Wednesday, January 27, 2010

MapleStory Got a Lot Better

I originally started played Nexon’s flagship MMORPGMapleStory’ back in 2006 and played it for a good two months and quit after reaching level 40. Just last week I decided to re-download the game and give it another try. Naturally, I created a new character to try out one of the game’s many new classes. I decided to play as one of the new Cygnus Knight classes, more specifically the ‘Thunder Breaker’ class. All I can say is wow! Leveling up in MapleStory got A LOT easier. It only took me an hour to reach level 10 and I made it to level 30 in 4 days of casual playing! Back when I played the game in 2006 getting to level 30 took me over a month!

So what changed since I last played MapleStory? Well…. a lot did. Nexon has always been ‘well known’ for keeping their games up to date with content updates and patches. Nexon’s other titles – Mabinogi, Combat Arms and Dungeon Fighter Online have also enjoyed consistent updates. The last few ‘major’ updates to MapleStory ‘Cygnus Knights’ and ‘Aran’ really expanded the game though. The Cygnus Knights expansion added some 5 new classes to the game, each with multiple job advancements, as well as countless new ‘maps’ and quests. The Aran update was much smaller, but still added a good deal of content to the game. What really sped up the game’s experience gain since I last played was the countless new quests added to the game. The best part of these new quests were that many of them were ‘chain’ quests, so there was always something to do. To this point, I never had to ‘grind’ to gain experience as I would always have at least one active quest at any given time.

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is to point out that Nexon’s MapleStory is an awesome game that changed a lot since release. It’s not nearly as ‘grindy’ as it was when I first played. If you haven’t played it yet, definitely check it out. It’s a lot better than all the MapleStory clones out there (ie. WonderKing / LaTale / Wind Slayer).