Off the heels of its third anniversary, Lost Ark's 2025 roadmap has been rolling out some big changes. This momentum will only keep up with the roadmap's third phase, which will deliver a great deal of content to Lost Ark fans.
Lost Ark in 2025 is an evolving title—a live-service game that's persisted for over a decade in Korea and since 2022 in NA/EU regions. The game sees a great deal of new content every year, and this year is shaping up to be among the biggest. As 2025's roadmap moves into its third phase, The Best War Games sat down with Amazon Games' franchise lead Matthew Huston who spoke more about the quality-of-life changes and content updates en route to Lost Ark.
Lost Ark's 2025 Roadmap Is Moving Into Part 3
Paradise System and Valkyrie
July will see one of the biggest offerings in Lost Ark's upcoming content pipeline, with the Paradise progression system set to add a lot to the title. This system will have players venturing through three sections, namely Elysian, Crucible, and Hell—each with different challenges and rewards. Elysian will be a wave-based mode, Crucible has players 1v1 a variety of bosses (with more bosses becoming available as the season progresses), and Hell will have 100 floors of dungeon challenges where players will have to try and delve as far as they can.
When it comes to the details of Lost Ark's next update, Huston spoke about some of the key ways Paradise will shake things up and the design goals the system is designed to achieve. For example, Huston discussed how, despite being accessible to all types of players, Paradise is in part designed to improve the endgame grind:
"Anyone who plays the game knows that the end-game loop can get static. Whether you're new, returning, or just have lower-level alts, we wanted to add more ways to improve progression beyond pushing players into solo mode or tweaking gold raid. Paradise has a lower entry requirement (gear level 1580) and offers plenty of opportunities for rewards and gold to help your character progress. You can still do solo mode, raids, and events alongside Paradise... This new system just adds more progression options while freshening up the end-game loop."
Valkyrie and Quality of Life Changes
With Paradise set to improve the endgame of Lost Ark, fans stationed in earlier parts of progression may be even more interested in what's coming after July. August will see a new advanced class hit the game in the form of Valkyrie, a female counterpart to the existing Paladin class. When it comes to the differences between Valkyrie and Paladin, Huston added that "she's uniquely designed around the flexibility to be either support or DPS, whereas Paladin is primarily a support class. If you've played Paladin, you'll find Valkyrie's general combat and movement feel similar, but her mobility is really fun and worth checking out."
Also coming in the fast-approaching parts of Lost Ark's 2025 roadmap will be a number of quality-of-life changes, with many of them set to arrive around July. Huston also spoke further on these changes and went into detail about what parts of the game they'll impact:
"We've made several Quality-of-Life improvements, but the key changes include reducing dailies. Guardian and Kurzan Front are now once a day and Una's tasks are removed after finishing their rapport elements. We've also nerfed endgame raids, updated solo modes and adjusted endgame progression costs for things like Advanced Honing and Transcendence. For Advanced Honing specifically, materials needed from 1-20 were cut in half, and silver/gold costs were reduced by 20%. Many more QoL changes are coming in July, so keep an eye on our release notes."
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 82 /100 Critics Rec: 85%
- Released
- December 4, 2019
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Smilegate RPG
- Publisher(s)
- Amazon Games
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 3
- Multiplayer
- Online Co-Op, Online Multiplayer
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- MMORPG
