Hey everyone! Just a quick question: do you prefer RPG Maker MV or MZ, and why do you like it?
I own both MV and MZ, and I mostly prefer MZ. The current version of MZ is much more flexible than MV. MZ can do almost everything MV can do, except for some plugin compatibility issues.
Always go with the latest.
Hence, MZ.
I use MV, but thatâs just because when I started, MV was the latest.
Thanks for sharing! Thatâs good to know. I also like how MZ has become more flexible over time. Are there any MV plugins you still miss when using MZ?
Thatâs Good ![]()
I wouldnât always agree on âalways go with the latestâ, but MZ is definitely quite a bit better than MV. It just adds a lot of little quality-of-life improvements.
If for some reason you canât update your MV project to MZ because it uses lots of plugins that donât work in MZ, you can still use MZ to edit your project â just be careful not to use features that are new in MZ, and take a few special measures, and an MV project should run just fine being edited in MZ.
I have MV and although I know MZ has a bunch of quality of life features, I havenât been enticed enough to move off MV. That and I feel the plugin market on MZ can be a bit outrageous at times.
I prefer using MV. I compared the event editors of MV and MZ and found that their content is almost identical. For the types of content I create (Japanese-style horror puzzle games), MZ doesnât offer any revolutionary breakthroughs compared to MV. There are no extra features in MZ that cannot already be achieved or replaced by plugins available in the MV community, which is quite disappointing. Moreover, MZ has compatibility issues with MV plugins, meaning that switching from MV to MZ would require me to search for new plugins all over again.
The MZ event editor does offer quite a few new features. For example:
- The âLastâ section of Control Variables â Game Data
- The âDesignate by Characterâ option of Get Location Info
- Move route preview
- Picture preview
- Interpolation mode for picture movement
- Balloon preview
- Updated plugin command system
Iâve probably missed a few.
But to say that itâs âalmost identicalâ is still true. On the other hand, to say that MZ doesnât have additional features that MV plugins canât provide is false â plugins canât customize the editor. The new engine features in MZ certainly are something an MV plugin can provide, but itâs the new editor features that in my opinion make it worth upgrading.
MV is cheap and really powerful if you know how to use JS but even just as is without plugins and stuff itâs a solid engine, MZ is basically just a quality of life improvement with some nice features but nothing warranting the price difference.
Generally MV and MZ are pretty similar, BUT MZ I do think is overall a bit better, as someone who has thousands of hours in both (have around 15,000 hours in MV and 5,000 hours in MZ at the time of writing). MZ has a few features in eventing and Quality of Life improvements that MV never had, for plug-ins the scenes are similar but with some key differences (MV has existed longer, but it has an issue that some updates broke various plug-ins between various updates to the engine so thereâs various old plug-ins that only work with specific versions of MV, meanwhile MZ never really had a update that broke many older plugins just added compatibility for some new plug-in features in later updates).
I am going to name a specific issue I had which is why I switched. In MV with games that were a bit technically impressive, Iâd run into issues of more than one project of mine crashing without being able to figure out how to fix it. The issue kindaâ has to do with how MV handles its cache and situations itâs loading a lot, doing a lot of effects, while also doing complex constant math problems. And MV tends to crash whenever it has an overflow issue (or any issue really). MZ handles these incidents more gracefully, instead of crashing the whole game itâll have a quick lag spike and then continue running, it has a higher cache than MV so it happens less, but even when it does happen MZ tends to power through moments itâs overloaded where MV tends to give up.
Small thing but it was sincerely my reason for deciding to move onto MZ earlier in because Iâd run into this issue enough times in a few of my projects, but given I was really pushing the engine to do things it wasnât built to naturally do so my âissueâ with MV was a very specific finnicky case. But MZ does actually fix the issue I had with MV here, and Iâd say generally a pro MZ has to MV thatâs selfdom mentioned is MZ has a higher cache, bigger database, and better crash handler than MV does.
Thank you
MZ.
Because I can use the layers separately.
And the other newer options too. I never liked VX/Aâs mapping, I still donât like it, and I probably never will!