Hello there, viewers all across the nation.

At this very moment, I’m at home, getting blasted by the AC, crappingwriting this PEAK Challenge post.

Honestly, I’ve never really been the type to love solo content that much in RPGs.

Which, I mean, makes sense, because in the end the whole point of an RPG is to build your spec, the motivation for that usually comes from seeing someone stronger than you and immediately getting psychic damage, and the fastest way to patch that hole in your soul is, obviously, good old “party play.”

But, well... what are you gonna do. The moment I settled on Elsword as my main game—a game where there aren’t that many people around to begin with and a lot of the remaining ones already have pre-made parties locked in—I also became a working adult with not enough time, not enough stamina, and absolutely not enough patience to keep clinging to party play forever..

People say you can just do something else while recruiting for party play, but that’s really not as easy as it sounds. Let’s say I assume recruiting will take about 30 minutes, so I start a round of Jeungbaram, and then... huh? The party fills in 10 minutes? It’s not like I can just go “welp, time to ditch” and heroically smash the quit button, and since “there aren’t many people” doesn’t always mean “recruitment will definitely take forever,” the reality was that I usually just sat there twiddling my thumbs and staring at the party finder window like a deeply unfortunate NPC..

Starting around last summer, Elsword began supporting a solo play mode for “retired” content, and honestly, it was more revolutionary than I expected. Even if it was retired content, it still felt like it was trying to flex the fact that it used to be active-duty endgame once upon a time, so instead of having to fight over healer and support positions that are basically mandatory in party play, or getting dragged into the sad little war where someone stronger than me snatches up party members first and leaves me standing there alone like I got picked last in gym class, I could just go in solo, do what I needed to do quickly, collect the rewards, and leave. Extremely convenient, not gonna lie.

On top of that, the fact that patterns you could only break in party play were reworked for single mode actually made it feel fresh, almost like new content that was easier to get used to.

And back then, Elsword players like me really did welcome solo play with open arms, and KOG took that as a positive sign and gradually kept increasing solo content.

At first, everyone was cheering for solo content, but I guess pleasing every type of player was never going to be easy. In the end, solo content kept increasing, while party play mostly stayed where it was.. and eventually players started voicing their anxiety and frustration over the growing amount of solo content, so when the summer roadmap was revealed, KOG basically answered with a very direct “see, we are still doing this” by saying party play would continue to be encouraged through the release of new raid content.

Of course, almost in the exact opposite direction of that statement, they also showed a schedule for releasing a single mode for the ‘Doom Aporia’ raid—currently one of the game’s end contents—even before the new content arrives, so they were also making it clear that solo content would keep being supported. Personally, I would’ve liked it better if the order had been reversed.. but for players who prefer solo content, maybe this was the better result after all.

Now that I’ve written all this, it somehow turned into a post criticizing solo content, but I was also negative about its release at first, and once I actually tried it, I definitely felt that solo content has a real place. At this point, all I can do is trust KOG when they say they’ll keep expanding this kind of solo content alongside party play, and looked at another way, that basically means it’s an MMORPG that’s also pretty good to play alone, right?

Anyway, this was just the rambling of one person who thought solo content was a good idea, but then did so much of it that I started missing party play again.

So, if you’re tired of party play and feel like taking a little breather, how about giving Elsword a try now that it’s a game where you can enjoy solo content once in a while too?

-Participating in the Nexon PEAK Post Challenge-