Hey everyone,

 

I know I am 2 days late. But late better than never, right?

 

Welcome to the start of our Open Alpha! Whether you’ve been with us since the internal tests or you’re just joining the community today, we’re glad you’re here.

Our Philosophy: Doing Things the Right Way

Astral started because we wanted to do things the right way. We aren't building every single tool from scratch, but we do build our own server source and have rewritten specific parts of the client to implement our own custom functionality. We do this because we want total control over the code that runs our game. It should be stable and flexible enough to handle the vision we have for it.

 

Why v95? (The Best of Both Worlds)

Most people consider pre-Big Bang the nostalgic era, and some people also feel that way about early Big Bang. We chose v95 because it represents the beginning of modernization for MapleStory. It brought a lot of necessary improvements to the game, but it wasn't too modern yet.

 

However, we also know that Big Bang is where Party Quests were not really worth doing. One of our goals is to fix that. We want the modern feel of v95, but we’re bringing back the parts of pre-Big Bang that worked, like making PQs actually worth doing.

 

Nostalgia is a great starting point, but eventually, the rose-tinted glasses come off. If you've only played classic servers, you'll eventually hit the same walls: the lack of a true endgame and a loop that feels boring and repetitive. We aren’t here to just live in the past. We’re here to take that "modern but not too modern" foundation and use it to create new memories and a game that stays interesting.

Quality of Life: Smoother Gameplay

A huge part of the Astral identity is removing clunky gameplay mechanics. We want the game to feel smooth and modern without losing that old-school charm:

• Faster Movement: We increased base walk speed (100% speed on Astral is actually 130% on other servers) and bumped climb speed from 3.0 to 4.0.

• Smarter Pets: All pets can pick up items and mesos by default. You don’t need Meso Magnets, Item Pouches, or any of those extra items.

• Combat Changes: We added jump shooting, reduced Final Attack delay to 60ms, and made it so Teleport and Charge skills can be used in the air. Also, Rush and Backspin Blow can now be used even if there aren't monsters around.

 

Reworking the Core Game

To keep the game fresh, we aren't afraid to make major changes to how the game works. Many servers aren't willing to touch the core systems, but we believe it's necessary for the game's health.

Job Identity & Revamps:

• The Future of Dragon Knight: We are going to be removing Dark Knight and replacing it with a new dragon-based job that continues on from Dragon Knight.

• A Better Shadower: Dual Blade is currently disabled from character creation and will be removed. We will be moving some of its skills into Shadower so they have a different identity and playstyle from Night Lords.

• No Cygnus Knights: We have disabled Cygnus Knights from character creation and plan to remove Cygnus Knights because they didn't really have their own identity and felt like recolored Adventurers.

A Better Scrolling System: We’ve reworked scrolling to make progression feel better:

• Simplified Scrolls: We've generalized all scrolls into three categories: Weapon, Armor, and Accessory. We’ve also removed 10% and 60% scrolls, replacing them with 30% and 70% variants.

• Balanced Progression: White Scrolls have been removed. Chaos Scrolls have been re-adapted to work only on accessories with a 0 to 3 stat range.

Boss Mechanics: We plan on reworking expedition bosses to make them actually engaging. Our goal is to move away from the "stand in one spot and hold one key" playstyle and introduce mechanics that require you to stay active.

 

Our Alpha Goals

For this phase, our focus is:

1. Bug Squashing: Fixing the issues we couldn't catch during internal testing.

2. More PQs: More PQs will be implemented. Currently we have Kerning PQ, Ludi Maze PQ, and Orbis PQ.
3. More Expedition Bosses: We will implement more of the expedition bosses but not all of them will be reworked with engaging fights yet.
4. Resistance: Implement the Resistance clases.
5. The Future of Dragon Knight: Implementing our new dragon-based jobs after Dragon Knight.

6. Initial Balancing: Doing some early job rebalances (major revamps will come later).