Worst MMO Ever? - Elsword

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Anime? check
Pay to win? check
Excessive amount of systems? check

actually quite enjoyable despite this? check

Elsword is a 2.5d sidescrolling beat-em-up MMO which is actually extremely fun to play, but incredibly expensive expensive to play at a high level.

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[tarastargaze]

'It feels like it was written by a teenager going through a goth phase'
You're playing Raven.

[lentoglacier]

As someone who played Elsword for like actual 10 years of my life, i'd like to point out that there is literally not a single person who plays this game that doesn't acknowledge the fact that this game is in fact pay to win.

[hovsep]

The coolest thing i liked was that each character actually ages when getting a job advancement.

[tylerlee]

Used to play the sh it out of this game. Nothing was more embarrassing than losing your class armor and showing everyone you were poor lmaooo

[lenz]

Elsword is one of those games that has lived for so long that you can see the moments when a dev team left the game to a new one, so the design philosophy starts to attach itself so much to the monetization and the power systems that it becomes a new game that's not nearly as good as the original, but it generates more money so all is good.

It's a shame since you can see the core gameplay holding the entire thing together and later on the combat system becomes so much more complex and rich, with an infinite skill ceiling where each class justifies itself, being a completely different experienced compared to the previous ones, but then you start to see the way it was handled during the years and you get depressed when even the dungeons/pve content can't keep up with your power/feature creep.

Honestly, it's a shame. Played this for what feels 7-8 years, so I saw it change over the years, always hoping it would get better. It never did, but I wish someone could pick up Elsword's core components and put them to good use into a different game. They have no business being stucked into a game that has been treated so poorly, despite being an actual goldmine.

[Webberjo]

I played Elsword's CBT and can confirm, it was a lot simpler back then, and surprisingly not pay to win. As more content was added though, pay to win features started becoming more relevant. One monetization feature, stamina, was removed though. The game used to limit how much you could play it by consuming stamina every time you did a dungeon, and stamina potions would restore a portion of it.

[NihilHazard]

I remember saying the exact same things with my friends back when Raven and Eve were still newly released characters to the game! Feels like a lifetime ago! I will always love the gameplay in Elsword and the character movesets but almost everything else surrounding it (story, cash shop, community, professions.. etc etc) is so bad that it's hard to want to go back, a real tragedy considering how much of a hidden gem this game is in the areas where it shines.

[vkknoell]

regarding the story, the game actually had way more dungeons(and they were longer too) in the early regions and each had to be done thrice in increasing levels of difficulty with snippets of story in between. There were also more fields like the bridge. It all got removed over the years to make it easier to level characters, so the story has been compressed to what it is now.

[DrYesterday]

Regarding the overly large amount of plot scenes transitioning into new plot scenes, a few years ago the game went through an overhaul of streamlining redundant re-runs of dungeons, and severely overtuned the XP you get for doing them, so those dialogue scenes used to have a dungeon run between them, many of the early zones had 2-3 more dungeons in them, and you ran each dungeon 2-4 times. nowadays you run each dungeon once until the third to last zone, and all the original dialogue scenes are just sompressed to run together as if you auto compelted a dungeon that doesn't exist anymore.

[parkhyoungmin]

As a fellow Korean I just laugh at the huge proportion Korean MMOs have within the "Worst MMO Ever" series. It's like an achievement and the same time an embarrassing title. In the first few minutes when I see the generic interface, cash robbing features, and sexual female bodies, I can't help myself but to admit it to be a Korean MMO :D.

[Kynoss]

Resonating with this one. This was one of my favorite MMOs for exactly the combat/gameplay loop and, like so many others, got turned off by the predatory devs and massive time investments that you were forced into to make progress. A combination plague that constantly rips through very good games.

[wavelength]

Former longtime player here, and your precise breakdown of what's beautiful and what's horrific about Elsword is spot-on. It's a gem that's drowning under its own weight, a lily gilded and suffocated by systems bloat. I have no doubt some of these were driven by monetization, but others (like disenchanting and identification) really seemed like they were in there "because MMO's are supposed to have it I guess?". I tried my best to just ignore all that and just enjoy the fluid, visceral fighting in dungeons and explorable areas - until the game forced me to free up inventory space over and over, check whatever ridiculous attendance event kept chirping in my notifications, click through quests that required replaying the same dungeon a bunch of times to advance the plot, and min-max 40 different stats to avoid being two-shot by late game bosses. Every play session had genuine high moments, but they were uncommon peaks in a landscape of frustration and tedium.

Also love your call that the reason the plot feels so vapid is that there's no "involvement" with the player or their character. In a guilty pleasure sort of way, I actually kind of liked being drip-fed static scenes of a trashy shonen anime the first time through, playing as Rena - but when I played from the "perspective" of another character and realized I was just watching the same exact scenes the second time around, which didn't even have my chosen character anywhere to be found in those scenes - any illusion that I should care was shattered.

I feel like if an MMO can take the 2D Anime Co-Op Beat-Em-Up approach of Elsword and Grand Chase, but thoughtfully build up every other element of the game around that core, it would make for an all-time great game.

[sushionaram]

God, i remember playing since start of it in Europe, that was huge anime-stylised game next to Nostale - both got ruined by Gameforge tho. Logged in few days ago to check how game goes now, saw so many new characters and instantly got lost how each class have now 4/5 evolution forms. Most importantly, almost 15 years later if you queue into pvp as 70 level character you still can get matched with 39lvl player.

[Stratatician]

I've played this game on and off for 7 years now, easily thousands of hours put in, used to be a very active member back on the community "phorums" as they were affectionately called, and it'll forever be one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had playing a game, and it's for the reasons you pointed out. This game, at its core, is great. The combat and dungeons, and general hack n' slash fighting game hybrid gameplay is amazing. However, the amount of predatory monetization, system creep, balance issues, and incredibly questionable design decisions surrounding the core game completely tarnishes the experience.

As such an old player it's funny to note that you didn't even get fully through the early game / tutorial yet. Because of all the feature creep the game itself doesn't actually start until you hit the level cap, lvl 99; they basically use the leveling process as the games intro levels. This is also why the dialogue is as atrocious as it is in early on, because they truncated the leveling process by removing a ton of content (each area used to have 5-6 fully fleshed out dungeons, with the early areas even having branching paths), but they needed the story to still make sense. The story itself actually gets much better in the endgame areas but the endgame areas are their own problem.

That combat you were praising mostly disappears by the time you reach cap. The reason being is that most enemies by that point end up with absurd amounts of super armor and incredibly high health pools, so the game basically devolves into chugging pots and spamming your best AoEs to kill everything. Still good fun but looses a part of what made the game so special in the first place. The raids later on actually do a little bit to solve this, not so much in bringing back the combo aspect but more so in forcing you to actually respect and play around boss mechanics, platform, dodge attack patterns, plan bursts and freezes, etc.

About the paywall. At this point I wouldn't even call the game p2w anymore, but pay to play. The primary way the game monetizes itself is via enhancement events, where the game offers sales on items needed to enhance your equipment. The higher enhancement your equipment gets the less likely enhancing is to succeed, and the more likely it is for your weapon to downgrade, reset, or outright break. People easily spend 100s of dollars just to get one of their armor pieces up to +10 or +11, and if you're trying to upgrade your weapon godspeed with that, I've heard stories of players spending over 1000$ trying to get their weapon to +12 and having nothing to show for it. The reason KoG gets away with this is because areas are gated by Combat Power (CP). Gear from Elrianode onward (basically where KoG says the game really starts) gain additional bonuses the higher the enhancement level is, and as a result you get massive differences in power and cp the higher you go. Most of the content is completely walled off unless you are willing to pay for the gear to have the cp to enter or are a really old player that has been with the game for a very long time (but even us old f2p players are insanely shafted and unable to enter proper endgame itself).

This is one of those games that could have truly been something special if it wasn't handled so so poorly, with the fun being monetized out of it. The only reason it hasn't been shut down in NA yet is because of the whales that continue to support the game, and the reason it's still getting updates is because the KR server has always been the devs sole focus.

[breadifies]

I remember playing Elsword when I was younger and absolutely falling in love with the designs, combat and core gameplay feel. I didn't seem to care or even notice the bad story because I had such a blast with beating the crap out of things. I easily acknowledge the fact that the game is in terrible shape but when I look back on it it's all just a fond memory now

[AliveByMind]

Played that for quite a few years.

I love the gameplay and pvp (still miss those some days), but eventually quit because the grind was just too unrewarding... one day, I spent 8h farming for something non-stop (I think it was called eltier, it was some stones for endgame gear). After all that grind, I checked my inventory only to learn that I got absolutely nothing out of that grind. No eltier worth using or selling, just less potions in my inventory. No progress at all, in 8h.
Those 8h were as productive as staring at a wall for 8h.

Something just clicked, and that's when I quit the game and deleted my account.
Made me value my time more when it comes to enjoying games with grind.

[DiscountYT]

as someone who played this in my childhood, i find it SO sad the direction this game has continued to go in. it had so much potential and i'm glad to see more people calling it out for its predatory monetization and inability to take feedback from the community.

[shadic]

The thing that always put me off about this game was that the cosmetics for free to play players were always temporary. It just showed me just how the devs felt a about the f2p fans: they appreciate you being there, but not enough to let you blend in with those that give them money. It's one of the most tragic MMOs I've ever played because the gameplay is genuinely amazing, but the predatory monetization pushes me away like no other game I've played

[MrLukendo]

Let's not gloss over the fact that Josh just got all the way to Feita using nothing but combos and the six standard skills from the base class. That's legit impressive.

[AddGaming.]

Oh yes. Finally. I'm interested in what Josh has to say about my childhood~

Edit: Video is now over. Totally agree. The moment he said "if you are a long-time player this will totally make sense to you" and showed the different screens... Ok, I played this when the EU servers got online in the early 2010s for around 3 years and I honestly could only recognize 1 or 2 systems presented. I also felt like Josh didn't experience Elsword at all.
When I actively played the game you needed 2 days' worth of stamina to get to the point where he was in the end. And that is if you know what you were doing.
The reason was that dungeons were a actually big thing. You had all these branching ways to explore inside one and late dungeons like Nasord-Core (the one with the big "environmental" boss from the video) took a newbie around 20 mins at first. This is why there was a title that you got if you managed to beat the dungeon in under 10 minutes which was actually a great feat! I kinda feel sad that he could not experience the dungeons at their best since this was the part he enjoyed the most...