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Posted to Dreamwidth on 4 November 2024, backdated to 1 March 2021. Originally posted on Wordpress.
October 3, 2020, 5:22 PM
- I have no idea what video game I want to play next.
- This is truly the least-stressful dilemma I've had in months.
October 3, 2020, 5:24 PM
- I've been extremely nostalgic for pre-2010 Maplestory, but I honestly can't think of any non-online, singleplayer games that would be similar.
Those two tweets, I think, were (along with the dream I had about Neopets) the thing that really kicked off this series of Nostalgia Time posts.
I don't remember where I found out about Maplestory. I first made an account in 2007 when I was thirteen and spent a lot of time playing. Okay, about 1 hour per day, because that was all the computer time I was allowed back then. I'm not sure why the game appealed to me so much. It was pretty unforgiving back then, and took forever to level up - at the higher levels, it could take months of grinding to gain a single level.
I never got anywhere near that at the time, because...it took months. And I was a middle-school student who only had 1 hour of computer time per day.
I played Maplestory on-and-off until about 2010, when I was midway through high school. I didn't think about coming back to it until after I graduated from university in 2016.
By that time, it wasn't fun anymore.
Between 2010 and 2016, nineteen (19) separate character classes were released. I started playing when there were only four! That wasn't the only difference - leveling had been changed to require less experience, so you could easily get to level 100+. The previous times I'd played, I'd only reached level 50. You could now kill bosses on your own in minutes that used to take entire groups of people close to an hour.
Honestly, it was...boring.
There wasn't the sense of community that there used to be. I remember joining parties in various maps in order to complete the "Kill 999 of a single kind of monster" quest. On your own, it'd take days, but you could get it done relatively quickly with a group of people, since their kills would also count toward yours. Leveling now happened so fast that you could skip entire maps and quest lines. There were so many gorgeous areas that no one ever visited anymore!
I feel like an old man complaining about the good old days.
