I quite enjoyed the Horizon series! I found the world building and enemy design really kept my interest, even if the game follows the Ubisoft formula (though I admittedly do not play that many open world games, and thus lack that jadedness).
Now I'm partway into Forbidden West after a half year break post Zero Dawn, and my partner's just finished ZD. I can't state how much I enjoy shooting components off enemies without getting trampled into the ground, like shooting apples off a tree.
Saw your comment and moved from Jerboa to Connect. Loading is so much faster, but I do miss the body text preview square Jerboa has. I can only preview it on Connect using fullwidth I think, which takes up too much real estate per post.
Overall, still a huge improvement.
Where I am WhatsApp is the go to for general communication as well as business. I also use discord for my extracurricular stuff and some game groups.
Wish Signal adoption was better here, but it hasn't taken yet with WhatsApp being so widespread.
I honestly haven't yet. I've seen it here and there back when it crossed over with Maplestory.
I think back then I felt like I was too attached to the 2d side scroller style of game MapleStory was to give it a try, though I'm a bit more tolerant of 3D styles now. That, and my computer was too old to even run games like Dragon Nest, so I was out of luck with 3D.
I might give it a go sometime though. Thanks for the suggestion.
Ditto on loading Twilight Menu. Once it's loaded launching a game is pretty fast though.
I've played MapleStory on and off for about 15 years now. I do miss when the leveling curve was so ridiculously high there was a lot more enjoyment in a type of "open world" way where you'd set your own goals in the game and that's how you spent your time.
I have lovely memories of my maple "boyfriend" at the time taking me to Florina Beach. Us desperately trying not to die because we weren't going to survive touching the jumping crabs. We ended up pulling our chairs out on a platform, and he'd aggro some crabs so they'd keep jumping up at us. It was pretty romantic, to be honest.
Then there's the ship to Orbis, the free market, the hidden paths along Lith Harbour, the slime tree, heneseys hunting ground, the sleepywood hot springs, the showa town sauna (which was notoriously hard to return from, given the level of the area, but the TOWELS). All places I remember very, very fondly.
It wasn't the way the game was meant to be played, but it's those moments that stick with you. That was in the time when MapleStory was considered more a glorified chat client.
I can still name and place most of the original BGMs, and I still keep up with the latest music (look up studio Necord on YT, they even do versions of songs in different styles!) and it's a fun Easter egg when creators use them in their videos.
I still remember the very kind people who took me along with them, even though I couldn't really type or communicate digitally at that age, and was basically a melee magician. Wish it was easier to keep in touch with them back in the 2000s.
Maplestory is more functionally a game today than it used to be, but that's also why I feel like it's lost its magic.
As I've grown up, the repetition of the grind and dailies ate into my dwindling amount of free time. With ADHD, dailies sometimes feels akin to torture you endure to get a shiny new damage skin or event cash item, and I was stuck in that event cycle loop for a while before I quit again around last year.
I still love MapleStory. The new music they're still putting out (while occasionally a miss) is still really good, and I enjoy that. But I don't think I'll ever grind to 250 and beyond (I was mostly leveling up with level potions before I quit the last time) because it's just not me.
I sort of mourn that, my loss of patience. I've become picky with the games I play, less patient to pick up and learn games that may not suit my stylistic preference.
I've tried some MMOs, a bit of Guild Wars 2, some Archeage 2, Eden Eternal, Eve Online (ok Eve is kinda cool but I'm not smart enough for this game) but I think I'm no longer an MMORPG person :(
I don't have the time to invest in them anymore, and I now prefer singleplayer indie games (because I have no friends, lol).
I also avoid gacha MMORPGs like the plague (Yes, ironic considering MapleStory is often cited as the first gacha game, but to my credit I still have never spent a cent on it), so I've never touched Genshin and games in that vein and risk developing a gacha addiction. A gaming dependency is enough for me.
I know my comment wasn't fully answering what you asked, but thank you (if you've read this far) for letting me indulge in my very fond, even formative memories of MapleStory.
I have great memories of playing it on my iPhone 4 way back then. Just as I've given up hope that the game would live to see a modern platform (was only iOS and DS at the time), suddenly I'm seeing all these ports, which is really well deserved for a great game!
SpotiFlyer is the one I keep around, though I don't use it much. I just remember coming across it on Reddit and it works well.
Been meaning to repost this since it's been one of my favourite guides but got distracted, as usual. Thanks for doing this!
It's a matter of education and how they understand the situation I suppose. I was a Reddit refugee moving over from the official app because the news really showed how anti consumer the company was being. It's not much of a protest, but I only go on Reddit now if I really need certain information, so I don't think it's a total failure.
Bots and trolls will probably follow as Lemmy grows and gains traction, but I hope by that time moderation will have improved and will be able to scale to handle that.
I think I find it a bit harder to find exactly what I'm looking for on Lemmy for support and help on various topics. So, it's good and bad. When it becomes easier to search for content Lemmy will definitely improve on that front.
I'm still discovering new instances every day and it has been a much more slow paced browsing experience due to load times and the frequency of new content.
It's definitely a different (but in no way worse) experience to what I'm used to on Reddit, but there's a whole lot less upsetting content (like personal stories of abuse and such) that show up on Lemmy, so I think it's been better for my mental health, even if I feel a bit less connected to the internet than before.
And let's be fair, it's probably for the best.
Inkbound is... disappointing.
I played the demo and it was pretty solid. It's an isometric, turn based strategy roguelike, with multiplayer support and some competitive features. I was initially planning to buy it on release.
But the price at launch was a bit higher than it would be for a no-brainer purchase, and playing requires constant online connectivity, despite supporting singleplayer play, AND came with a cosmetic battlepass out the gate.
I found it ridiculous that the game couldn't even support offline play before pushing a battlepass. Cosmetic only or no, this game is missing important functions and ultimately put me off getting a paid PC game that hasn't even gotten it's shit together before shilling their microtransactions. Smh.