Lost Ark Is A Very Pretty, Over The Top Diablo Competitor

Play and complete Diablo 3 multiple times and you'll eventually reach difficulty levels in which the mob count balloons and combat is enjoyable for frequency of popping, bursting, exploding enemies. This eight minute Lost Ark trailer begins with dozens of enemies being fought and dismembered and only becomes more ridiculous from there, with increasingly wild attacks and scenery-dwarfing boss monsters. It's an Unreal Engine 3-powered, South Korean-developed MMO hack-and-slasher and it's not clear if it's coming westward, but you should watch this trailer anyway.

It's rare for a game to be announced in the west with anything more than a 60-second CG teaser, so it's a thrill just to see this much. The game's website is in Korean, but from the above we can infer co-op combat, mounts and, I guess, some sort of laser-grapple for dragging floating landmasses. The game will also have 18 playable characters of which only five have been announced so far.

If the game looks lush, that might be because it's being made by Smile Gate, developers of gosh-it's-just-anime-Counter-Strike CrossFire. That was reportedly the highest grossing free-to-play game in the world as of the beginning of this year, which presumably gives them some money to throw at this new thing, which has already been in development for three years.

The trailer marks the launch of beta sign-ups for a closed test due to launch next year. There's no word on when or if that will be localised into English.