Man, I yearn for the day Josh does Maplestory.

Despite the flaws it remains the only game to ever let me kick a gnoll in the junk, then grab it by throat and used it to beat other gnolls. It gets a special place in my memories for that.

I love the idea of escort quest where you can carry an NPC instead of dealing with their (usually broken) pathfinding.

Fun fact about the changes made to the game: There used to be a jumping mechanic! Complete with jump attacks too! The reason it's not in the game anymore is because the devs were so incompetent with balancing one character's jump attack damage that they totally scrapped the mechanic and no longer allow your character to jump

I'm a veteran from the early days of Vindictus. The game was much harder in the beginning and was actually quite challenging for the time. Armor and weapons had more meaning and you had to really know how to use your skills and iFrames. Nexon just made it all easy-mode but it wasn't originally intended for that.

"Vindictus isn't a world, it's a vehicle" - it used to be completely different 10 years ago when I started and there were only 3 chapters in total in the west release. You'd need to walk between the buildings to talk to the NPCs, and also the docks were a separate zone. Back then the power creep didn't exist yet, so avoiding damage was required. And then we saw the enhancement system, and that you could buy lootboxes that had a chance of containing maxed out gear pieces. And then the cosmetic shop hit, and it wasn't cleavage-oriented. It went past that and straight into bikinis :D

Vindictus was amazing for its time, me and my makes laughed hysterically at "No time to explain, grab a kobold." and throwing them at eachother. I tried it again this year, but they had deleted my character (which had paid cosmetics), everything was much more ugly than I remember, the town- and missions were completely empty. Vindictus is a ship that has long since left harbour.

I keep intending to come back to Vindictus, since it's the only game to let me grab raid bosses out of their attack animations and impale them with their own weapons. When I did fire it back up after years away, it handed me a Returning Player Bundle containing a full set of armor and weapons that was far better than anything I'd been able to grind out during the couple of years I did play seriously. I've never had a gift that good feel so depressing before.

Ugh. It infuriates me watching this and experiencing the game now since I know what the game used to be. Crafting was introduced early on because you didn't get quest gear, you had to make it as you went and farm for it. The enemies and bosses were so hard that I saw a lot of people needing to group up to fight Decisive Battle's gnoll boss. Traps and falls used to break armor really quick lowering your defenses. Secondary weapons like the grappling hook and flash bombs were necessary to trip and stop bosses, holding them down for your party to beat on. The end of the ruins levels were a 'wall' that tested your abilities. That 'drop-down' in the ice caverns taught you to push those heavy blocks through the wood bars, but they removed them for some reason? They changed it all so you could progress faster and 'catch up' to the new story parts. Even Glas Ghillean's a joke now.

Couple things that might not have been clear just from playing the game:

As someone who has played this game for over 7,000 hours and had a rank 3 character I can honestly say that everything in this video is pretty accurate. The only thing that changes as you progress is that the combat becomes more engaging, though the gameplay loop remains the same. It becomes incredibly repetitive, tedious and unrewarding, even for a multiplayer RPG. The combat is the only thing that holds this game together. Barely.

I remember just LOVING the hell out of this game, never saw myself quitting, then the RISE update came out and shit just got worse. Such a fun game, and i'm still looking for another MMO that lets me clash with bosses like Karok, one day someone will make one....maybe.

Thanks for covering this game, I've played for a long time but its basically invisible to the wider world of games due to Nexon's decisions both historically and presently. I wanted to just reply to a few bits, in a probably disjointed manner. Length warning, but I will try to keep these as brief as I can. Omega tl;dr: This explains some history of Vindictus, that it wasn't always this way.

This game's updates history is so weird.

I think the voice acting in the opening cutscene is actually pretty great despite the weird audio mixing and spacing problems

This is another MMO that was actually incredible on release (and honestly all the way through the first act of the story - in fact it even dramatically improved in the second half of season 1) but then sadly greatly outlasted its lifespan. By season 2 they'd swapped development directors and the game pretty much immediately started to go off the rails. A lot of the difficult combat encounters of the past were gradually replaced with gimmick bosses that barely take advantage of the game's combat system at all, lots of big sandbag bosses that really only serve as DPS checks, longer and more tedious missions for grindier rewards. They introduced an entirely new town and area, but decided for whatever reason not to continue the season 1 storyline and instead do something entirely different and almost completely unrelated. They realized this was a mistake later and tried to correct it by returning to the previous storyline and sort-of trying to connect the two, but.... it really doesn't work, the story just becomes increasingly incomprehensible and I was entirely divested from it by the middle of season 3. The combat, bosses, loot, crafting, and everything else also continued to degrade all this time, new systems are never really reconciled with old ones which is what leads to so much incoherence when you're playing the older parts of the game, which they've dumbed down into an extremely long glorified tutorial. Except, honestly, because there's NO CHALLENGE in any of the older content, you don't actually learn anything during that long pointless tutorial - so you reach the part of the game where enemies suddenly have 10x more health and do 20x more damage and you just get your ass kicked forever because the game never taught you how to fight anything the intended way. Oh, and now you need to do daily raid grinds for .01% drop rate items to improve your character, and buy cash shop items to upgrade them to the point where they're actually strong enough for content of your level unless you want to risk an extremely high chance that your equipment will fail to upgrade and break.

Vindictus was always

I remember playing this back in beta. Had so many fun memories with the break system, when secondary weapons actually did something, and when raids actually posed a challenge (Hidden solo Season of Macha, anyone?). But now when I log in it's just an empty shell of what once was. I'd gladly play a Vindictus 2 or some other spiritual successor should it ever come to be as long as it's not handled this poorly.

Yep, I too was very heavily invested in this game around 2011 to 2014, when it was actually challenging, and took a lot of skill; you clearly could separate the good players from the bad players. Grind was a little much, but crafting your full gear set gave so much dopamine, and seeing people fully in crafted gear was something awe-inspiring; you knew that guy worked his ass off for that gear. Monsters had break-offs that you needed to have good aim with the spear to get, and usually they were components of armour. You could die from the polar bear and gnoll chieftain, they were noob killers. Then when around Episode 13(?) got released, more and more boats started requiring 13k+ attack as raids were introduced and it was around that time (Level 70?) that I quit, since getting high level gear was nearly impossible without either being stinking rich or paying in the cash shop.

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