Inkwell: Classic World is not a one-to-one remake, and the roadmap waits for MapleStory Fest

The interview is conducted by Jaime from the Nexon America team and runs to nineteen questions in four chapters: Inkwell’s career, the Hyper-localization approach he brought back to Global MapleStory, why Classic World was made, and what it is meant to be in ten years. It covers different ground from his letter in the Ossyria Exploration Report: that was dates and a list of what is held back, and this is the reasoning behind both.

• The original update order is not the plan. 3rd job and “certain regions” may arrive in sequence where that makes sense, but older content will be picked rather than replayed, some of it adapted to fit, and Classic World will add originals of its own. Forgotten Hollow and Citizenship, both shown in the closed tests, are the examples he gives.
• Grand Launch on 21 October brings another piece of content that has not been shown yet, and a new boss is in development. He does not say what either is, or whether the boss is part of launch.
• A more detailed look at the post-launch roadmap is planned for MapleStory Fest in October.
• Updates are already prepared and more are being made, and the release question is framed as when each one suits the progression and the community around it, not how fast it can ship.
• The Cash Shop is meant to avoid items that directly affect a character’s stats or growth and to focus on cosmetics and “appropriate convenience items”. He declines to define pay-to-win in a sentence, on the grounds that it means different things to different people.
• Multilingual support, macOS and controller support are presented as long-term investments: resources that, he says, would be more visible spent on one more quest or one more boss if only the first months after launch mattered.

Asked whether “Classic” should mean the old game exactly as it was, Inkwell says no, and the reason is who is making it. Nemi, who worked on the original game design, and Dr. Lim, who led MapleStory’s art direction from before the Big Bang, are on the project, and other early-era developers have come back to it. That changes the question the team asks.

The answer he gives is to keep the feel and the core of early MapleStory and carry on the ideas, stories and systems that technical limits or schedules cut short at the time. It is the same promise the Ossyria letter made about Manji, the Hero’s Gladius and what Chief Stan and the Dark Lord have been keeping to themselves, made here as a principle rather than a list.

Classic World started from a problem with returning players. Someone who played ten or fifteen years ago and looks at Global MapleStory now finds twenty years of systems stacked on top of each other, and Nexon heard from people who wanted to come back and did not know where to start, or who came back and left again quickly. Inkwell says the answer was not to simplify Global MapleStory but to build a second way in, with a lower barrier, that new players could use too, and that could bring people into the wider game.

So the two are meant for different players. Global MapleStory is the one for combat, fast progression and deep systems; Classic World is meant to be relaxed and social, where talking to friends, making steady progress or standing around in town counts as playing, and where stepping away for a while does not leave you hopelessly behind. “The beauty of taking it slow”, the phrase from the Ossyria letter, is described as something the team says internally. Inkwell accepts that some players will find it slow or uneventful, and points them at Global MapleStory rather than promising to speed it up.

Classic World was not built by taking people off Global MapleStory: that team has been kept and grown, and a separate group was hired for Classic World. Inkwell and Nemi did the initial design and early development between them, and today a small dedicated team works on it in parallel with Global MapleStory. He is plain that it is fewer people than he would like, and that a good reception is what would make the case for more.

He worked on MapleStory at Nexon Korea, went on to direct it in Korea, and describes himself as effectively the last generation of Wizet, the studio that made the original game. He then oversaw MapleStory across international markets as an executive producer, moved to the United States as Nexon’s VP of Production for its Western games, and spent about five years working alongside Embark Studios on THE FINALS and ARC Raiders from their early stages. He came back to MapleStory around THE FINALS’s launch, when he was asked to head Global MapleStory from the US.

The idea he brought back is the one he described at GDC 2024 as Hyper-localization: rather than translating one game and adjusting it per region, understand how the players in each market Nexon serves actually play and build that into the mechanics and the service. He credits it with Global MapleStory growing in players and in scale to new highs year after year, and with the community’s talk moving from when the game might shut down to how it could be better, while saying there is a long way still to go.

Nothing in the interview is a number, so nothing in the data moves. What it does is say how to read the content the Ossyria report held back: 3rd job and “certain regions” may come in sequence where that makes sense, on no schedule he gives, and not necessarily as the closed test showed them. The pages built on that content already say they describe the test client. The next post likely to change that is the roadmap promised for MapleStory Fest.