and happened every single time.... No QA for their team what so ever.

Didn't log into the game yesterday because I was busy with other stuff and then log in today and my thermal tower has just disappeared. It wasn't destroyed, there is no pvp here and no chaosweavers spawn close enough to do any damage. Thousands and thousands of personal materials just gone. They didn't want people littering the area with these towers so they added a system, obviously without testing it so that if people weren't around the towers would despawn. Someone else had the same issue in my "guild". He was out for 2 days and came back to his tower being gone as well.

Tried to submit a ticket regarding the issue and the ticket system just loaded as a white page and would never progress past this. If you care about your time at all then avoid this game.

There is really no way for me to express how broken and disappointing that this game is other than to uninstall it and warn others to avoid this game at all costs. Free to play or not, it's trash and people shouldn't support a company in any way, even playing their "free" game if they don't have the ability to develop any better than this.

This game is absolute trash. Do NOT buy it.

I'm getting so sick of companies releasing their uncooked trash and calling it E.A. How do you launch a game in this kind of state and think it is reasonable to call it E.A.?

Where has game development gone? Where has quality gone? Where have developers that care about their products and their reputation gone?

This game has simple stuff that doesn't work in it, like nearly 1/4th of all the icons are missing.... This is like a couple hour fix at max.

Then you have things like half the seeds that you can plant don't work. The growing system exists and the seeds exist but half of the seeds don't grow.... So this isn't an unfinished mechanic in the game. This is complete and utter laziness or greed wanting money for a product that isn't finished.

Where would we be today if car manufacturers were like, hey I hope you enjoy this new E.A. car. The brakes work some of the time. The handle for the emergency break is there and the brake is there but we haven't gotten around to connecting the cable yet. We'll see how things look in a few weeks. The engine works but sometimes it won't start....

This may sound like an outlandish example but this is really the type of crap we are paying for these days. All due to F.O.M.O. It has grown beyond acceptable now. The last 5 games that I have played have been E.A. titles because nothing is actually coming out finished anymore and 4 of them have been complete garbage.

Aside from these problems the game has tons of mechanics that don't work. The follower A.I. is complete trash. They do everything exactly opposite of what you would expect them to do. Then tonight I had my follower of 40 hours just "disappear" on me. It was carrying hours worth of harvested materials. It completely disappeared from the map. I teleport back to my home realm and there it stands, but it is no longer my follower. I have to walk up and claim it again. Upon doing so I realize that everything it was carrying is gone, including all of the gear/equipment I had made for it.

Harvesting mechanics are completely broken. Do not enter the swamp under any circumstances. It is the most unfinished zone and has more bugs than all the others combined.

The crafting system needs a LOT of work to be fun. The excessive amount of menus that you have to go through and the absolute lack of information on how crafting works and the excessively convoluted upgrading system including tons of addon upgrades for work stations that come in multiple tiers and don't even work like they claim they should.

I won't get into the always online issues with the game as that has been done to death but the fact that sometimes you have to wait upwards of 5 minutes for a realm to load while you are sitting there looking at a loading screen.

There is easily 500+ hours worth of stuff wrong with this game at this point and this crap should not be allowed to be on steam and should be removed and all purchases refunded until this game is in a better state.

Do not buy this game until you fully research if it is the game for you. The developer has lead you to believe that it is another large open world game similar to Ark Survival or many other opened ended survival games but this game is NOT.

This game is NOT multiplayer friendly.

- You are limited to the number of bases you can have in the game at a time.
- The story is based on server progression meaning if one person progresses the story and others aren't on at the time then they miss out on the progression.
- Vendors and NPCs can be summoned around the map but there is only one instance of them. So if you are crafting something and your friend summons him to another location then he poofs along with your materials.

This game is far more similar to Valheim than any other survival game out there and far more restricting with the single progression story line. At least in Valheim you had to get item drops from bosses that could be repeatedly summoned in order to progress so the allowed for more individual progression. In this game if you have a quest and someone else completes it while you are off line then your quest will never progress as the things you need to use to progress it don't exist in your game anymore. Your quest does not update to whatever is current either. Only the person with the highest level of progression can continue the quest line. If you are online for all levels of progression then you are okay but if you miss one then you are done with progressing the story.

This game is a massive catfish, buyers beware!

I will say that the game looks good if you plan to play alone, or with a small group that always plays together, but that is not what I was led to believe this game was about.

Most of my information comes from spending hours trying to get a dedicated server running today while listening to the developers and moderators respond to people in the official discord.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!

If you have ASE already then just play it. This game is not worth even $5 USD. It is 100% not stable, as if you expected anything else from Wildcard studios but many of the Mod developers either haven't commented or are not planning to update their mods for ASA which means most of the things you love about Ark won't even be available on ASA.

Also due to being in debt over their ears Wildcard has signed an exclusivity deal with Nitrado servers to run ALL private servers from a rental aspect which means you MUST use Nitrado servers if you want to rent and run a private server. You can't use the 100 other companies out there that put Nitrado to shame.

Here is a link to an article that explains some about the debt they are in and I'm sure if you are more interested a simple google search will easily uncover more.

https://massivelyop.com/2023/09/05/sec-filings-reveal-the-multi-million-dollar-debt-ark-survival-evolveds-publisher-owes-nitrado/

TLDR: Yes it is long and the gist is this isn't a coop game except for at specific spots in the game and it's 100% pay to win.

As with most games Lost Ark has been out long enough that the rose tint on everyone's eyes is starting to wear off.

There is a plethora of reviews out there that complain about things like connection issues and such so I will refrain from posting about those.

From the point that I started the game until I hit level 50 I really enjoyed my time in the game. The gameplay loop was fun and the combat system was basically Diablo/PoE with a little bit more depth. I do consider myself a fairly hardcore player, and I ran through this content pretty quickly.

The story is very eastern in general so if you are looking to get lost in an epic story line this is probably not the game for you unless you are a huge anime fan or are very used to the eastern culture. Even then this game will be very hard to find pleasing. While the story line doesn't make sense to the average western gamer the fact that in translation they felt the need to add many religious based changes to the story line are rather annoying.

In addition to a lot translation errors the voice acting is some of the worst acting that I've ever heard in my life. Most of the actors must have been tone deaf because their voices are all over the place. Overly excited when there is no reason to be... granted if you follow things like Dragon Ball Z, or the older Speed Racer series then maybe this makes more sense than not... After about 15 minutes of the story line I literally started skipping everything because I just couldn't stomach listening to it anymore.

I like being able to get immersed in the games that I play. So when playing a game that involves content based before modern technology only to run into multiple islands in the game that talk about or revolve around modern day attire and/or technology. I find it rather unsettling. Not to mention there is an entire island dedicated to basically Ibeza, the party island, complete with modern sound systems and DJ music.... While small I do still find that annoying.

Now let's get into the meat of the content. This game praises itself on the amount of content that you have to do. The sad part about all this content is that it is basically all timed gated and rewashed content. Once you hit 50 you no longer really gain experience as you would think, even though currently the level cap is 60. You aren't meant to get to that level with any reasonable measure of time, instead you now progress based on item level. In order to increase your item level however you must first collect a new set of gear from content that you don't get access to until you have hit a specific point
Once you get your tier gear then you just level it and that will be your gear for the rest of the game... or will it? Once you get to tier content you will get a brand new set of 302 item level gear. From this point on all content is gated behind that item level. Each tier has a minimum of 4 different types of materials that you need to collect in order to level up your gear. Sadly they never quite give you enough of any of the materials. At least at T1 and T2 you can do some islands to get a nice boost of these materials, but unless you are the most lucky person on the planet then this boost will only get you about half way to where you need to be.

The only other way to get these resources once you have looted all the islands is via daily or weekly events. There are some events they are infinitely repeatable, but don't let that fool you. These events require an entry ticket and those tickets are extremely rare. So rare in fact that I've only gotten 3 total tickets across the 6 different types/ranks of infinite content out there in my 250ish hours played.


When you upgrade gear you get a failure chance that gets more and more steep as you level the gear. This wouldn't be a big deal if you were able to just go and realistically grind dungeons or creatures or something to get more of these materials to level up with. What I found out is that based on your luck determines if you can continue to play with your friends or not. Since all the content is locked behind items levels, and the weekly content you can only do once a week and most of the other content is daily that means that if you fail to upgrade more frequently than your friends then you will not be grouping with them anymore because the game rewards you more for higher end content than lower.

In addition, the item level gating depending on content can be as low as 20 item levels. Considering the fact that T1 content goes from 302 to 600 item level. That means that there is a lot of content that you can't access at 302 or even 460. Since these events are daily and the name of the game is to get as high a number as possible. No one really wants to drop to the lower end content to do it with you because they want to do the content that gives them more resources which is the higher level content that you just aren't quite high enough level to get.

Don't worry though! Once you get to 600 item level you get to destroy all your hard earn gear and upgrade immediately to 802 gear which starts back at level 1 and you have to level up all over again. The sad part is there are set bonuses to consider and + to skill modifiers on all that hard earned gear you spent time leveling. Those are all gone now because each piece of gear drops with random skill modifiers and the ones that are good are extremely rare. So while your stats to get a huge hike the really important skill modifiers that change how your character feels are all gone and you have to farm them again. Don't worry though once you get to 1100 you get to scrub it all and do it all again.

Not to worry though! Here is the silver "gold?" lining! If you ever find yourself falling behind in the game and unable to keep up with your friends due to really unlucky upgrade rolls. You can just head over to the local in game auction house and purchase any of the materials that you need to continue doing upgrades as fast as you would like. All you need to do is purchase the upgrade items with in game gold! What could possibly go wrong with that?

Well like most free to pay (not a typo...) games. This game has a real life currency store as well. In this store you can purchase crystals for real life money! These crystals can be used to purchase many many cosmetic items or even the 30 day monthly subscription system that gives you a few QoL perks. Oh, did I mention that you can also auction said crystals at the auction house for in game gold? These crystals sell extremely fast I might add! So falling behind? Just open up your wallet and take out that master plaster card and buy your way to 1500 item level today! Oh, if you find the prices of the real money store to be too high. Don't worry, there are many gold farmers out there waiting to take your order for in game gold! So there are plenty of options for you guys out there with really bad luck and a whole lot of money to burn!

In summary, The game suffers from an uncompelling story that is marred even further by a complete lack in care from the voice actors and the translation team. The item upgrade system is extremely repetitive and really does not feel like upgrading as much as it does playing the slots at a local casino. This game is 100% pay to win as there is absolutely ZERO gating of content if you have money to spend, aside from maybe everyone else opening their wallets to buy the upgrade materials at high end before you do! At the end of the day this game is lacking a lot when it comes to end game and needs some serious fixes if it will ever become a respectable game. Currently the game is little more than an online casino for people who haven't really figured out that the lottery is really just a tax for stupid people.

This game has received many updates and fixed the majority of the problems I've had with it.

EXTREMELY POOR DESIGN!

This game has serious issues with bugs. Terrain awkwardness and MASSIVE lag in any sort of multiplayer. The game is fairly playable in single player but unless you can continuously perform a PERFECT game then you have zero chance of beating the game in solo mode. The challenge is fun until you get to the end boss which is annoyingly difficult for absolutely zero reason. It's not even the boss that is so hard it's the fact that you have to keep running out of the lair to maintain your base. It's a stupid game play mechanic that just isn't fun to deal with.

There needs to be more weapon upgrades. At least 1 more tier . The final boss is extremely laggy and can one shot you because you get stuck on it's feet when they aren't even there which makes it so you can't roll away from the 1 shot mechanics.

Constantly getting stuck on terrain is extremely annoying. Also the fact that literally anything can bump you into the water which is a 1 hit kill. Some things have a stupid amount of knockback to them for no reason. The final tier of armor and weapons require golden horns which you either have to farm for at about 3-4 an hour or you have to find luckily in games. Mind you that to get 1 legendary weapon and a suit of armor will take you 6 horns.

I highly suggest avoiding this game until they have some massive updates to fix the multiplayer lag. Just playing with myself and 2 other friends the game is so laggy when you try to do anything like upgrading craftsmen or opening the community chest or putting things in/out of the chest. These also cause gameplay lag which causes people to die. None of this exists at all in single player.

Also there is an ability to buy runes from the town behind the healer. The runes cost 1 horn each which is stupid expensive considering that you don't even get to choose what type of rune you want. It is completely random and most of them suck.

The very small rogue lite system that the game uses has very little impact on future games. A lot of it is based on getting access to more powerful runes but since getting them is completely random and the more you have access to the less likely of a chance you'll get the ones you actually want they don't really have much impact on your ability to complete the game.

The rogue lite aspect needs to have more influence over the game. You never really feel "powerful" in the game unless you are going back to an area that you really don't need anymore. You have to be WAY too progression focused in order to enjoy much about the game because of how fast the days pass in game and how much you have to accomplish in such a little time.

1 or 2 of the classes are by far the one you need to choose in order to do well in the game. Their benefits are just so much stronger than any other class. The classes need a serious balance to them. I don't think the good classes need to be nerfed but the weaker classes need to be buffed to match.

As I said earlier. You should really avoid this game until some major updates are provided. The game "could" be fun if more effort was put into the end game and the days were a tiny bit slower so you could enjoy the game a little. You just don't realize how annoying and stupid some of the game is until you are attempting to actually beat it. It is really annoying playing for 1.5-2 hours straight without the ability to pause or get up due to the time crunch in game just to lose at the last minute to something seriously stupid or some type of bug.

This game has WAY too little content in it's current state. You can blow through it all in a day or less if you tried. If you enjoy building it can be longer depending on how much fun you get out of that. There is a 10 player server limit which is silly. The world and it's contents are finite and don't naturally repopulate and currently people can create a character load it up in single player and use cheat codes to give themselves anything that they want and then load into a multiplayer game with that same character. They can't cheat while in someone else's world but that doesn't stop them from just switching back to their single player and giving themselves all kinds of gear. Combat is poor with a few too many 1 shot mechanics that doesn't matter what type of gear you are wearing and is more based on the somewhat lame food system. My suggestion is avoid the game for the time being. Even if you absolutely LOVE the game. There isn't enough content to keep you entertained for long and due to a super small dev team it will be quite some time before more content is released.