Amazon Games and Smilegate, the developers of Lost Ark, acknowledge that players want Western balance updates sooner, but that doing so is “not easy”
Since its western release in February 2022, Lost Ark updates have been a source of contention for the massively multiplayer ARPG. The MMORPG’s global version, which was first released in South Korea in December 2019, has long struggled to catch up with its Korean counterpart.
This disparity is highlighted whenever major, popular changes are introduced for Korean players, with the most recent incident prompting developers Amazon Games and Smilegate to address the issue directly.
As the global version of Lost Ark celebrated its first anniversary in February, Amazon Games reportedly said that it hoped to close the gap “faster than players expect,” but admitted that “catching up with the Korean build is challenging, to be realistic.”
Unfortunately, it appears that this problem persists in the MMORPG; the most recent set of Korean-side class balance updates, which have been generally well received, did not arrive with the Lost Ark Soul Harvest update, which was released on Tuesday, November 14.
Naturally, this has caused considerable consternation among players eager to obtain the most recent set of changes. Amazon Games addresses these concerns in a new blog post. “With the highly sought-after balance changes that were recently released in Korea, we wanted to let players know we hear their feedback and give a look into our process,” it says.
The team explains that each Western update includes features from a variety of patches to the Korean version of Lost Ark: Ascension.
“For example, the November 2023 update includes features from patches that were released in Korea between July 5 and September 13. All packaged up and prepared by Smilegate RPG and Amazon Games, these combine to make a base build,” which “contains hundreds of different updates.”
Some of these updates, however, aren’t applicable to the Western release because they pertain to content or systems that haven’t been included in that version of the game. As a result, these must be removed or rearranged to fit the Western progression.
“For that reason, simultaneous releases are not easy,” it says, “and some updates in Korea may be adjusted again at a later date, so Western builds have the advantage of additional testing.”
It adds, “If Amazon Games determines that we need significant improvements sooner (such as the endgame raid changes and Chaos Gate update), we will work with Smilegate RPG in advance and aim to bring it to the West as soon as possible, separate from the base build update.”
Because Korean balance updates are frequently tweaked and rebalanced after their initial release, the Amazon Games team will not bring them over until it is satisfied that they are “sufficiently optimized,” and says that work is currently underway on the next base build for January 2024, implying that these balance changes will most likely arrive then.
That may seem like a long time, the equivalent of seeing your neighbor across the street playing with a fantastic new toy and knowing you won’t be able to get your hands on one for several months. “We know that many players would like to see balance updates released more quickly in the West,” Amazon Games admits, adding that the company is working with Smilegate “to look into how we can make this happen outside of the base build system we currently use.”