gMS, believe it or not, gets another first.
It was only about a month ago since we heard about New Leaf City. Little did we know that it was coming to us in the very next patch. They didn’t just stop there then.
As we learned with last night’s patch notes, New Leaf City was the first city on a new continent that hasn’t been seen in any version of MapleStory yet: A continent called Masteria.
That being said, I think there’s a lot more of a future ahead for gMS than just NLC. Speaking of which, although the area seems quite bland and incomplete at the moment, New Leaf City is great. It has a nice feel, funky music, and although the terrain and map navigation is a tad different than what we’re used to it makes things that much more interesting when trying to explore the map. Not to mention, mages and priests around level 80 should have fun with wolf spiders, which are a lot easier to handle than most other things such as Death Teddies despite doing around 500-600 more damage on touch than a Death Teddy.
Intersetingly enough, Nexon America decided not to link New Leaf City (and the rest of what will become Masteria for that matter) via Orbis, but instead using the Kerning City subway as its link to the current MapleStory world. Now, especially since my first login after the patch was in Ludibrium, I didn’t like the idea at first, but I guess they decided that a subway was the best way to fit it in. I dunno why. High level players, however, will most likely be making the trip between New Leaf City and Kerning City many times to provide their mains with the godly potions available there, and that I will get to a bit later on.
Right now, New Leaf City is made up of three areas, which judging by the layout could be expandable to six or seven, maybe more. (Nexon really left themselves open to expand on this.) The first of these areas, of course, is the town centre itself:
Contrary to what you might think, New Leaf City really doesn’t have much of a North American feel to it, unless you count the “MAPLESTORY” replica of the Hollywood sign and Mount Rushmore to be any part of it. If anything, it contains scenery from around the world, including London’s Big Ben (called Bigger Ben), Paris’ Eiffel Tower, and the Sphinx. One of these areas (Bigger Ben) is already completed while Nexon is working on the other two, and there are a few empty spots in the city to allow for future expansion.
New Leaf City also sports a hair salon, plus eye and skin care facilities, much like the other “exclusive” worlds of other MapleStory versions. This time though they decided to cram them all into one place; the New Leaf Mall. About six new hairstyles were added as a result of the last update.
As you may have noticed from one of the screenshots I posted above, NLC also has a ton of new pots, and a lot of them are actually better and cheaper than what we’ve been using before. One in particular, “Ginger Ale”, is one that’s definately gonna get gobbled up by priests, and it’s almost inevitable that the high levels will be parking their mules in Kerning City so they can go over to NLC, grab these new pots, go back to Kerning (since NLC currently lacks both a storage NPC and a free market entrance) and transfer them over. Here are a couple of the new potions that have been added to the game: Two of them I switched to, and the other one of course being the Ginger Ale potion.
Bigger Ben is an intricate maze, filled with hidden portals, warps, and quite a few mysteries as well. Each map inside seems to be constructed around such a theme. For example, there’s an area along the top of one map which is only accessible via a hidden portal… that can only be found by people willing to jump for it. Not a lot of people know about it yet, especially since this is the first version to get a place such as this.
At the end of one branch of this long mage is a map filled with a new monster; Wolf Spiders. These new monsters, despite dealing over 1500 damage by touch, are quick kills and make a potential training area for level 7x and 8x’s with lots of HP or lots of mesos for potions.
New Leaf City also sports a jungle area that, for the most part, makes up the majority of the new, unexplored continent of Masteria. Most maps are straightforward but also utilize a portal system to make moving around maps faster or to get to certain areas. Some of the later maps start to get complex, actually using two layers of terrain at the same points of the map to offer two different paths. Nexon seems to have really gone wild with their map designs when creating the first few areas of NLC.
Gryphons can be found at the end of this area which, although flying monsters, can provide a decent alternative to zombies if you can get a couple of people on the same map. Assassins and hermits won’t be very affective here, however, and neither will bowmen unless they have arrow rain/eruption.
As I had mentioned in previous posts due to its pre-patch obviousness, Maple TV also made its debut on gMS as an alternate to megaphones. A regular announcement goes for a couple dollars cheaper than a super magaphone and displays your message, along with another character of your choosing if you wish, on the top half of TV screens placed in every town around the game. Unfortunately, these newly-placed screens do tend to generate quite a bit of lag. It’s usually not much more than coming across 10 or so people however.
Thats all I have to say about this patch so far. I am VERY impressed with Nexon both with regards to the content of this patch, as it gives a good start off to a new land, and with how the patch was taken out. This patch actually ended a half an hour early (instead of the usual 3 hours behind) and all the new content was absolutely glitch-free, despite a couple of glitches that Nexon might want to get on quickly in terms of existing content. Hopefully a short server check in the next couple of days (or maybe they’ll wait until next week) will clear some of it out.
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