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What’s causing the long launch time in Lost Ark?
The long launch times in Lost Ark are likely due to its game engine. Lost Ark is built on the Unreal Engine 3 – an old game engine built in 2004 notorious for slow load times. Killing Floor 3 and Rising Storm 2: Vietnam are two other games that exhibit long launch times similar to Lost Ark, and both games also use Unreal Engine 3.
Another factor that’s likely causing Lost Ark’s long launch times is EAC or Easy Anti-Cheat – Lost Ark’s anti-cheat software. The Division 3 also uses the same Anti-Cheat software and is known to have very slow launch times as well.
How long does it take to start up Lost Ark?
Startup times for Lost Ark will depend on how fast your computer is and whether you have Lost Ark installed on an HDD or SSD. Expect to wait around 1-3 minutes if Lost Ark is on an SSD and 5 minutes or more if the game is on a mechanical HDD.
An HDD or Hard Disk Drive offers the best storage size-to-price ratio of any drive in the market. However, this type of storage is notoriously slow and isn’t the best option if you’re looking to speed up Lost Ark’s load times.
Despite this, some users reportedly have the game installed on a very fast NVME SSD but are still forced to wait a few minutes after clicking on the Lost Ark shortcut or the Play button on Steam before Lost Ark finally launches on their computer.
How do I make Lost Ark load faster?
Long launch times are innate to Lost Ark’s game engine, Unreal Engine 3, so there’s really not much you can do to make Lost Ark load faster – except make sure you have the game installed on fast storage like an NVMe Drive or SSD.
If you still have the game on an old mechanical hard drive, it might be worth investing in a more modern NVMe SSD or even a slower SATA SSD. Either of these two options will help you cut down Lost Ark’s load times significantly. The latter, while comparatively slower than an NVMe SSD, will load Lost Ark much faster than a mechanical hard drive.
Is Lost Ark easy to run?
Lost Ark is fairly easy to run, only calling for an Intel Core i3 or AMD Ryzen 3 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 460 (or similar) to run at the minimum settings.
For reference, the GTX 460, a mid-range graphics card released more than a decade ago, is still very capable of running Lost Ark. A modern entry-level graphics card, such as the GT 1030, should have no problem outperforming the 460 and should be able to run Lost Ark at low graphical settings.
With that said, if you’re looking to turn on every eye-candy setting in Lost Ark and experience what the game looks like at its best, you’ll want to have at least an Intel Core i5 or Ryzen 5 processor, 16GB of RAM, and an RTX 2070 or Radeon 5700XT to run Lost Ark at max settings in 1440p.
Conclusion
Unreal Engine 3 and EAC or Easy Anti-Cheat are likely what’s causing Lost Ark’s long launch times. However, there’s not much you can really do in Windows to speed up Lost Ark’s launch times since these are software problems that are innate to the game itself.
With that said, you can make sure Lost Ark loads as quickly as possible by installing the game on an SSD or NVMe drive.