"You may find these books particularly interesting, Adversary. Individually, they're glimpses into the origins of things. A bit incomplete, but a serviceable accounting. But taken together, they tell a story about how those who do not understand the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes." - Darmoa
The revamp is rushed, poorly thought out and should've been at least a month longer in development. In fact, Nexon admitted after its release that, in hindsight, the workload was too much and that they were short-staffed. Furthermore, the initial reveal trailer and test server over-promised what this revamp would bring, as it proposed a far better deal than what we ended up getting. They threw out thirteen years (!) worth of revamps out of the window with this one.
To make matters worse, Destiny as a revamp had more emphasis on player-based feedback than what came before. Any related forum quickly became a dumpster fire as it mainly garnered loud players with a lack of knowledge on the subject matter. Result? None of the right demands were made, and even when it rarely happened, it would never see the traction needed to be noticed by Nexon. And as a response to all of this, Nexon overcorrected by releasing too many shortsighted hotfixes back-to-back in an attempt to please the crowd, resulting in a jumbled mess of a revamp.
Because of that, the changes made to Hero are either a hit or miss. Only few changes are great, but most have been a downgrade for reasons I will explain. This revamp shows how much missed potential it was, how much has been forgotten about Hero's changelog, MapleStory's history, why things are as they are, and how easy it is to fix most of it.
Throughout this entire process, from the update's reveal to wrapping up this blogpost, I've been upset at the lack of knowledge and awareness the Hero community has on this game. I've been frustrated at how it negatively influenced the revamp. I've been disappointed in Nexon blemishing their otherwise great track record of Hero changes, and I've felt embarrassed as a bystander to see this entire debacle unfold. To that, I'll say: no more. I can either choose to keep complaining from the sidelines and lose my sanity, or I can make the best use of my experience and knowledge, and try to make things right. Two years later, and Hero is still a mess. It only further justifies the need for this blogpost.
In today's blogpost, I will examine the remastered Hero and give a critique on what we got. The discussion includes the changes introduced with the Ignition update, and those found in the update between Savior and New Age. Anything released after New Age will be saved for the dedicated 6th Job blogpost later this year, unless it's relevant to the discussion. As 6th Job builds on top of the Destiny revamp, consider that blogpost to become a continuation ("part two") of this one, as I'll be examining whether 6th Job addresses any of the issues caused by the Destiny revamp.
But to summarize, before we dive into the abyss: the Destiny revamp isn't well executed, as it fails to equally distribute its attention, changes and quality. It made for an unfinished end result, where certain parts of Hero had lots of work done on it, while others were left unchanged. There have been genuine attempts to solve some of the growing pains, but most of them are simply not enough. Believe it or not: some of these attempts made the end result even worse.
Of all the blogposts I've written in the past thirteen years, while this is not the longest blogpost I've ever written, it is the longest one that got published. But to say that writing this article wasn't fun would be an understatement. It had all the hallmarks of development hell and scope creep. I've been working on it on and off over the past 21 months, and I had to rewrite it at least thrice*. Let's see if this over 140 pages behemoth with 60000 words is going to make a change.