[EMS] 15 years of Rayque!

Farewell Abrup, as you won't be here for next year's anniversary.

Fifteen years already, huh? I kinda lost track of it a couple of years ago, so my blog helps me to remember.

Been busy with several LEGO projects (yes, deliberate word choice) and working through my backlog from the past two months (you can blame Xenoblade 3 and Gunvolt 3 releasing on the same week for that), but I should be able to get back to writing about the Destiny revamp in October. When you read it, you'll probably understand why writing it took me longer than usual.

Anyway, the past year for EMS (and MapleStory in general) has been interesting, to say the least. With the absurd amount of quality of life improvements being dumped on a frequent basis (with some being long-overdue), the game's certainly moving in the right direction, but it's still not quite where it should go. Sounds familiar.

Because of the mixed reception for the Destiny and Ignition revamps, Nexon has pretty much dropped their initial long-term plan to have every (outdated) class modernized. What concerns me the most about this, is that this would theoretically mean that Nexon's not going to rework every class from the ground up to have skeleton animation.

I'm not going to give a thorough technical explanation, as that would require another blogpost of itself, but the gist of it is that not reworking every class from the ground up will bring a very awkward inconsistency between modernized and old fashioned characters. At one side you'll have all of the classes released since Kinesis, with Adventures and Knights of Cygnus, that run skeleton animation for pretty much everything. Flashy skills with complicated animations and behavior, but more importantly: smooth(er) gameplay. On the other, you have everyone else without, with classes such as Mechanic, Kaiser, Luminous, Mercedes and Evan being a couple of examples that needs skeleton animation the most. Due to their archaic and sluggish gameplay, they struggle to keep up with the game's increasing demand for finer mobility, precise movement and quick responses. Newer skill mechanics such as built-in ammunition (introduced with Pink Bean's Blazing Yo-yo), or something as intricate as secondary cooldowns (introduced with Kain) are heavy on the game client, so they can only really be used in conjunction with skeleton animation, which old classes then can't have for their non-5th Job skills until these are reworked from the ground up.

Thus, the unchanged classes from the early 2010s are showing their age, and Nexon's eventually going to hit that physical ceiling where numerical changes to attack speed and skill damage will no longer suffice. That is why they introduced skeleton animation and the 64 bit client, and that is why they started with reworking classes from the ground up... until they stopped with Knights of Cygnus. Whether if Nexon will change their mind has yet to be seen, but I hope that they will reconsider it once they have the appropiate staff for it (which they currently do not). They kinda have to at some point, considering that the current producer of KMS, Wonki (yes, that one), has declared that Maple is going to continue for the next 30 to 40 years. At that point, why would you ever choose any of the unchanged 32 bit classes over an up-to-date, modernized 64 bit class, moving forward?

Revamps and MapleStory's doomsday of 2079 predating the Maverick outbreak of 2095 aside, Housing's pretty good. I haven't unlocked everything just yet, but I might consider to write an in-depth blogpost (similar to Monster Life, or any of my other informational blogposts) at some point, since there's interesting stuff to write about. Definitely more fun to write about than whatever I'm trying to do with that Destiny revamp blogpost, or that Xenoblade article...

Shame that the first chapter of Monad's going to be removed soon, but that's been on the chopping block ever since they removed Captain Vaga several years ago. All things considered, a four year run aint bad for such a bunch of spaghetti coding. Not to mention that Monad's story is going to continue regardless, since World Tours have been integral to the main plot for almost two decades now. And to all of you recent loremasters out there: everything is canon, and always has been. If you don't believe it, you just haven't figured it out yet and have a lot to catch up with.

Cheers everyone. Dammit, I should've bought ice cream. But that's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!