Maplestory

I figured I'd make an official thread for this. It'll probably help explain some stuff I guess.

Link here --> http://maplestory.nexon.net/

- What It Is -
A Korean sidescroller mmorpg that focuses around killing monsters and gaining levels while working through an overarching story. Which I guess is most mmorpgs. Whatever. It comes with a load of different servers for you to make characters on. Keep in mind that except for specific circumstances you can NOT meet with players from a different server. It don't work.

- How It Runs -
Pretty good actually. On really bad computers you might get some lag but I play on an old laptop and I can play with minimal fuss. Beware the download time though - the shit's about 10 gigabytes large.

- Basic Story -

Spoiler

Five(?) heroes from centuries ago fought with a basically omnipotent being named the Black Mage, or the Transcendent of Light. Yeah it's ironic but whatever.
After their battle, the five(?) heroes are sealed in ice for centuries until they wake up in present Maple World. Except for one of them. He dead. The other classes (besides the heroes) focus around duties surrounding the Black Mage, with subtopics relating to lackeys for a bunch of them. Some dragon dudes fight a dude named Magnus. Fun.

- Free to Play -
Yes. But it has a LOT of microtransactions in the form of both cosmetic equipment and optional items to make your character or equipment more powerful, permanent and limited alike.

- Gameplay -
You have one attack button, which for all but a couple of classes becomes useless pretty soon. Oh well. One of the downfalls of Maplestory. (You get skills that act as attacks tho) The game houses many skills for each class, some of which are flashy and useless and some of which you spam forever and get bored of. Some are actually fun.
You'll usually find yourself performing quests to gain experience to advance. If that fails there are party quests which you can do with friends or random other people, or just grind for a level or two. If you get far enough into the game it may be a task to keep leveling though.

- Classes -
Ohohohoho oh boy there are a couple. Tons of classes to choose from. Unfortunately Nexon's solution to making the game less boring is to keep adding new classes in.

Spoiler

Explorers

The most basic of classes. These are the original five, and are your basic warrior, mage, thief et cetera. Not much to talk about but they're a decent starting class. They recently got an interesting new storyline which is better than before.


Cygnus Knights

Literally explorers but with a different story and skills. They just form an army against the Black Mage which will definitely 100% work.


Heroes

These are those guys from before who fought the Black Mage. They didn't kill him but they sealed him and got frozen in ice except for one who died. They're all pretty different but I don't really want to explain each of the five(?) classes.


Resistance

Like explorers, but with certain gimmicks. The archer rides a panther. The mage fights up close. They all form a secret resistance to fight against their oppressors, the Black Wings. As you can probably guess it's an organization under the Black Mage.


Kaiser

Dragon warrior class from another world. Reborn as a different person with ancient powers and such, destined to fight with another dragon warrior from the same another world.


Angelic Buster

Pink (not-)dragon thief class from another world. Fights with her magic dragon bracelet powers and is also a diva or something. I'm honestly not sure but I think her story lines up with Kaiser's. Fair warning her voice is extremely grating and you hear it constantly.


Hayato

Originally from a Japan-inspired another world, was sent to Maple World after fighting with a corrupt royalty figure who had like, magic powers or something. I think they all had magic powers. He's a fast-paced warrior.


Kanna

Same backstory as Hayato they're both from the same another world. The difference is Kanna's a pretty slow mage and she has a foxfurry companion. After this class Nexon really started to go wild with the furries.
Which leads me to...


Beast Tamer

...Yeah. Baby fox girls aside this class isn't bad for diversity. It has four skill paths to choose from which differ from speed to party buffs to pummeling. She even has four different key mappings for each! So you don't have to eat your keys with dozens of skills. Neat. Also I'm pretty sure she doesn't have a story and if she does it's stone cold retarded. Something about people trying to steal her animal bffs. Kinda fun to play though.


Zero

So basically the Transcendent of Time had a child, who was split into a male and female counterpart. You play as both, and tag team between them by using the skills of the other partner as a trigger. It's actually pretty fun to play and adds some strategy into the game if only a little. It starts at level 100 for some reason though. Dunno why.


Shade

Okay. OKAY. This class is pretty much the reason I got back into this game in the first place. There was actually a sixth hero yeah SURPRISE I didn't fool anyone.
A lot of stuff in the past went down. Shade traded his "time" to like, decelerate the Black Mage's time or something. So Shade thought that would kill himself cause he's losing his time. Nope. Just play the class I'm not saying anything but this class' story actually had me in tears.
Also fur lolis take care of him aww. Cute.

Look at this cutie.

Dear lord thank god that's over. That was a chore and I didn't even go through everything.
Anyway hopefully this'll push one or two people to check it out. If you feel like playing with another my ign's BardOfShadow. I play on the Arcania server.

 

Back when I had my laptop, the hard drive wasn't that large, so I wasn't able to give this a try.
Now that I built this computer, may as well give it a go.

 

Beast Tamer must not be very good at actually taming beasts if she only has four that she keeps around all the time. More like she just went to the pet store and bought some, don't you think?

 

Guess not. What a loser.

Oh also I forgot that sometimes some of the classes are closed, which prevents creation of those classes for awhile. You can still play them if you already made that class though. At the moment everything is open except for beast tamer and zero.

 

just grind for a level or two

ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I hate you so much that I might actually update my LP

 

Wow that
That'll show me

 

consequences will never be the same

 

consequences will never be the same

Oh, I remember that from that sound buttons app I downloaded once a year ago! I have no idea what meme it's referring to, but it must be really old. Or I'm just ignorant!

Speaking of ignorance, if I'm remembering right, weren't you one of the people who liked to point out how bad MapleStory is, Doors? It's obvious you still don't consider it very great but you do seem to be trying to put some aspects of it in a fairer light. Did you have a minor change of heart?

 

What
When did I do that

Honestly I'm quite fond of this game. I'm trying to stay neutral so that people get a better representation of the game and know what they're getting into. Don't want to play? That's cool. It's hard to give it a shot what with the large download after all.

And yes I might have exaggerated about the grinding. It may take longer than "a couple levels" but honestly for my most recent character I've only had to grind say 5 levels or so. I'm at level 90 right now.

 

I might as well weigh in with my honest opinion, since anything I said in my Let's Play would have been written for humour.

MapleStory is a highly-polished timesink (what's bigger than a sink? timeblackhole?) that's basically a flashy <INSERT YOUR PARENTS' CREDIT CARD HERE> racket. What game isn't these days. It's not like having every aspect of the game geared towards making money is shitty. Most games are created with returns in mind. MapleStory, however, is mind-numbingly repetitive, at least in my experience. Bobbyis would probably agree with me, so that's two peoples' experiences. Close enough to a majority.

You can get through most of the game by completing quests, just like your average MMORPG. However, the difference questing and just simple grinding is slight. You're gonna go to a place and kill 80,000 babies or whatever, either way. Shit gets so monotonous that your resolve will wither away until you end up caving in and buying cashmoney items. Or maybe you've just spent so long staring at your stupid character's stupid face that you want to change it. To the cashmoney shop you go. Or maybe you think you deserve more of a reward for wasting 1000 hours of your life fighting cartoon mushrooms. Cashmoney.

So the business model is "make the game so addictive that it's impossible to stop, make it so boring that it's impossible to enjoy, and sell eye candy so you can relieve the boredom." And that's definitely me projecting. But you have to admit, person reading this who has played MapleStory, shit gets dull after the second job advancement. Maybe someone can explain to me how to keep it interesting past level 30.

As for the MMO aspect of the MMORPG: interaction with other players isn't necessary outside of party quests, in which everybody knows what to do and you'll only hear anything from your mates if you fuck up, and the free market, in which jesus fuck what a nightmare. There's families, guilds, parties, raids, and probably other social activities that I never bothered with. I'm not that social in games. Having friends to play MS with would likely go a long way towards sustained enjoyment.

The sights and sounds are nice. I will always like the original Victoria Island and Orbis scenery and music the most, though. Mostly because of nostalgia, but also because Victoria Island used to feel coherent and consistent. It felt like it had history, and all the areas were actually next to each other, and could exist on the same island. Like Vvardenfell, or Azeroth. After that, new areas with seemingly random aesthetics and locations were slapped on, with no attempt at connecting them to the overall world of MapleStory. It's not supposed to be fuckin' Dungeons and Dragons, I know, but immersion goes a long way towards a game holding my interest, and MapleStory doesn't even try. I bet they still have the CVS Pharmacy guy in Henesys.

You'd think that a 2D game without any vector graphics would not be demanding for your computer, but you'd be wrong if your computer is an old piece of shit like mine! I don't have much to complain about, since my compy's so old, but it's not lightweight game. It freezes for a second or two whenever I go ANGERIC BUSTA, the load times are iffy, and don't even get me started on opening the damn game. Already complained about that in the LP, don't need to reiterate.

In conclusion, MapleStory is a video game. The level cap is 250. glhf

 

and don't forget how much fun monsterlife is amirite

 

We don't talk about monster life

 

 

I bet the localization team for this were just like "fuck it" and, since I don't have to play it myself, I love it.

 

Sometime after you mentioned it to me last year Doors, I gave MS a try on my more-recently bought computer.
And I gotta say, I liked it surprisingly more than I originally gave it credit. Though not by much.
Addiction factor's still the same. Once you start, it's more difficult to stop than you might initially expect.
The combat and controls are still painfully stiff and the microtransactions (as you mentioned) are abundant and annoying.

I did find some more enjoyment from some of the classes you recommenced to me though.
Dual Blade was pretty fun for a while, and though I didn't get try Zero I did get a kick out of Kaiser and Angelic Buster when I tried them again.

It was a better experience than I expected. Not anything worth investing in but I swear if I install that shit again it's all I'll be doing for the rest of summer.
To me it lies somewhere in between okay and mediocre, but hey, that's still better than awful.

So yeah, thanks I guess.

 

MapleStory is kinda dead now

It really is just a broken cluttered piece of a mess now. All of it's current success was based on the fact the game was once developed by a company that wasn't utterly stupid and greedy to the point of handing out 2x EXP cheques if you smacked money in their faces hard enough. Or you know, have the audacity of asking 10 dollars for an outfit that vanishes after 3 months. It's allmost bizzare to think that MS could actually rival with WoW way back then. Okay, it was at a moment where the genre itself was at it's prime but there were a lot of competitors out there and MS shined amongst the crowd.

The popularity was already waning, most of the people that stayed were either awful or used botting software to vacuum monsters and kill them instantly. The virtual economy plummeted, GMs didn't do anything against the botters and Nexon's ideal solution was to install GameGuard with MS, something that i'm sure never worked in the first place and actually spied on your activities even after you closed MS. But MS really wrote it's own death warrant by splitting up people from different continents into different servers. If you live in Europe and just signed up, tough tits trying to contact your buddies at the American servers now- to the vacant wasteland you go. And if you wanted to invite someone over, better hope they come from the same continent you live in otherwise you just have to pretend someone's there or just play a different game. It's so cringingly stupid and just made the game seem a lot more vacant then it really was. The whole Big Bang update was just a final cry for relevancy before it turned into the sad state it is in now.
It's been a long while since i played it, all of my experience from it was before the BB patch so i'm not sure they fixed the issues with the server splits and the toxic community. Pretty sure they didn't.

One thing that i've allways hold on for always is that the art design and music is fantastic in MS, i really can't complain about that. I remember Ludibrium being a really fun place to explore, what with it's giant 100-story tall lego tower and the wierd spooky stuff that happened underground. Orbis was also really pretty to look at. It's prob the reason why it drew so many people in it in the first place, i imagine.