by ByteStixMapleStory 2 Official Release
Nexon announced earlier this week during their premiere event at NOVO Lounge, Los Angeles, California, that MapleStory 2 will be launching globally (with the exception of the regions Nexon has blocked) on October 10th, 2018. The official launch brings with it new classes, new dungeons, new events, and an increased level cap. During the event, attendees were given the ability to play the game ahead of everyone else – while the rest of the playerbase is stuck playing through the Mushking Royale Pre-Season that has been running since the 22nd of August until October 1st. This event, while serving as a unique way to hype up the game also allows players to pre-create their character and reserve their in-game names.
MapleStory 2 Founder's Packs
Ahead of the official release, Nexon and MapleStory 2 have offered players the ability to opt in to purchasing Founder’s Packs for the game. Each pack offers various unique items, merets, name reservation, a premium membership offering bonus XP and Mesos and other status effects, along with a head start.
So if you haven’t already – you might want to jump in and secure yourself a Founder’s Pack to jump in before everyone else and gain access to all these goodies!
Hi! Let me first introduce myself to you and I am going to apologize ahead for my English (while I find it very hard to write, I will consume the time that it takes for me to write this honest review to make it as understandable and detailed as possible as I believe it is worth it for you to learn the truth). My name is Unlimited and I have been playing MMOs since Ragnarok Online 1 which was my first MMO. I am now 24 years old, I already graduated, I am working and I am no longer a student since years ago, and I have been exposed to MMOs since young age. Furthermore, I have played Maplestory 1 since Beta and I stomached the game to pre-5th-Job-Update which is further in the timeline where the game have been turned to a laughing stock. I am a hardcore dedicated MMO gamer. I am by no means a prophet, but an honest, non-blinded, non-delusional player who have played both the CBTs of this game.
If you have been in the Official Maplestory 2 Forums, you may have heard of me, you might find my name familiar. I will reintroduce myself again to you for the second time; my name is Unlimited, and it’s that same Unlimited who have been ghost-banned by biased and unprofessional Moderator/s for complaining and for voicing my honest opinions about the game (which even though negative, all of them being negative, still have factual baselines). I believe that Nexon, the Forum and Game-Community staffs, and it’s white-knights have been trying and have tried to derail constructive criticisms and negative reviews about this game that comes and might come from it’s own players. They have done such a good job that they made it look like that this is a perfect game with perfect aspects and it’s having positive receptions from it’s players, even though in reality, the game is even more of a stinky garbage than Bless. You cannot hide the truth forever!
I have played both the CBTs of this game (both CBT1 and CBT2), and based on that, the game is so badly designed riddled with so many pay-to-win and bad aspects. I will say the game is beyond fixed like Bless Online. For that very reason I have quitted and uninstalled the game and paid nothing as this game is not worth my money nor even my attention. How is a bad game like this not getting criticized and not allowed to be criticized for being so bad and lackluster while many Korean MMOs out there – which even though bad, are still way better – do? That is the question that I would like to ask the white-knights who want to hide and deny the truth and the moderator/s that ghost-banned me. The MMO-industry is a competitive business, what do you expect? It will be unfair to us consumers to not know the truth of what this game contains and what it offers. Everything that you read in the official moderated forums are biased to the game and to the devs. Everyone is smiling and high of positive energy like north koreans putting an act even though the reality of the game is grim (as grim as the grim reaper awaits).
1.) The game has 10 daily dungeon limits for a maximum total of 30 dungeon limits per week per character.
2.) This is a game that forces you to play multiple characters. A main-character supported and gear-funneled by alt-characters your character-slots can occupy. Since tradability is available(even if limited with Trade Ribbon), feel free to take this to the extent of alt-accounts. Account-alts are mandatory because of prestige system, trophies, customization unlockables (eye and hair types and color-sliders) locked within leveling alts of specific classes. Not only do they want and expect you to play multiple alts, they want you to play all the classes!
3.) Everything in this game is limited and is session-based from Dungeons/Raids, Housing, Life Skills, PVP, to even the Pet-system.
4.) For a heavily session-based game, the best thing they can offer is a UTC-based timezone of service for all server of any region. This matters a lot because the reset-times are UTC-based in your local-timezone.
5.) The whole game is skill-based. Yes, this is true. There is no point of even gearing because of Fair Fight mechanics and scaling.
6.) End-game dungeons are elitist and skill-based. It has 1 shot mechanics that even the experienced players die from. Not only the difficulty is hard, they expect everyone of all playstyle to be able to clear them. This is the only option that they offer for end-game. They offer no alternative longer but easier route to people who just have less skill since everything in this game is skill-based. GIT GUD or don’t play this game at all.
7.) What is the point of gearing since the game is skill-based, the end-game is skill-based, and all contents are skill-based. It discourages you a lot and it takes away the rewarding experience. What exactly are you working for?
8.) There are no PVP gears in this game.
9.) The whole game is a dungeon-crawler. That’s all the end-game, gearing, and progression ever offers! You get stronger so you can clear dungeons more efficiently. The game literally offers nothing but this. This is your end-game as well.
10.) The game is very repetitive and boring from the same dungeons.
11.) No SEA players. Coming from SEA myself (and by the way, I live in NA East), it turns me off a lot. Oceania Server is dead and only Aussies use them. Do we even have significant number of MMO-players in Australia/New Zealand all together for you to give them their own server exclusively? It’s an insult to SEA-players and being SEA myself, I am deeply insulted! The whole East and Southeast Asia is insulted by Australia! Do you even know that MMOs are a main thing in Eastern parts of Asia (I know because I came from there, we even have gaming cafes), and for Australia(a country and region that barely do gaming as activity) to have received their own exclusive server in the exclusion of us, do you even know how much of an insult this is for us? Not only you excluded SEA, you insulted SEA!
12.) The game is heavily Pay-to-Win. The game has a direct Meret : Mesos Exchange similar to Revelation Online’s Aurum : Gythril (Imperial Coins) Exchange. The exchange is inversional (you can sell Merets for Mesos, you can buy Merets for Mesos). That is a direct Pay-to-Win.
13.) Just like Bless Online, this game also have Premium. You cannot survive in this game without monthly Premium just like in Bless (you need the unlimited Rotors and %reduction for Meso-revives). The game is already a Pay-to-Win Free-to-Play game, and to add to that, there is a Premium. The game being of poor quality, bad design, and lacking of contents, just do not justify it’s associated price! That’s just 1 thing that is Pay-to-Win in this game and this one is very major! The 50% HP Pots which is the best available HP Pots in the game being Cash Shop exclusive is also Pay-to-Win.
14.) The game is linear. From Epic-Quest levelling experience that takes only less than 10 hours to get to level 50(on CBT2 build), from Gearing-progression, the whole progression in this game is linear and that is the only experience you will get in this game in terms of progression.
15.) There is no grind to this game. Do not come to this game expecting grind mechanics (this game prohibits grind). If you can bypass the limits with alts, you will be doing the same dungeons over and over again to funnel gear. It’s very repetitive and the experience you get is worse than grinding. This game is just not fun, even if you are the type to enjoy grinding. This is not grinding, but repetitive dungeons using alts.
16.) Paid World-Chat. On a modern-MMO that have no World-Chat, it just doesn’t work! Goodluck organizing/searching for a group that you are gonna need to do everytime with no medium! You only have Local-Chat and a dungeon que que system that is random. To do this in discord is kind of frustrating!
17.) Like I said, this game is beyond fixed like Bless Online. They already screwed this game from the core design. There are so many negative aspects to this game that there is almost no positive. In the socializing and customization aspects, the game is somewhat good, in the actual progression and gameplay aspects, the game has nothing to show but failure. This game is nothing but a glorified chatroom. This is what MS1 degenerated to be, and this is the legacy MS2 carried with it. This game is nothing but a joke! Do not call this a game because it is not! It’s nothing but an online social platform because what it can offer in terms of gameplay is nothing!
18.) Open-world monsters in this game exists for nothing. They are tanks that hit like a truck but gives no significant EXP and drops.
19.) The rewarding-feeling in this game do not exists because nothing in this game feels rewarding. Not even the gears because we have fair-fight. How can you design a stat-progression-system in this game and make the whole game skill-based? How stupid can you possibly be? What are the stats even there for? What exactly are you working for?
20.) This game do not feel immersive enough at all, and there are just too many immersion breaking contents. The lore and story also lacks by a lot! I hardly find this game immersive and addicting at all! Poorly immersive game like this is one reason why the game feels boring! UGC, while they add to the extensiveness of customization, they destroy the immersion of this game, which makes it a poor trade-off in terms of game-design.
21.) Classes in this game are so imbalanced that they favor the range-DPS classes especially the Archer. How the ** are you supposed to do Temple of Immortal with a Berserker? Archers in this game is just overpowered! So what if the melee-classes do more damage? Do you even know what attack speed is? It’s the same thing that range-classes like archer have access to that berserkers and melee-classes don’t! Melee DPS’s are not efficient in this game! They are as useless as if you are to bat my legs and make me not walk again, chop both my arms, burn my eye balls, and blast my ear-drums, all being carried out. That is how I felt playing a Berserker in this game. It’s a joke that you might as well send it to the retirement-home. Classes in this game are not balanced, they are far from being balanced. How can you not see and criticize these, when you do so to the Paladins and Guardians of Bless?
22.) Almost nothing good about this game but it’s smooth combat, intuitive and organized interface, and UI, dominated with negative in every aspects of gameplay-design makes this game not worth it at all. The game feels in-immersive, linear, boring, repetitive, un-fun, un-rewarding, lackluster, stupid, and annoyingly daunting and hard in some parts.
This game is just absolute trash brought to you by it’s known greedy and retarded developer/publisher. This game capitalizes on nothing but socialization and customization, which are done mediocre-ly anyway (Revelation Online has tons of Cosmetics and Customization as well, can you say that this game can offer something as beautiful as that?) and fall very short in terms of gameplay and progression contents. Nothing is fun about the gameplay and nothing is fun and rewarding enough in the progression aspect. This looks like a cheap game in terms of graphics/art-design and especially the contents and gameplay-design, and for 2018, this game is a laughing stock! Having played both the CBTs, how can this garbage game even pass your standards when Bless failed to do so (this game is as bad as Bless!). They might as well not release this game at all because it’s quality is really poor!
Save your money and do not ever spend a cent towards this game! They need to learn the lesson Neowiz and My.com is facing right now. This game is nothing but a Cash Grab and this game offers nothing! How can you criticize other MMOs like A:IR and not a single to this one? When you play this game, it looks like no effort went to this game at all (it’s just like Bless. The graphics of this game is worse than Bless). Almost every aspect of this game is bad if you are to look at the gameplay design. The game-design of this game is a fiasco and this game will flop because of this. It will inevitably happen, you don’t need a crystal-ball to figure this out.
CASH GRAB PIECE OF ****! The reason Nexon is not learning anything is because white-knights like you keep supporting them! You should already know their history as one of the most greediest publisher!
A Cash Grab game like this deserves to flop and not sell! I played both the CBTs of this game, and just like Bless, I do not recommend anyone to even bother for this game. Absolute piece of trash!