Following massive player fall-off, Amazon's MMO Lost Ark is getting an update to make levelling faster and address a 'known progression pain point'

Lost Ark was mostly a pleasant surprise for me when I reviewed it back in 2022. I enjoyed both its spectacular ARPG combat and its increasingly absurd MMO story, which shifted from conventional fantasy fare to throwing you into enormous clown battles and exploring islands inhabited by Borrowers-like characters. But there came a point where the progression barriers were thrown down, and my movement across its colourful archipelago was increasingly inhibited by grind.

It seems I'm not the only person who has struggled with Lost Ark's progression, as developer Smilegate and the game's Western publisher Amazon are cooking up a bunch of changes designed to improve the RPG's forward momentum.

These changes were originally announced in a livestream that focussed on the Korean version of the game. Later, after some community members voiced concerns about plans to nerf gold income in various raids, Amazon published a Steam blog addressing how the changes will affect the Western version of Lost Ark.

Chief among these changes is a nerf to several crafting requirements in the game, with required gold and materials for several in-game crafting processes such as advanced honing and armour and weapon transcendence reduced by as much as 50%. While Amazon specifies the changes are not 1:1 with the Korean version, it does plan to implement many of the announced updates.

“To ease progression costs for new and returning players, we will be implementing the Transcendence and Advanced Honing nerfs,” the company writes. “These changes will help make progression more accessible without the negative impact that gold nerfs might have caused.”

Elsewhere, Smilegate is looking at an overhaul to Lost Ark's gem system, where players can plug gems into their skills to increase their damage or reduce their cooldowns. Smilegate feels like the system currently “creates barriers to both character progression and playstyle flexibility” and so is examining potential solutions to make the system more accessible.

In addition, Smilegate is planning to address Lost Ark's infamous T3 dead zone, a “known progression pain point” upon reaching character Tier 3 where character progression grinds to a halt. Apparently this is not exclusive to the Western version of the game, and something that Smilegate has wanted to deal with for some time. Now the studio is actively doing so, although Amazon says it's are not able to share the exact plans at the moment.

Why this sudden focus on smoothing player progression? Well, it may have something to do with the fact that Lost Ark's player retention isn't great. The game's Western launch was massive, attracting a peak concurrent 1.3 million players in February 2022, according to Steam DB. But that figure dropped off rapidly over the following six months and has declined consistently since.

In the last 24 hours, Lost Ark attracted just shy of 17,000 players at its peak. While not a bad number by most metrics, it's still a huge fall-off compared to launch. It's also a lower 24 hour peak concurrent than fellow Korean MMO Black Desert, a game that achieved a considerably smaller all-time peak of just over 60,000 concurrent players nearly six years ago.

From this, it's clear Lost Ark has a problem with picking up and holding onto new players, and it doesn't surprise me that ponderous progression is the issue. Lost Ark is at its best when you're barrelling through one of its wacky side adventures like an intercontinental ballistic missile flying through a circus, and I think the easier Smilegate makes it to encounter those stories, the more popular Lost Ark will be.