Why Lost Ark's Story Feels So Excrutiatingly Long

thegamer.com:

As far as MMORPGs go, Lost Ark’s campaign is fairly short. You can get through the story content in roughly 20 hours at a leisurely pace, while games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 typically take 40 to 50 hours to work through each campaign. Despite its length, Lost Ark’s leveling process is a horribly paced, brutal slog that will wear down even the most enthusiastic MMO player. If you’re struggling to push through to the end, you’re certainly not alone.

There are several compounding issues that contribute to Lost Ark’s poor pacing. One of the biggest problems is the structure of its zones. In every other MMO, the world is broken up into lots of smaller regions where players can freely explore to complete quests and farm crafting materials. These zones typically have several quest hubs like camps and villages where players can stack up a bunch of quests at once, then head out into the wild for a long stretch of monster killing. Lost Ark approximates this loop, but changes it in a few hugely impactful ways.

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Instead of large, open-world areas, Lost Ark’s maps are made up of narrow corridors and small open combat areas. While it’s fun to see new areas for the first time, you don’t get the experience of exploring zones or getting lost in the world like you do in other MMOs. All you ever really do is walk from point A to point B down a hallway, interact with something, then walk back. In other MMOs, the size of the world and the signs of life in it help obscure the repetition and monotony of questing, but Lost Ark doesn’t offer that level of fantasy, which makes it harder to ignore how tedious questing is.

Speaking of questing, there are no real quest hubs in Lost