Last year, I wrote this article: "A Korean online game from three years ago topped the Steam charts"
"Lost Ark", the standard Korean "kimchi-flavored online game", once exceeded 1 million online after Steam opened US and European servers in February last year, surpassing CS:GO, Dota 2 and PUBG in the same period, and topped the Steam online list.
However, at the time I was not optimistic about the game.
The reason is also very simple, on the one hand, the same Amazon released "New World", when it was first launched, there were 910,000 online, and the number of online users fell to 30,000 less than half a year later.
On the other hand, what "Lost Ark" can get hold of is a decent action design and sense of blow, but in addition, the gameplay itself is still standard kimchi flavor, and players who have played Korean MMOs understand it. As an MMO that was launched in Korea in 2019, the graphics were quite good back then, but now, Unreal Engine 3 also seems a bit outdated. In the context of the decline of PC MMOs, such a mediocre game does not look like it can be popular for a long time.
So no matter how you look at it at the time, this will be a short-lived game.
However, a year later, when I opened Steam's online rankings again, I was surprised to find that "The Lost Ark" was still in the top ten, one place higher than the evergreen three men and one dog.
Although the peak number of Steam users of less than 100,000 is only one-tenth of when it first launched, this number is not ugly compared to those cool and transparent MMOs.
Even the game's reputation is not bad, open the game's Steam page, you will see that the overall rating of "Lost Ark" is "mostly positive". But you must know that in Steam, a place that has always been very harsh on free online games, this evaluation is already good.
It even engaged in a linkage with "The Witcher 3", giving European and American players a little Korean aesthetic shock.
In recent years, there are not many online games that go to Steam to rub a wave of traffic calculations, but I have the impression that it is still in the top ten after a year of launch, which makes me wonder, why is "Lost Ark" not cool?
In the process of checking the game information, two keywords that first caught my attention were "moving bricks" and "studio".
In "The Lost Ark", gold coins can be traded, there are trades, there are brick movers and studios, and in the comments of Steam, there are also players who complain that there are a large number of studio accounts in the server, and the official ban strategy is also very strange, many studios' numbers are alive and well, and ordinary players' accounts are inexplicably blocked.
So will brick moving parties and studios be the secret to the continued popularity of "Lost Ark"?
It's not hard to find the answer to this question, just look at the curve of the number of people playing online. A cold fact: ordinary humans are meant to sleep. Therefore, the number of normal game online players will fluctuate relatively large with day and night, such as the online number curve of "Dota 2":
Dota 2 Steam online demographic curve
But professional studios are online 24 hours a day, so the general studio accounts for the majority of the game, the online number of people curve fluctuations are relatively small, so what does the real studio gamer online curve look like? Here's the Legends 4's Steam online demographic curve:
"Legend 4" (abnormal trough is server maintenance)
No waves.
It is worthy of you, "Legend 4", focusing on a "chain game" (blockchain game) concept, others are "online players", you are "online mining machine number".
So what about The Lost Ark?
"The Lost Ark" (unusual trough is server maintenance)
You can see that the fluctuation of the curve is smaller than that of Dota 2, but it is not a straight line, and it can be inferred that there are some studios, but the proportion of normal players is higher overall. Moreover, from the perspective of the activity of overseas game communities, the number of players who play games normally is still very large.
So what is the main reason why "The Lost Ark" has survived to this day?
On MMO Population, we may find the answer. This website can check the ranking of the current number of active MMO players (estimated), and it can be seen that among the dozen games with the highest number of active players, the 2019 open beta "Lost Ark" turned out to be the most "new" game, and it was only the World of Warcraft nostalgia that was "open beta" in the same year.
*Unofficial data, the number of active players is estimated based on foreign social media data, excluding domestic MMO data
On this list, games that have been in open beta for ten or even twenty years account for most of the games.
So the answer is also on the horizon.
In this era of MMOs, "Lost Ark" is a very flattering game, whether it is "World of Warcraft", "FF14" or "Path of Exile", every game in front of it is undoubtedly more fun than it, but if you are looking for a "new" MMO that is less complicated, brain-free, and has good graphics, there seems to be no more suitable choice.
As the current "master" of Korean MMOs, it can still attract those players who like "kimchi flavor" gameplay, although there is no revolutionary progress, but at least the gameplay is full, as long as your liver does not die, there will always be something that can make you die liver.
In addition, "The Lost Ark" inherits the glorious tradition of "greasy senior sister", and in the top ten foreign MMOs, FF14 has the power of a battle in terms of character appearance, but if it is about color, it is definitely the first place in the broken gear under the background of a number of European and American "true abstinence" characters. In the "Lost Ark" community abroad, you can also see many posts that post the character's appearance.
This picture is even labeled NSFW (not suitable for reading at work)
In terms of gameplay, in Steam's reviews, you can see very polarized reviews.
When it comes to gaming experiences, the most frequent saying is "play like work" (but praised).
Strangely, it is not uncommon to give praise while scolding the game for being too livery, and the first one in the hot review basically condenses the essence of player evaluation:
Liver, krypton and retarded, but played for more than 2,000 hours and gave praise.
Not everyone thinks this way, a foreign player with 1600 hours of gameplay, after retiring from the game, used a bad review of thousands of words to dissuade players who wanted to try, he said:
"The Lost Ark action design is great, the classes are interesting, and the graphics are beautiful, but the ultimate purpose of these existences is only to make you krypton gold"
In another review, players say something like this: "You have a lot to do in the Lost Ark, but you don't enjoy doing it." Of my 2,000 hours of playtime, about 20 percent of the time I find it fun, and the other 80 percent I just feel like I'm wasting time."
I think that Crooked Nuts wrote so many long articles, I should have never heard the famous saying that describes Korean MMOs, "Anything is good, it's not fun", just this sentence can summarize the experience of this type of game.
If you know a little about Korean MMOs, you should be able to piece together a relatively complete answer by this point.
"The Lost Ark" has not made any earth-shaking progress compared to its many Korean predecessors, in fact, it is more like a "power enhancement version", the graphics and action design are considered top-notch, and it also strives to stitch more gameplay in, but retains a bit of the traditional "kimchi flavor", so that you know that you are playing a Korean MMO.
If you only count the MMORPG end game, the only ones in front of it are FF14, World of Warcraft, Road of Exile, and an old antique Old School RuneScape that most domestic players have never heard of. Among these old guys, the most "young" is the road to exile in the 2013 public test.
It is not an exaggeration to say that foreign MMORPG end games in the past ten years are a pool of backwater, there has not been an online game worth playing for too long, and the old guys also know that there is little hope of expanding the player base, and they have chosen to maintain the existing core players as much as possible, and even epic "reversing" cases such as "World of Warcraft" have been successful. In front of this pile of old guys who are harder than a hardcore and more difficult to get into the pit, "The Lost Ark" is attractive enough, the threshold for getting started is low, and it is about differentiated competition and harvesting new players.
Although the gameplay has always been criticized, but the Korean MMO has always had its own market, although it is still that daily weekly brush book, small size raise large size, cultivation materials brush to spit out, the main combat power value, but as long as the noodles add more water, water more noodles, keep trying, find the right recipe, there will always be someone to take this mouthful.
At least judging from the results, "The Lost Ark" is the most successful of the few MMORPG games in recent years, which is perhaps the best proof of the saying "turnip cabbage, each has its own love".
In the article I wrote a year ago, I asked the question: Will The Lost Ark stay on fire?
Today, a year later, this question has been answered in stages, and at least a year later, this game, which I was not optimistic about, is still in the top five in overseas MMORPGs. Next time we pay attention to this game, let's wait for the national server to go online.
There is an oft-quoted classic line in Party A and Party B that is often quoted as "1997 has passed, I miss it", and for old MMORPG players, there seems to be nothing to miss because after so many years, nothing seems to have changed.