Smilegate and Amazon apparently have more up their collective sleeve for Lost Ark’s second birthday than events and freebies: Last night, Smilegate released a memo directly to the western playerbase, clearly meant to assuage some of the grumpiness about update parity – and promise some rather epic merges.
“Our goal for 2024 is to balance the speed of the adventurers’ contents progression and gap between KR contents update,” Smilegate says. “As announced by the Roadmap, Breaker will be released in March and Thaemine will release in April. As Thaemine will be challenging to try, we have prepared various events starting in February. […] As for the latest Echidna (Ladon) Raid and Kurzan continent released in Korea, we are collaborating with Amazon Games to find the optimal update timing.”
“We’re not only working on new content, but also to update existing contents. This is to address difficulties in playing the existing contents, such as rebalancing the difficulty of Brelshaza. Both Server Merge, and Region Merge that have been constantly suggested by you adventurers are being prepared. We are working alongside Amazon Games to schedule the merges. It is difficult to disclose in detail about the preparations we are making for Western service here, but we will be able to do so separately soon. We will closely listen to your voices in community so that the adventurers will be able to have more enjoyable experience with Lost Ark.”
The mentioned roadmap is included in the post; the studios note that Road to Thaemine will move up to March, alongside the Breaker class. Amazon also clarifies that it’s planning “two rounds of server merges that will target all regions” on March 6th and 13th, followed by the teased major server merge in summer.
“In the Summer of 2024 we plan to merge NA West, NA East, and SA into one enormous region,” the company says, though it doesn’t really address anything else about the way it’ll be handled.
