“An Old Time Classic that aged like wine.”
Back Story
Hi, I’m Jiawei. I am a massive game lover. From the very moment I got my hands on my first ever console, I was hooked, even addicted at times about all the different kinds of games and fascinated at how these combinations of 2d pixels manage to suck me in and made me lose all my time management skills that I had drilled into myself since a young age. However, no other game has affected me as much as the old time classic, Maplestory. However, as time went on, adult responsibilities started its crawl into my life on top of other games that fascinated me but that is a story for another time.
How it re-captured me again
“The dark knight retu-… it never left?”
Fast forward to a year ago, I had reached a low point in life, worrying about my present and damages it could cause to my future, more stress than I had ever experience, tough decisions to be made, existential crisis. But then, a Youtube advertisement caught my eye, it was an advertisement for MapleStory, advertising their 15th year anniversary. That was when the thought crossed me “Wow, this game is still alive? I wonder what its been like”.
At the time, I was extremely fed up with all the things life in general had thrown at me, so I made an impulsive decision to just pick up the game again. And surprise I were.. I went in expecting the exact same mushroom game I had fell in love with as a child but what I got is something conceptually same but fundamentally different.
What Changed
“hoo…. boy….”
Trading
Something every Maplestory player is familiar with, trading was and still is to some extent the heart and soul of why the free-to-play model works in Maplestory. The trading system in Maplestory works just like how you would trade a pokemon card with your friends at school. You would trade in-game items for either other items or more often the in-game currency called Meso.
Players would buy a shop that they could setup in the free market and put items for sale on said shops. Simple, right? not for the average free-to-play player, as the shop requires in-game Premium currency to buy. So those who couldn’t afford it resorted to standing in front of the doors to free market for arduous amount of time and spam messages of what they are selling even going as far as to add “@” at the end of their message to maximize the text bubble that appears to catch others attention. Also, buyers had to go through multiple shops just to find the exact item they were looking for and get the best prices for said item. But now, everything has been simplified into 1 single feature called the “Auction House”, where you can basically put items up for sale and buyers could search for a specific set of attributes to instantly find the item that they are looking for.
Gameplay
Maplestory has a pretty simple to understand gameplay, its a 2d side scroller and you attack with various skills and enemies die. But back then, monsters were extremely hard to defeat by yourself, and training by yourself could cause more death screen than experience points gained. So people often resorted to party quest of party training. But nowadays, monsters have become easier to kill so people stopped partying up and instead trained solo as it grants more experience points that way. As for party quest, it still exists but players only do the high level ones and for different reasons than experience points (we will get into this later).
Progression
Maplestory over the years has released many updates and with it many systems that helps players progress through the story, most notably the Arcane Force System. This gives players an orb called symbol that they can equip for stat increase for every major arcane river area quest they complete there are currently 6 symbols in total that players can collect. When first received the symbol will be at level 1, in order to level it up players will have to get more symbols and merge them together up to level 20. Players can get these symbols by doing daily quests and party quest. This gives less informed players a clear idea of what they should do to progress through the game in a way that doesn’t involve third party informant such as Youtubers, Streamers or online guides.
Others
“There is just too many…”
As you can see just from the length of this story, a lot has changed in Maplestory. There are actually much more that has changed from guilds, Bosses, classes, and the new Authentic Symbol system, as well as new items and many other newly added features that make free-to-play players life easier.
Final Thoughts
All in all, despite the bad light that has been shed by players on this game recently and in the past. I still highly encourage everyone to give this old classic another try as it truthfully feels like a completely different game.
