Does Lost Ark Take a Lot of Time? Unequivocally Yes, Especially at Endgame

As an avid MMORPG gamer with hundreds of hours poured into titles like Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, and now Lost Ark, I can definitively say that yes, Lost Ark requires a huge time investment to fully experience all the content. This is especially true once you reach the endgame. While the leveling process moves faster than most MMOs, the endgame progression gates much of the best content behind daily and weekly tasks. Add on top extremely long load times, queues at peak hours, and the need to maintain multiple characters, and Lost Ark starts to feel more like working a part-time job than enjoying a game.

Reaching the Level 50 Cap Takes About 20 Hours

For a focused player sticking to mostly the critical path and minimal side content, reaching Lost Ark‘s level 50 cap takes around 15-20 hours. This makes the initial leveling process faster than most MMOs – for comparison, Final Fantasy XIV can take over 100 hours to reach cap. However, Lost Ark has far less actual story content to work through. If you take time to explore islands, hidden quests, adventure tome completion and more, hitting level 50 could easily take 30+ hours.

Here‘s a quick breakdown of approximate hours to hit key level milestones:

• Level 25: 10 hours
• Level 30: 15 hours
• Level 40: 18 hours
• Level 50 (Cap): 20+ hours

So while Lost Ark‘s base campaign offers less playtime than some MMOs while leveling, focusing on side content can extend that substantially. But the real timesink lurks at endgame…

Endgame Progression Demands Over 2 Hours of Daily Play

Lost Ark‘s endgame is centered around completing daily and weekly tasks focused primarily around raids, dungeons, and quests. Based on analyzing player reports in forums like Reddit as well as my own experience, a breakdown of estimated daily playtime at endgame looks like:

As shown above, spending less than 2 hours at endgame per day severely limits progression speed. And while occasional players can stretch activities out over multiple days, hardcore players pushing item levels will need to complete everything daily.

Expanding this analysis to a weekly scope sees requirements ranging from 14-25 hours per week possibly spread across multiple characters. For example, by having 6 characters all repeating endgame tasks, you could easily surpass 30+ hours of weekly playtime.

Compared to the roughly 10-15 weekly hours needed to cap currencies in FFXIV or WoW, Lost Ark demands players treat it like a part-time job once they finish the story.

Technical Issues Exacerbate the Timesink

Now, no discussion around Lost Ark‘s time demands would be complete without touching on the technical issues that plague it. Lengthy loading screens and peak hour login queues make it take even longer to actually play the game on a daily basis.

Based on community analysis, average load times entering or leaving major cities often exceed 5 minutes. Transitioning between zones takes 1-2 minutes typically. Over just 10 play sessions, that‘s already 50+ minutes of load time instead of actually playing the game!

And queues have consistently remained over 1 hour long even at 100,000+ concurrent players recently. With bots suspected to make up 40-60% of users, dealing with queues may persist long term unless Amazon Games steps up anti-cheat efforts. Sitting around waiting to play rather than playing wears down even the most engaged gamers.

So in closing, while I love Lost Ark‘s combat, progression hooks, and wealth of content, I must objectively acknowledge the immense daily time investment required to experience it fully, especially multiple characters into endgame. Technical issues exacerbating already long progression gates risks burning out a lot of players who don‘t have 20+ hours a week to dedicate solely to Lost Ark.

My hope is the developers continue refining and adding to Lost Ark‘s stellar foundations while also respecting players‘ time limitations. Reducing certain daily and weekly gating mechanics could really improve the experience. But only time will tell how Lost Ark balances keeping hardcore players deeply engaged while also being welcoming to casual fans.