[Participating in the Nexon PEAK Post Challenge]

Whenever I go back to replay PC online games I used to enjoy, I am often surprised by how different they feel from the versions I remember.

My guess is that, as countless games have appeared and disappeared, the industry has kept refining itself by addressing the strengths and weaknesses that became apparent over time, and that in turn made me think it might be interesting to compare older PC online games with their current form and look at what has changed.

In this post, I want to share my personal thoughts on how PC games are changing.

Improvements in Convenience

The area that feels most changed whenever I revisit older PC games is convenience. As more and more games have been released, the effort to reduce player discomfort and lower barriers through convenience features has continued, and at this point it almost feels as though their absence would be stranger than their presence.

Personally, the feature that makes me feel this most strongly is the tutorial.

Older PC games often had far fewer guidance systems than people might expect. Even when some form of guidance existed, fully understanding the game usually meant investing a great deal of time and effort and figuring things out for yourself.

These days, though, tutorials feel so standard that if a game does not have one, it can genuinely make me think, “This game... I do not feel like playing it...” Of course, there are also plenty of cases where people skip through them and absorb very little, but even so, it has become one of those systems whose absence leaves a strangely noticeable gap.

As a side note, there used to be actual guidebooks, and those books were where you found easter eggs and deeper information about a game.(The Kingdom of the Winds guidebook, Mabinogi Heroes guidebook)

So if a friend happened to buy the guidebook for a popular game, there were times when you would go over to their house and read through it carefully to learn what you could. Now, by contrast, information is available almost immediately, and because of that I sometimes feel that some of the pleasure of exploration has been reduced.

Another example of improved convenience would be the preset system.

In older PC games, customization was usually done by changing things one by one from the default state, but once features that offered a preset-based starting concept began to appear, it became easier, within increasingly detailed customization systems, to find a reasonable middle ground much more quickly.

Of course... if your mindset is, “I am going to make the perfect character!” then it may not matter much, but for people who think, “I want to stop customizing and actually play the game now!” it probably helped quite a lot.

Presets also really show their value in games where you need to use multiple pieces of equipment and weapons. Personally, I remember feeling a noticeable increase in comfort while playing Mabinogi once presets that let you switch to weapons suited to different situations were introduced.

Compared with the days of opening your inventory and changing things one at a time mid-combat, having everything switch with a single “click” felt like convenience taken to its logical extreme.

Beyond tutorials and presets, features such as auto pathfinding and auto hunting also stand out. Systems that once might have felt almost unacceptable are now openly part of the mainstream, which really suggests how dramatically convenience has advanced.

Original IP	Expanded Genre	Representative Games
MapleStory	Idle/World	MapleM, Raising, World
Dungeon & Fighter	Open World	The First Berserker: Khazan
Mabinogi	Mobile	Mabinogi Mobile
Lineage	Mobile	LineageM, Lineage2M
Ragnarok	Mobile	Ragnarok mobile series
League of Legends	Card, Auto-battle	Runeterra, Teamfight Tactics

Genre Expansion Based on Strong IP

As the game industry went through major mobile and console booms, games repeatedly appeared and disappeared, and within that broader 흐름 I think PC games also changed quite a bit.

Of course, it may sound slightly odd to say that games created through genre expansion directly changed PC games themselves, but when I see headlines that essentially say, “This game has returned in a new genre,” I think that also counts, in its own way, as part of the broader change in PC gaming.

There are many games now being built by taking a strong IP, one solidified through long-term live service, and pairing it with a new genre. Representative examples, in my view, would be games like “Maple Raising” and “The First Berserker: Khazan.”

Looking at Maple Raising, which combines the strong MapleStory IP with the raising genre, and Khazan, which reinterprets the Dungeon & Fighter IP in a console-style format, I sometimes think this is less a direct change in games themselves and more a continuation of the IP. Still, if we treat IP as something closely tied to the category of “PC games,” then I think this too can be understood as another kind of change in PC gaming.

The Return of Classic Games

In the past, if people wanted to play older versions of games, they often ended up using private servers. Now, however, it is becoming increasingly noticeable that classic versions are being officially operated by the game companies themselves.

I find this a very interesting change, because many older classic games present the core fun of games in a relatively pure form.

That said, even if a game can return to the past, my own time cannot, so I also feel it is not easy to jump back in too casually. The real question is how much time and enthusiasm I can realistically afford to invest now.

Recently, I saw a post on another blog saying that Illya is getting a remaster.



Illya is a game I played for a very long time, starting around the time I entered elementary school, and it is a game I feel attached to to the point that whenever it is mentioned in game-related news, I tend to read the coverage very carefully. At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, the idea of devoting all of my time to it now also feels burdensome, so while I am very excited by the news of a remaster, I also find myself feeling a mix of anticipation, regret, and concern about how much I will actually be able to enjoy it.

Personally, when classic games return, I think it would be nice if there were also versions released in a partially modernized form, like Maple Planet. (That would probably make them easier to enjoy without too much friction..)

Given the topic, I kept thinking while writing, “I should include this too...” and “I should include that too...,” so I feel like the post ended up a little scattered. I tried hard to smooth it out, but it still seems somewhat awkward to me.

Since these are only my personal opinions, I imagine some people may see things differently, so I would be glad to discuss a range of perspectives in the comments.