I don’t often do ‘screenshot posts’. I find I am generally fairly happy to just include them in my usual posts as I go. Even if they don’t always precisely match the content under discussion. ;)
One of the issues Bhagpuss has expressed with Lost Ark is that the game never really lets you see anything of note save for in cutscenes or in the brief Vista viewpoint shifts, where the camera suddenly awakens realising it isn’t fixed to a single position for all eternity and gives you a more sweeping view of things.
So I took up a challenge. A simple challenge, to capture screenshots of scenes I liked that didn’t take place in any form of cutscene or atypical camera angle. I also avoid anything particularly spoilerific. The only concession I made toward the aesthetic value of a shot was to disable the UI. (You can cycle elements of the UI off until it’s entirely gone with Alt-X.)
Some of these I liked for the lighting effect and tone — although I must confess; I’m sorely disappointed in how the image compression has ruined much of the impact of these. Image compression generally doesn’t bother me. Oft times I’m one of those folk who can barely tell the difference. Well, I sure can this time. The rays of light become smudged and much of the detail is lost. As a result, I’m making the click-through on these shots go through to the full size which returns some of the detail back.
There are two particularly impacted by this where the whole reason I liked them was the subtle interplay of light in an otherwise very muted colour palette.
Ah well.
Garden Island
Note: This is not at all the name of the island. I’ve utterly forgotten what this place was called, which will certainly make it difficult to track down again! I came here for a sequence of co-operative event quests and came away with a new song for my troubles. :)
Shushire
The first shot is from the frosty northern continent of Shushire. I need to go back and collect some more screenshots from this area later on, as the exterior frigid beauty of the area no doubt is worth capturing. I was largely done with this continent before starting to think about capturing shots for this.
Rohendel
Rohendel, home of the Sylvain people. This is where my adventures have me visiting presently, and where I’ve been while intentionally looking for screenshots that don’t utilise a vista or cutscene. So unsurprisingly, this is where most of my screenshots are! Even while staying thematically rather consistent, I do love how varied the areas manage to remain.
Closing Thoughts
To Bhagpuss’ question of, “Is the game beautiful?” I would certainly place myself in the camp of people that says ‘Yes’. … For the most part.
Is the initial continent rather bland? Yep. Does it have some exceptionally rough patches? Yep… Do animations sometimes hilariously get out of sync, particularly when one object is waving around another? lol, yes. (There is one part on Tortoyk where a tree gets waved around, and it is just… Well, it’s a thing to be experienced.)
I also recognise this post hones in on and pinpoints just one of many valid issues Bhagpuss has with the game. There is no intent here to attempt disproving the whole by picking on one element even by implication. In fact there is a post bubbling away under the surface — just in thought so far, not a word written to its name — where I want to dive into how much of my love for Lost Ark is driven by the simple fact… I wanted to love it.
My hypothesis?
A lot.
But maybe it isn’t entirely that simple either. That’s a topic for another day though. :)
I think some of this just comes down to personal taste. Looking at the shots in the post, even allowing for the missing lighting effects, only a couple (the formal garden and the dock) strike me as pleasing and then only in a very minor, subdued key. All the rest look generic to a fault. They could be from just about any game of this type, They’re certainly professionally produced but they don’t seem to have any idiosyncratic personality that would mark them out as being from this game rather than any number of others.
That’s partly the nature of the art style, which I do feel is uninspired and unoriginal, but it also has a lot to do with the way the combination of isometric projection and a fixed camera make it all but impossible either to select or frame a specific scene. You can’t swing the PoV around to look up or down or to the side. You can zoom in but you can’t really control the result to a useful extent. I did find the Hide UI option and used it a few times but the impossibility of getting the angles I wanted made it a frustrating process.
I think Lost Ark is graphically functional for what it needs to be but to me it very much has the feel of an assembly-line construction, produced to a good standard following very specific, commercial directions. So far, I haven’t seen much, or indeed any, sign of the kind of playful, ironic, surreal or flat-out weird visuals that characterize many mmorpgs, including those produced in the East, Black Desert for example or Blade and Soul. Actually, pretty much any 3D mmorpg I can think of… It is a lot harder to do those kind of things in a 2.5D isometric perspective but as I play Lost Ark I do often think of how much more vibrant and involving the graphics, especially the set design, struck me as being in Divinity: Original Sin 2 or even Pillars of Eternity.
Of course, we are all very spoiled when it comes to graphics in games these days. Visuals that would seemed unbelievably advanced a few years ago, we take for granted. The standard has been set so high that “very good” almost seems like a failure now. Nothing less than “astonishing” seems worthy of comment. I think that’s partly why I tend to react most strongly to visuals that I find quirky or odd. I expect everything to look polished, professional and slick. That’s the baseline. To qualify as “beautiful” or even “interesting” there has to be something extra and so far I haven’t found it in Lost Ark, except perhaps in some of the cut scenes, which do seem to have more personality than the game itself.
The high standard and absolute loving attention paid to the detail in the fine things like the lighting and even the etching work in certain textures, or hell- even the grass in certain regions is what gets me.
In places, Lost Ark absolutely wears its inspirations on its sleeve. Not only in the visuals but in entire game systems too.
The Guardian Raids, for example, are intentionally (and openly), being a Monster Hunter turned Isometric RPG. And boy am I here for it.
It’s interesting your mention of BDO though, because I’m struggling to remember anything about it that, asides from the biggun of free camera, would differentiate it from Lost Ark or anything else out there. It is very typical, classical, standard aesthetics as well. Albeit very well done.
But I’d put Lost Ark in that same camp!
Would I prefer a free camera? Yeah, almost certainly. I’ve played and loved fixed-camera ARPGs in the past though, so perhaps there is a difference there, too. While preferring the free camera, the lack of it hasn’t really hard turned me off anything else so far.