I’ve heard some variant of a similar story the past week or so as people boot up Lost Ark, the new Korean MMOARPG from Smilegate and Amazon, namely that they started playing, and didn’t stop until late in the morning.
While all MMOs or ARPGs have some certain inherent level of addictiveness, there are a few things that I think Lost Ark does to amplify this. And no, not in an unhealthy gacha way where spinning the roulette wheel just one more time for a few bucks is sure to get you that character. I just mean in a way that’s designed to keep you playing, and coming back.
One common complaint I’ve heard about Lost Ark is that many of its sidequests are scant. It’s true, a lot of the sidequests are simply go to a zone fifty feet away and kill five things and return. And others are not even that, just go around and talk to 4 or 5 people and you’re done.
They’re not all like this, but the entire main campaign including the core questline is mostly structured this way, where each new zone will give you 3-4 clusters of quickly completable nearby missions, in between larger dungeons.
The way this is organized, there’s really no way to get lost or feel stuck like you don’t know what to do next or how to make progress. Yes, Lost Ark does have a hilarious amount of confusing currencies and systems, but in terms of quest design, these little micro quests are designed to give you rapid fire dopamine hits as you level toward 50, or get new pieces of gear with that little “upgrade” arrow on them.
Lost Ark is designed to essentially never stop rewarding you for more than a few minutes at a time. Even if that reward is just a small pile of XP or currency, it adds up, and the game does not require long stretches of downtime in between making progress, nor forcing you to go back and grind old areas to make progress toward new levels, at least not during the main campaign. That changes to a certain extent with Chaos Dungeons in the endgame, but even there, it’s a very, very clear path toward your next item level upgrade with Gear Honing. You can log in every day and at minimum, get enough new currency for a couple more upgrades. Again, more constant forward motion.
Layered on top of all of this is a Clash of Clans-like base-building system that asks you to complete lengthy building projects or send out recruits on missions. It’s not a new concept, and yet it is another reason to log in every day, even if you’re skipping other tasks like daily bounties. It only requires a few button clicks to keep building or keep raking in currency, and is a longer time grind on top of the short, quick rewards that pervade moment to moment play.
Lost Ark is kind of masterful in its addictive design, keeping players engaged without employing actual gambling mechanics or forcing people to hit paywalls to feel like they’re making significant progress. Maybe that changes in the ultra late game, but for now, this is the reason why it feels like the last fifty hours have almost flown by.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
