wanted: mmorpg with aesthetic, world, and gameplay resembling that of Mabinogi, but not 15ish years old. 😶
@chel Unfortunately, FFXIV is the only thing I've found that filled its niche for me, and even then only loosely. Not enough fantasy life. *huff*
@elfi yeah, that kind of seemed to be the case... I gave it a shot, but it wasn't really my cuppa tea. like you said - not enough fantasy life ;_;
gorgeous game, though, I'll admit... to say nothing of the music 🤩
@chel Yeah, the music's impressive, it definitely meets the same standard Mabinogi set with its set pieces! But yeah, FFXIV's crafting feels less interesting, the gathering... probably about the same tbh. At least they brought RP dungeons over in a sense! :'D
@elfi honestly I think Mabinogi kind of ruined me for mmorpgs. Every time I try to get into one the comparisons start to come instantly - the combat, progression systems, life skills, world, lore, music, aesthetic, and so much more start competing with it in my mind, lol.
FF14 really did impress me in a -lot- of ways, though I think it was the combat that kind of made me disinterested? I wanted to like it, but it just didn't click ;_;
I gave Maplestory 2 a try, but that... was fun, until you ran into the fact that progression was pretty much 100% RNG gated 😅
@chel Yeah, MS2 really didn't last long at all either. I heard about it one day and then it was gone the next
long incoherent rambling
@elfi It was... pretty poorly conceptualized tbh. I got into it on day one, and was out of it within about a month and a half I think? It had a massive map - probably 75% of which there was never any reason to visit, and that had no lore or story. Some of the areas had some really interesting looking things that seemed like they'd be important within the context of the world --- but, nothing.
The story content could be cleared within one day, bringing you right up to the level cap pretty much.
Gathering and crafting were... soulless. Life skills? None. Selling items that you've crafted? They were all character-bound (and not all that great). In general, there just... wasn't really anything to strive toward.
The game had some fun features and concepts, but the overall experience was impossibly shallow across the board imo. There was talk early on of capitalizing on the game's voxelness to allow people to make custom dungeons and things like that, which never materialized ;_;
In the end it kinda felt like it was trying to be a Diablo-like in terms of gameplay, with none of the things that make those games worth coming back to. I dunno. It was kinda tragic tbh.
I was able to snag 'Pink' as a guild name though, which was pretty cool, if short lived 😅
@chel that sounds like the struggle of a lot of KMMO maintainers. Gravity Interactive's staff seemed pretty grim and bitter after working on iRO for so long. Can't speak much for Nexon, they didn't have enough people to begin with
@elfi it seems like a pretty brutal business, to put it mildly 
@elfi honestly I'd love it if there were ever a tell-all postmortem by a developer or something. They spent pretty much the game's entire western lifespan in a rushing to try and make changes to the game to make it more palatable, which... must have been interesting to try and keep up with 😓