MabiPro: The Authentic Old-School Mabinogi Experience

G13 of Mabinogi left alot of things unfinished, and it lacks a fun endgame to work towards, which is why alot of players end up quitting and/or going on hiatus. There needs to be things that keep players incentivized to stay.

Party Quests and Iria Quest Board
While the team is working on new custom content, I think it'd be a nice idea to add in the remaining dungeon PQs for non-normal dungeons that G13 left undone. This would add an extra incentive for running these dungeons people would otherwise not bother with. Similarly, Iria could do with similar treatment with the Rano quest board. While I don't know how much of this is possible, adding in custom quests for running Iria dungeons with rewards comparable to running circles around Cor would give players more options to obtain gold, exp, and what have you. More options means more variety and less burnout from doing the same thing over and over. G13 actually has alot of content, but most of it is overshadowed by a few superior options, or rather the unvisited content is significantly inferior to the said superior options.


Aside from that, there's a few fun ideas I have.
Monster Hunting on Iria
Iria reminds me alot of Monster Hunter. Having something like periodic spawns of giant monsters akin to the Iria field bosses would be interesting. These monsters would be doable with just a small party or perhaps even solo. Maybe have quests from the quest board that would activate these monster spawns. Limiting the availability of these quests would be important.

More HM dungeons
If new hardmode dungeons are possible, it'd be great if the commonly run dungeons such as Rabbie and Math got hardmode variants. Running these for materials without the challenge and threat of death is a drag.

Now for some loftier ideas.
Commerce and Homestead
I'd like to see merchants and trade routes come to MabiPro. Probably difficult or impossible to implement at the moment but it would make the world seem more alive. Homesteads would be nice too, however I've heard people speaking out against them. Being a custom server, it's possible that we can prune the bad parts and keep the good parts of it. Mind you, I've never played live, so I don't know what it's like.

MabiNovel
(https://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/view/MabiNovel) seems REALLY FUN. Something to mess with on the side. It's the little things that count.

A Penultimate ENDGAME
There's an old MMO that I used to play. It's not very well known but did get a good playerbase in its heyday. The game was flawed and had content problems too (skills were very limited and combat doesn't get any more interesting after a certain point). However one particular thing of note was that the game had a very strong PvE endgame. The endgame of this MMO was a massive war fought in a massive field with upwards to a hundred few players participating. It had multiple phases, bosses, goals (the home base spawn point needed to be protected while you took down the enemies), and a time limit. Despite the fact the game is still alive and populated by a small, dedicated playerbase, this endgame event has yet to be cleared; all attempts have either been losses or time outs. Something as grandiose as this in Mabinogi would be absolutely terrific.

I want to emphasize that the last few points are just me fantasizing. These are big things that are unlikely to happen in the present but still ideas that I wanted to throw out there.

Experience and gold efficiency is irrelevant. The point is to give certain dungeon difficulties more of a reason to do them. The people I run with hardly touch SMs outside of dailies and special passes, and it'd be nice to have a reason outside of 'I want to get this pass out of my inventory without it going to waste' to run them. Furthermore, Party Quests encourage multiplay, something that an MMO ought to do. It's something that Nexon left incomplete in this version of Mabinogi and wouldn't take much effort to remedy, so why not?

Also I agree that dungeons have alot of pointless empty space to traverse. If I had the source code and had the ability to change this, I'd add traps, ambushes, and general random events that would occur in the empty hallways to keep players excited and on their toes. On the other hand, dungeons have more variance given that the layout is procedurally generated. This little difference makes running dungeons over and over again significantly less strenous than running SMs over and over again.


Even if you don't participate in commerce and merchanting, it still affects you. Positively, that is. Seeing all these merchants travelling and delivering goods makes the world seem more alive and helps with immersion. And, yes, immersion is important.

See, when I thought homesteads, I thought of a personal farm you would raise from the ground up. You would have to protect crops (herbs) from wild animals, and, uh, your trees and fish source from whatever; obviously not something that essentially hands you materials on a silver platter. I also don't like the idea of having a free teleport to it. I'd rather have to travel to a certain warp point to get to it as a limitation.


Not everyone's cup of tea of course, but the idea here is simply an extra activity that one can do when bored. It's not all that different from music. Music as a feature in Mabinogi is absolutely unnecessary, yet it's here. You might argue that music can provide buffs, but these are insignificant and a waste of manpower in combat. These things are for people who like to write or compose (like me). Some day, you might get bored enough to read some terrible Mabinogi fanfiction. Who knows.


In the event from the MMO I played, it was specifically an endgame event, for players who reached a certain level threshold. It's something you'd participate in after you've completed a good chunk of content. Aside from that, there was still a good range of player levels that were allowed to participate. The various tasks that the group of players on the field needed to complete had various difficulties. Lower levels would protect the player spawn points and attack the enemy fortress gate. Capturing enemy territory was left to stronger players and taking out bosses were left to the absolute highest level players.

As for the AI, they are pretty limited in this game. But, you don't need good AI for a proper challenge. All you would need to do is give monsters gimmicks, things that players would have to plan strategies to take out and perhaps even use teamwork, and no that does NOT MEAN GIVING EVERYTHING HEAVY STANDER, MANA DEFLECTOR, AND NATURAL SHIELD. Ahem. Let me give a few examples I've thought up.

Skeleton Wheels that spin around colliding with players when hit with a windmill. This means that players have to take into consideration whether to use windmill or not in the presence of one.
An enemy ability called dispel. Golems too powerful? This ability will remove any magic in an area, doing massive damage to (magically) summoned entities.
Monsters that teleport in response to be hitting with ranged magic attacks. Firebolt spam too powerful of a strategy? Enemies with this capability will teleport close in a standing position and attack immediately after getting hit.
A monster that reads player inputs and responds perfectly to them; a deadly creature that essentially sees the future.

Also the discussion of gimmick monsters brings the topic of balance to mind. Skills do not need to be nerfed whatsoever. Rather, it's better to make overpowered ones more difficult to use in situations because of enemy abilities. See: poison. Terrific for killing beefy opponents, except that most-hard-to-kill bosses are immune to it.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand.
Individually, a gimmick monster wouldn't be too much of a threat, but slap a bunch of different gimmick monsters together and you have a puzzle that players must work out and solve. Mabinogi doesn't work well as a fast paced action game, but it excels at being a strategy game, and that's where I think combat gameplay should be emphasized. It's a shame that 100% custom monsters aren't possible yet (I assume), but this is definitely what I would suggest if they were.

What I was trying to get at when I said that was that skills don't need to be directly nerfed and have their numerical values reduced. Instead, it's a better idea to make enemies resistant to that skill as an indirect nerf. Players don't like having their toys taken away, so it's better to let them keep their overpowered abilities but reduce its usefulness by giving enemies a skill to counter it. Obviously this doesn't mean to overdo it and give EVERYTHING this counterability.


The ideas I presented are very general and of course require fine tuning. A monster with this ability may only trigger it in reaction to certain element used on them, so that mages would have to switch up the abilities they use. Otherwise, just bring a buddy that has another damage type and have them take care of monsters that would otherwise be a hassle. And yes, this isn't something you give to a boss, unless if it has a bunch of mooks that mages will instead target and leave the boss to the other players.

And this goes back to the whole idea of my flavor of gimmicks, which serves a different purpose from the gimmick bosses and monsters we already have. The idea is to limit a player's toolkit in dealing with challenges. 'Do you like spamming windmill? Then here, have a monster that you generally do not want to use windmill on. Beat him some other way.' This would be the most simple of gimmicks and you would tack on more and more to make the monster more challenging to beat. Once again, you don't overdo it to the point the monster is frustrating to fight. There's always that balance.


This particular idea came from fighting game AI, which is notorious for reading player input as a means to make them 'harder'. Having dynamic group AI for monsters isn't the idea and would be difficult to implement. (Actually, you see very simple group AI with shadow warriors, lancers, archers, and the ilk.) But rather, you'd have a boss or mini-boss monster that would move and respond immediately to player skill loads. Due to limitations, let's say they only do this to the player they're aggro'd on. Say if a player loads Defense. The monster would move in, immediately loading Smash or a bolt to counter. Cancel that Defense, and the monster stops to load Windmill. Charge a bolt or a ranged ability to counter this? The monster will load Charge to stop you. In a fighting game, this would be terrible. However, in Mabinogi, this would instead be a monster a player would have to outsmart in order to beat them.

There's a problem with doing this. Only the player who gets the finish on a monster gets the drops from it. There's less incentive for someone to help another player kill a mob if they're not going to get any reward for it. Why waste your time helping someone when you can similarly help the team and get loot by taking on mobs yourself? Unless if you make a workaround so that players have an non-altruistic incentive to fight the same mob, this sentiment against mobs that have no solo counterplay will remain.

You seem to believe this is how I personally play the game, which I absolutely don't. This is how the average person would view it subconsciously. This is how a majority of the community plays, whether you like it or not, and even if you grabbed a population from somewhere else, it'd still be the same. Therefore, you need to design content with this in mind, otherwise it will never work the way you want it to.