Lost Ark has surpassed the significant milestone of 20 million global players, according to Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG. North America, Europe, South America, and Australia account for more than half of them.
Christoph Hartmann, VP at Amazon Games, said: Overall, the excitement surrounding Lost Ark from around the world is quickly gaining steam, as evidenced by the growing number of global players. Together with Smilegate, we are committed to supporting the growing community with a robust roadmap of updates in the years to come.
Wong Chi, CEO at Smilegate RPG, added: Lost Ark has been well-received by experts in terms of development value and game quality, and the number of users is steadily increasing.
The MMORPG had a fantastic start on Steam, where it is still ranked second in terms of the concurrent player peak. However, this resulted in unusually long lines, particularly for European players. Because Europe Central was at capacity, Amazon Games had to create a whole new Europe West zone.
Gender-locked courses, which are frowned upon in Western countries, have also been a source of criticism for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Soomin Park, the franchise lead, told Eurogamer that this issue will be fixed over time.
First, let’s start with gender-locked classes. This is something that will roll out over time. Classes are tied pretty closely to their character models in terms of function and animation, so bringing opposite gender characters to a class takes more work than just making a differently gendered model available.
However, Smilegate RPG is actively working on this; the female Berserker is the next class coming to Korea. While not every class in the game currently has a male and female counterpart available, we made an effort to include those that do in our launch class lineup. In the future, Smilegate RPG will be creating more counterparts for classes that are still gender locked, and we will bring these to Arkesia in time.
Park also talked about the revealing clothes used by female characters in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The creators intend to offer fewer revealing alternatives, but the ones that are currently available will not be withdrawn.
