Playing MMORPGs in Korea

One of my buddies here in the U.S. Is moving to Korea later this year. Sorta sucks, but at least I can still talk to him via skype and play MMOs like Dragon Oath and Neo Steam with him. Internet 4tw I guess. Korea is pretty awesome considering all of these free to play MMORPGs originate there. Well not all of them, but most, as Electronic Arts recently entered the free to play arena with FIFA Online and Battleforge. Even Sony Online Entertainment began embracing free to play with Free Realms and Clone Wars Adventures. Some of my favorite free to play MMORPG companies though are Korean. Companies like NCSoft and Netgame for example are high quality MMO developers. NCSoft is probably best known for Guild Wars and Aion while Netgame is better known for Hero Online, Scions of Fate and Cloud Nine.

Come to think of it… a lot of the MMORPGs I play are developed in China. I used to think 99% of free to play MMOs came from Korea, but chinese developers like Perfect World Entertainment (Ether Saga Online, Jade Dynasty, Etc) and ChangYou (Dragon Oath and blade Wars) are pretty big companies. Perfect World Entertainment is huge in China and probably one of the biggest MMO companies in the U.S as well with their American division. So I guess its sort of a misconception that free to play MMOs are exclusively from Korea! Chinese MMORPGs are big too!

Anyway. I bet there are a lot of awesome MMOs available in Korea that aren’t out in the U.S. Yet. I know Netmarble (Korean MMO company) launched a global English portal, but they only have one game available at the moment – Mini Fighter Online. The Korean portal on the other hand has games like Koongya Adventure, Wego and numerous other titles that haven’t even been announced in the U.S. Yet. Vindictus is already available in Open Beta in Korea through Nexon as well. That game is highly anticipated here in the States, but it won’t be released until Fall, 2010. So North American and European users will have to wait. I guess one of the perks of living in Korea is that there are a lot more free to play games available. I wonder if pay to play games in the U.S. Like Lineage 2 and Aion are free to play in Korea? I think they actually might be.

Anyway. Yeah. Living in Korea sounds pretty interesting, but it would sorta be impossible for me, as I don’t even know the language. My buddy who’s moving there is Korean so it makes sense for him. Anyway, I’m about to go play some League of Legends with my Korean buddy.

MapleStory Got a Lot Better

I originally started played Nexon’s flagship MMORPG ‘MapleStory’ 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).