Information MapleLegends: My general view on "Nostalgia"

Hey all,

Ever since we've started to do client editing, I've had numerous questions and concerns thrown at me.

While it was not many people, there was a few out there that started getting concerned about the client editing occurring in this server, and how it affects their authentic gameplay in MapleLegends.

I've given my view a few times before when it comes to my view on seeing "nostalgia", I'll use this topic again to address it one more time.

Ever since MapleLegends was released, we've applied custom .wz edits (graphical modifications) to the server. For example, in vanilla v0.62 data some bosses had no boss bar, so you don't see their HP at all while fighting them. Such bosses were Headless horseman, Mushmom, Blue Mushmom, Female Boss, and numerous other area bosses.

What we did during Closed Beta already is design custom boss bar colours and icons and implement them into the game.

Before we've done this servers added a very janky "@bosshp" command which you would write each time you were fighting these bosses just to see their HP. As soon we added custom boss bars and custom icons some servers followed and did the very same thing.

My view on this is "Quality of Life" updates, which doesn't really change how the game is played, but rather makes it feel less clunky or outdated.

My personal view on Old School MapleStory is that I don't feel, or ever felt nostalgic from clunky gameplay. For example, in very early versions of MapleStory, NPC's had no lightbulbs yet to indicate if they had a quest or not, making you have to click every single one of them just to see if they have a quest or not. To some people this is nostalgic, but to me, this feels outdated and clunky. Of course, I like it when researching about the game, to learn how different the game was back then, but I don't like to actually "play" in worse ways.

Another example is "stairs". In ancient MapleStory versions, you had to jump and hold right to navigate these, whereas in newer versions such as v0.62 you just had to move forward. Again, I personally just see this as clunky gameplay.

While old school balance can be seen as nostalgic to me (ex: 3rd jobs only), clunkier gameplay (ex: no lightbulbs, no quest helper, no NPC chat), does not.

This is a view of mine that never really changed. It became clear to me that starting v0.6x Neckson started to implement patches that make the game more user friendly. To tips, to removing dice rolling, to implementing skill recommendations, etc. In my view, Neckson started to do this because it became noticeable users who ruined their characters more and more and would quit the game over it. This is still present in a lot of levels in ML too (yes, also washing...).

A perfect example of implementation we've recently made that will definitely help users not make major mistakes are the White Scroll / Legendary Spirit prompt changes, which will hopefully put an end to users constantly using their White Scrolls when they didn't want to. Of course, one could say "suck it up, you messed up", but I don't think we should. Yeah, Old MapleStory was all about making mistakes and learning from them, but not everyone just has that time anymore to do both. We've often also got the blame (and unfortunately rather harsh words) if we had to reject any kind of refund when such mistakes were made, for obvious reasons.

While many people point out that wash is the main cause for people to quit the game (which I obviously acknowledged by now is indeed a big factor too), users that accidentally made a mistake that either ruin their character, ruin a rare item they had, or losing 1 or multiple White Scrolls play a massive factor as well, and we try to prevent that in current and future updates as much we try to fix the other things with balance patches.

So while MapleLegends is an Old School MapleStory, It's not an authentic MapleStory server. I view MapleLegends as exactly how it's advertised everywhere: An Old School MapleStory server. It plays like the old game, it feels like the old game, but it still gets updates to keep it fresh, and some balance changes from time to time. Exactly what Old School Runescape is as well.

Originally we were only making changes by .wz edits, and very minor client edits. Thanks to more advanced tech, learning, as well as reverse engineering, you may have noticed for the past few years that more and more servers start to get fancier with true client edits. Adding a custom prompt for Legendary Spirit for example is 100% a client edit, adding chairs that move your character in the v0.62 client is a client edit. All of these things are absolutely NOT possible originally but are now thanks to the way client edits are now being done.

Thanks to these tech evolvements we've now also been able to get edits done that was a dream back in 2015 if I had an "ultimate pre-bb experience" wish, and some of them even exceeded these, slowly with each patch becoming a reality. Unfortunately though at end of the day we all got a limit on the time we can work on things, and client edits while very cool and advanced are not things you can implement in 1 day and call it a day. Very careful things have to be implemented because if doing wrong it can cause massive issues or memory leaks, which is why we have to test them a lot once implemented in our test servers.

So will MapleLegends continue to receive client updates that tweak how it looks that may be from later versions of the game? Yes. While MapleLegends keeps evolving, we also do keep in mind we are an Old School MapleStory server, meaning we try our best to make the changes we make client wise an option to toggle off in our Legends.ini, which you can find in your root MapleLegends directory. That way, you can make MapleLegends feel like your preferences.

I hope this helps you understand a bit more how I view MapleLegends, "nostalgia" in MapleStory, as well as how I prefer the Old School experience myself. Another reminder as always is that we do everything in a team, so things aren't just changing to how I want it, but how we think is the best for the server.

Happy Mapling.