AS OF THE TIME OF WRITING THIS POST, THIS GAME IS 10 DAYS AWAY FROM NO LONGER BEING UNDER NEXON.

HEAR THE VOICES OF THE PEOPLE REJOICE!

10/10 game's ok I guess.

No more nexon 10/10

Fantastic game. Great PVP. Amazing combat, would genuinely recommend. Far out of it's time yet still so fun, can't wait to see how much better it will get now that it's out of Nexon's filthy grasp!

My impressions from trying Dragon Nest. Up front I'll say I didn't stay to find out how certain things work because my first impressions made me not care enough to do so, so take everything with a grain of salt. Also, the game's changed hands, so what the new management might do in the near future to change any of this I have no idea.

TL;DR: I don't hate the game, but it did annoy me, for a number of reasons detailed below.

First off, I couldn't find a way to re-bind default keyboard commands. ---[Edit Note: Uninstalled, so I can't look, but see Amazia's response in the comments about the game's two separate keybind menus.]--- To move stuff around on the hotbars, or add skills to hotbars, or open a map of the default keybinds, yes. But to do something like re-bind the WASD movement to what I normally use in games (for physical reasons, not just preferential ones), no. I looked at least three times, and it's usually pretty obvious in games and the first thing I do in them. This made combat so aggravatingly awkward for me that I don't know if I can comment with any degree of objectivity. I did still manage to hit things in the starting game, and they fell over and coughed some loot onto the ground with their dying breaths, so there's that.

Moving on... Gender-specific classes aren't a dealbreaker, and I knew going in and was prepared to ignore that the male characters look like kids and female characters look like short-skirted cheesecake dollies. Welcome to anime-meets-video games, right? To be fair, when it comes to anime or manga, my preferred style is more in the range of any version of Appleseed, say, than this, but I've enjoyed things done in other styles if they had enough going for them. The wispy-girly voice acting for the female characters was annoying as I watched the intro and tutorial cutscenes, and I ended up hitting Mute and accepting that I would miss stuff that way. Female character emote audio wasn't a lot better. The male character audio was... well, it was what you'd expect from a male protagonist anime character in this style. It didn't irk me like the female voices and didn't stick in my mind enough to have an opinion on it.

On the subject of character appearances, though... The initial appearance customization options are extremely limited -- three faces and three sets of eyes, maybe four hairstyles, a handful of hair and eye colors and skin tones, one outfit with a few pieces for which you can separately choose from a small selection of colors. Meh. Based on this limited customization, when I looked it up, I expected that Dragon Nest had to be a lot older than it is. I might have forgiven it if it was, or if its characters were so tiny they're just blobs of color with legs and weapons during play. But this isn't a "tiny blobs of color" game, so it feels like an "option B" game, wherein appearance customization beyond the initial kids' menu of choices will probably involve microtransactions. (Which I'm not automatically against, and purely cosmetic or optional stuff is where I think microtransactions belong. I do think the people keeping a game going deserve to get paid for their work; I've subscribed to or bought stuff in free-to-play games I felt deserved it that had the option to do so. But there's such a thing as going too far to shove people towards the store, and in an MMORPG of this design this falls under "too far".) A brief search suggests I'm right, I saw mention of it taking around $30 to customize an outfit, but again, I didn't stick around to find out.

Dragon Nest's initial customization is just too ridiculously limited for an MMORPG of this game's age and "up-close, face to face" design. I mean, it has animated emotes and a command which is specifically labeled as being for flipping the camera around to take a better screenshot of your character... [Edit to FYI: I hit that while standing too close to a zone portal and the game glitched, locking me into snapshot view with no menus and no key command response but not outright frozen. Tabbing out and closing the game program reset it.] To me, Dragon Nest looks like a game that doesn't promote getting attached to an MMORPG character enough to stick around unless you've already spent money on it, but is also built to constantly remind you of the lack of customization you have access to for free. Which feels kind of like asking me to be attached to a paper cutout because it's possible to draw a face on it if I spend money to do so. As noted above, I don't know if the new management plans to change how customization works, or if so, in what ways.

I was prepared to let this pass, albeit not happily. Until I ended up with an inventory full of free "gifts" for which I hesitate to use the term...

The "free gifts" currently available ingame are part of what made me curious to play it, which is presumably a part of their purpose. But compared to other MMOs in which a gift item is typically an item, you assign the character who gets it and it's theirs, these are more like "real-time-limited free first-time rentals". I opened the mailbox and pending gifts panes and saw realtime expiration timers (meaning: they will expire in that time whether or not I open them, use them, or play the game at all) of about a week to about a month. Timers again on the resulting boxes once accepted, and timers yet again on the items once removed from the boxes... the ones I could even open, that is. One of these boxes required a minimum level 90 to even receive before it would rot, and a couple items from one I could open had a minimum level of 30 to use.

I seldom hurry in MMORPGs, I've never attained max level in my first year of playing one. This is down to my playstyle and time spent hanging out with friends or roleplaying with them, as much as to grind factor or time available to play. So the "fastest MMO" splash used to tout this game wasn't a selling point for me, and a row of ticking timers in my character's bagspace wasn't encouragement to go play or invite some friends to play with me, it was encouragement not to. Finding mention that to continue having the items from opened "gifts" after they expired, I'd have to pay some form of item rent, didn't help. I assume if I didn't get to the required level in time any unopenable boxes would evaporate.

Again, I don't know if "rent" meant real-money microtransactions or ingame currency, I didn't care enough at that point to find out. I'll tolerate certain kinds of rental in games, too, specifically only AFTER I've had time to learn the game enough to decide if those things are worth investing in. But when I get a gift box as a newbie in a game that I have to level up in a rush in order to open, when I open that box, whatever's inside had better BE a gift: done and dusted, mine from now on. Not a thing with the same timer on it as the box, that's just a disappointment no matter what it is. As a new player I have no real idea whether it's worth investing the time to get and then to rent to keep that stuff. Which I suppose may be part of the point.

A required level of level 30 and maybe a month I get in a game that says it's "fast"-- or I would, if the resulting item didn't evidently expire at the same time the giftbox it came from would have, instead of "race to get it, but once I have it it's mine". Maybe it's encouragement to get out there and play and group with people to beat that timer. But rushing to level 90 for something that might then just go away or lock-until-paid anyway? Nope, I don't want aboard this particular hamster wheel.

So, after all of that, a row of countdown timers in my character's inventory was what finally made me feel like this game isn't for me. Seems counterproductive for stuff meant to be player bait. I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing about this game, but it just couldn't draw me in long enough for me to want to find out.

Installed,fapping to great excitment for game, watched opening(skipped it)
-finds out for some fudging reason i can't move the mouse in screen
-rages, slapped myself if it works for magic
-thinks it would be better to just download the game from website

Dragon Nest summed up:
Play 3-6 dungeons...
Play them again a dozen times each because that's how quests work...
Move to next area...
Repeat until max level...
Do the same raid until you die inside...
Wait for big update and do it again.

I miss the good ol' days, when PVP was fun, PvE was grindy, and communities were made. I've followed this game for awhile now with +4000 hrs logged in (favored the launcher over steam) and i'm pretty bummed about the route this game went. One hit bossess and mobs all the way till cap in PvE, PvP is pretty dead now, and so is alot of the towns. Mostly just vets and idles lookin for them ever so juicy likes. This game will always have a great place in my heart, and wallet. Here's to hoping MapleStory 2 comes to us Westerners and that its not ♥♥♥♥ on like this. I'd reccommend if we could go back about 3 or so years...how the time flies...

I like this game.

This game destroyed my life and stole what was left of it. 5/7

It's allright.