Western Lost Ark Gets a Release Date

Look, I won’t lie. I thought the western Lost Ark release already had a date. Steam has been telling me to expect it March 31st 2022 for a while now. Although as I look at it again right now, it does have a rather important qualifier there which I suppose I hadn’t properly registered until now.

The Game Awards 2021 just happened and one of the gifts it dropped us was a new Lost Ark Trailer. Specifically a ‘Launch Reveal’ trailer.
The thumbnail there should already be telling you — but just in case, it’s February 11th, 2022. Not that Amazon Game Studios is shy about 11th-hour delays to their titles- but I’m still a little more confident about this one since, you know, someone else built it.
I am getting a little worried about how frontloaded and densely packed the game releases I really want are though! Monster Hunter: Rise (PC), Dying Light 2, Elden Ring and Lost Ark are all within a stone’s throw of each other — and none of these are particularly ‘small’ games.
I could easily see each of them becoming an All-the-Time Game for a period of time too.
That aside, it’s hard not to be excited to know just how close it is after all these years of waiting. Particularly given the reversal of the original decision not to launch in Oceania (and a bunch of other countries, too)!
Still have no clue what class I’ll start with though. The launch line-up of classes was recently expanded to include the Sorceress filling in the role of your more traditional mage / elemental caster. Probably not one for me to kick off the game with but I can’t deny it does look pretty nifty! Sorceress was a very new (as in, August 2021) release to the Korean version of Lost Ark too, so pretty surprising to see it as a launch class for us.
Hopefully, the class release cadence post-launch will keep up a pretty clippy pace too. I really want the Scouter (or whatever it ends up being called in our release). :D