A couple days ago I made an announcement that this game MapleStory N would be launching the following day. I played the game for around five hours the day it came out, but ultimately I found it to be underwhelming and uncharacteristically disappointing.
The game begins with a wifu incel vibe that seems to cater to toxic gamers who can't get laid. Obviously that's not a deal-breaker or anything; maybe they know their audience amirite? But from there things don't get much better.
Looks like I made it to level 40... which isn't saying much because as you complete the main questline you keep getting opportunities to skip the storyline and add bunch of free levels. Pretty sure I skipped to level 10 immediately... then was offered a skip to level 20 at 12 or 13, and then to 30 at lvl 22. Why would a new game that just launched let you skip ahead as though the game has already been out for years and you're being given a handicap to play catchup? Dumb.
Also notice that every single one of my stat points was put into INT on my Wizard. The game has a deceiving air of complexity in which you're given all these options... but none of those options seem to matter (or there's always an obvious choice to pick with no room to customize).
I ended up picking an Ice/Lightning Wizard which seemed pretty cool and powerful... too powerful really as everything just dies in one hit and you're basically just spamming the same ability over and over no matter what class you pick.
Again the game has the appearance of complexity while actually being completely hollow. Some of the skills are completely worthless and some are completely overpowered. This is also the first game I've ever played in which the executable seems to completely hijack your operating system. It's the first game in which I wasn't allowed use a 3rd party app to change the keybinds... and I can't even use the wheel on my headphones to manipulate the sound when the game is selected in the foreground.
On one side this means they take cheating very seriously but on the other it means they could be doing some pretty weird and shady stuff with that type of access to your OS. Not great considering I'm not even allowed to play the game from USA and use a VPN to get around the IP block.
Another weird thing about this game is that it's over 20GB and it seems like you can only open the executable from their webpage, which I find to be particularly shady and odd. The way they run their security and player-tracking is truly unique.
We can see here that even after playing for 5 hours I'm not even close to being able to mint NFTs or change the name of my character away from a random string of characters. Again... it really takes you out of the game for NPCs to be calling you l1w5b9z4f8f1... seriously nobody needs that, it's terrible UX and there's absolutely no reason for it.
Pretty pointless and basic. At this stage of the game not even sure why you'd ever need to create a macro for this stuff when it's mostly just spamming the same ability over and over again. Although I'm sure there must be a reason for it just not now at the 'early game'. All I need to do is cast Thunder Bolt or Cold Beam and everything on the screen dies. Spells don't seem to have a casting time or a cooldown and just get spammed endlessly and thoughtlessly. Boring.
Also mages are supposed to be squishy and die easy... the game even says that on the tooltip. But Wizards in this game get a mana shield called Magic Guard that essentially increases your HP by x7 by extracting damage out of your mana pool... which you'd think might drain your mana but it seems like you can just spam potions the entire game to never run out of mana or health. Boring.
One potentially redeeming quality of the game seems to be the reward distribution system. When you complete dungeons or bosses you can enter a raffle to get loot from that dungeon. This creates a static inflow of items to the game and prevents hyperinflation of items... in theory.
But also I believe that all items remain unbound at all times, which means you can buy gear "as an investment" and then sell it when you find better gear. This type of economic system is doomed to create hyperinflationary mechanics because the best items in the game never leave circulation once they are found. I'm always baffled that this issue was solved in the early 2000's by World of Warcraft (with Bind on Equip mechanics) and yet games like this have learned nothing from it. An item with infinite durability should not be re-sellable after it's been equipped... this shouldn't even have to be explained to anyone that understands basic supply dynamics.
Because this game is easy and anyone can play it... all you have to do is grind for hours and hours and hope to get lucky. Even the graphics of the game seem to mimic the type of visuals you'd get if you walked into a casino and took a look at the slot machines. It's pretty gross from a psychological standpoint. They spared no expense on creating an experience that would get the maximum amount of degens hooked on the gambling nature of it... and now that it's connected to crypto I assume that's about to get 1000 times worse.
I had high hopes for this game but I can't even play it on principal at this point. The requirement to KYC is a joke when being labeled "web3". The business practices are shady, and the game itself has the appearance of substance on the candy coated exterior while lacking any of the meat we'd expect on a deeper dive. All around disappointing. Do not recommend.
