Lost Ark – Reasons To Play Plus How To access the Closed Beta
Lost Ark is an MMOARPG coming in March 2022 to North America and the EU for the first time. This has been out in Korea since 2018, and Amazon Game Studios are bringing the game to western audiences. We have a closed beta coming up, starting tomorrow, and today I wanted to give you a rundown of the game in case you haven’t heard about it, plus give you some details about how to access the closed beta.
Let’s start out with the game itself. This is a massively multiplayer online action role-playing game and it’s been available in Korea since 2018, plus it’s in beta in Russia and Japan since 2020. It’s coming to Western audiences in March 2022. Also, good news… it’s going to be free-to-play!
The gameplay is from a perspective similar to Diablo, and you have classes, loot, exploration, and combat. You can customize your skills, weapons, and gear to spec into different playstyles. The action and the gameplay loops look very satisfying, whether you are fighting masses of enemies or facing off against big bosses. There are PVE battles, raids, and PVP combat too. It looks like a whole load of fun, plus it swept the Korean Game Awards in 2019, which is what made me sit up and take notice.
How to access the Lost Ark Closed Beta
There’s a closed beta starting on 4th November 2021 at 9 am PT, and it’s running until 11th November, so we’ll be able to play for a week to really get stuck into Lost Ark. This has been available in closed Alpha before now, but the difference this time is people are allowed to publish their gameplay, so I imagine you are going to be hearing much more about Lost Ark over the next week or so.
There’s a couple of ways to get access to the Closed Beta. You can sign up to be a beta tester on the Lost Ark website, that’s playlostark.com, then click on tester sign up and log in with your Amazon account. If you are lucky, then Amazon will get in contact and you’ll be able to play the beta.
There is a sure-fire way to get into the closed beta if you really don’t want to leave it down to chance and that’s to buy one of the founder’s packs. These range from Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum and start as little as £13, which is roughly $15-20 for the Bronze pack. If you are really excited about the game, then I’d recommend this method, as you guarantee your way into the closed beta. Also, the download is available now via Steam, so if you want to jump in immediately tomorrow, I’d have a look at this option.
Lost Ark Info
In terms of the story, the world has been invaded by a demon army, as Kazeros (the big bad) has opened The Chaos Gate with his six legions to invade the human world. The world had long since forgotten the threat of demons, and humans had forgotten about using the Ark to defeat the demons in the past. Now, it’s up to you to explore the huge world of Lost Ark to gather the pieces and stand up to the Demon army.
In terms of scale, there are seven varied continents (with seas between them) full of different cultures, strange beasts, and secrets to discover. The collective name for the lands is Arkesia. Its your job to explore, take down enemies and huge bosses in the open world plus collect that all-important loot.
The combat is in an ARPG-style and you’ll be able to level up your weapons and armor through quests and raids, battling world bosses and also PVP opponents too. Lost Ark promises easy-to-learn combat features that lean into their Tripod system where you can unlock three tiers of customization for your abilities, letting you control how you want to fight. There are different classes, all of which have unique play styles including Warrior, Mage, Assassin, Martial Artist, and Gunner.
Lost Ark combines plenty of features that make MMOs popular. You have a huge world to explore, there’s rich and detailed lore plus the character customization is deep and varied.
One of the promising facts about Lost Ark is the fact it won 6 awards at the Korean version of the gaming Oscars in 2019. This means the game is out there, people are playing it and loving it. From the visuals alone you can see this one has potential but it won everything from character creation options, sound, technical achievement, and also the People’s choice award. It’s also been out since 2018, meaning the developers have had time to hone the game based on player feedback. Hopefully, this means it’s not going to be a hot mess when it releases like other major releases we’ve seen in the past few years.
Amazon is going to be the publisher for Lost Ark in North America and Europe and apparently, there was major competition for the distribution deal. Amazon has already launched their first MMO with New World this year, which had a great start, although recently seems to have lost a bit of traction with the game-breaking bugs. Lost Ark could be the perfect follow-up to New World, especially if it has a little more polish and quality.
The MMO features combined with a satisfying gameplay loop do have the potential to be a winner, look at what Bungie has done with Destiny over the years, turning that into a machine that people log into weekly for regular content drops. Here in Lost Ark, we have PVP, or players teaming up for PVE world boss battles. When you’re not in combat you can be customizing your character, or getting stuck into professions and refining your skills.
Overall, Lost Ark has caught my eye and I think it’s something you should be paying attention to. I’ll be jumping into the closed beta and reporting back my findings and if I enjoy it then maybe it’s something I’ll cover on the channel on a more regular basis. It seems to have all the right ingredients to be a winner, and if you want to jump into the Closed Beta it starts tomorrow at 9 am PT, which is 4 pm here in the UK and it’s open for a week. The game then releases on March 31st 2022.