Why was Ragnarok online so fun?

OVER THE YEARS OF PLAYING MANY MMOS AND MANY OTHER TYPES OF ONLINE
GAMES IVE ALWAYS YEARLY COME BACK TO RAGNAROK ONLINE, ONE DAY I STARTED
WONDERING WHY?
WHY IS IT THAT IM DRAWN TO THIS 10+ YEAR OLD GAME EVEN WITH NEW GAMES
OUT TODAY SUCH AS WILDSTAR, TERA, ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE, GUILD WARS 2 AND
SO ON... NOW A LOT OF THIS MIGHT BE ME USING NOSTALGIA TO EXPLAIN WHY
THINGS ARE GOOD OR BAD BUT I DID ASK AROUND OF FORUMS AND PEOPLE DO SEEM
TO SHARE MY SENTIMENT OF WHAT MADE RAGNAROK ONLINE WHAT IT IS.
IM ACTUALLY WRITING THIS BECAUSE THERES A SPIRITUAL SEQUEL COMING OUT
CALLED TREE OF SAVIOR, AND PEOPLE TOLD ME HEY YOU SEEM TO GET IT WHY NOT
EXPLAIN IT A BIT MORE INDEPTH SO IM GOING TO TRY AND DO JUST THAT. EXCUSE
MY WRITING, SPELLING AND OTHER ERRORS IM NOT A NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER.
NOTE: MOST OF THIS IS PRE-RENEWAL BECAUSE THATS THE RO EVERYONE LIKED AND
LOVED AND IT MADE RO WHAT RO WAS.
Graphics
Isometric View with 2D sprites / 3D Backgrounds
Te frst thing you see when entering the game obviously. Its what made Ragnarok online the game it is. It has
2D sprites for most of the interactive objects in the game such as players and monsters. Some trigger objects
in the background were 3D. Less is more is the name of the game here.
Te 2D sprites and 3D backgrounds enabled
a very curious thing. Te game was grid
based and one square could be occupied by
any number of objects so you could make
a train of monsters and in the end they
would at most when you stopped occupy 1-3
squares when attacking you if done correctly.
Tis in combination with AoE skills enabled
you to kill massive amounts of monsters at a
time. Going for 40 or 50 monsters if you had
a tank that could pull them was not
uncommon. But Ill cover this later...
To the lef we see a an assassin using hide
and grimtooth to kill monsters.
Also another advantage of the 2D/3D system was the fact that you could make visually impressive monsters
and graphics that stand the test of time with minimal efort. Just have a look at a monster sprite above. As you
can see with few frames you got a fuid looking and moving monster. Tis was done cheaply and very proba-
bly quickly. Tat meant that in almost every area you would fnd new and unique looking monsters. Te only
constant in RO was porings. Tey were obviously a fan favorite and so the poring is pretty much the only
monster sprite that got reused for a quite a number of monsters, there was a few others but basically from one
part of the world no another there was always new monsters to be encountered with a poring favor. Tis also
naturally meant that players and their headgear could be designed quickly and cheaply so Ragnarok for its
scale had a ton of headgears for customization. It also meant that the anime artstyle that we all love was kept
there and to this day Ragnarok Online while looking dated looks nowhere near as dated as Dungeon Siege
that also came out in 2002.
Te User Interface or Heads-up Display
Minimalistic and ofered a
clear view of the battlefeld,
you and your friends sprites,
and the monsters. Only the
necessary information was
there, unlike modern MMOs
which food you with useless
information. Part of this is
because Ragnarok Online had
no real quest system but it still
today looks sleeker compared
to more modern ones.
It displayed the necessary in-
formation in an non-intrusive
way. XP, HP, SP, money and
skills everything you needed
was there in a very compact
form. Even when you were in
a WoE or PvP situation you
didnt really need anything
else.
You all have probably seen these insane WoW UIs flled with every possible information ever during raids.
Like the one pictured above. Below we have a picture of a Ragnarok War of Empirum massive battles between
players.
I think you see the diference. Wow technically could be played with your graphics card shut of. You simply
have to watch the numbers and the cooldowns. Positioning while it was important wasnt SUPER IMPORT-
ANT. Menwhile in Ragnarok the action is actually happening on the screen. You have players moving around,
you have spells being cast. You need to watch you positioning VERY CERFULLY. Ragnarok was a grid based
game where there was a ton of AREA OF EFFECT buf, traps and spells. Step into a storm gust and youre fro-
zen. Manage to cast Magnetic Earth and suddenly the enemy cant pre cast. Step on a mine and die or be sent
backwards. Positioning and the actual things happening on the screen where the thing that interested you. Not
your user interface flled with tons of data. Also worth mentioning is speaking to NPCs made a huge picture
pop up that showed then in 2D instead of the sprite. It was a really nice feature.
Te Art style
Ragnarok Online is what many in the west would refer to as an Anime MMO it has this cutesy Japanese
looking art style, everything is made out of sprites and the only way to customize your character was to
color the sprite or get a headgear but more on that later. What made Ragnarok attractive to a lot of people
was exactly that art style. Anime fans focked to it. It was their frst online anime game. People looked the
same (classes) while some would argue it was a lack of customization I would say it simplifed things and
Im glad Tree of Savior is sticking to that. Naturally we need to talk about the monsters and the humble
poring. Really its just a cuter version of a slime from Dragon Quest but boy did it become iconic. It was
cute, it was easy to kill and it was found everywhere. And they simply changed to color or added cute wing
and they had a new monster or boss. I dont know who came up with the idea but it was awesome. And
the idea was consistent. Low level mobs were cute little fuzzy things. You could usually tell by the look of
a monster how strong it was. Tere was no Monster levels above their heads or even HP bars. People in
the old days had to use Monster Property/Sense to get the monsters stat. And that skill was limited to the
Mage Tree but the party could see it. Tis made the game a lot more mysterious and encouraged explora-
tion, but also punished it because well you could die and lose XP if you wandered too far or made a wrong
corner in a dungeon. Te fact that you could sort of tell monsters strength by their looks also made a twist
late game were a cute monster would destroy you in 2 seconds. I always remember going down into Payon
Dungeon and seeing a cute pantiless catgirl only to get destroyed by it and its horde of summoned nine-
tails. Te point is the art style knew a great balance. How to make things scary, how to make things cute
and how to make things deceptively cute.
Te Classes
Every class had a unique sprite. Tat made a long leap in recognizability of players and what function they
served. When I frst started playing I went into town and saw all these people. It was clear who was a knight,
who was a priest and who was a mage just by one glance. Knights had armor, Mages had robes, Priests had
clerical apparel merchants had carts and a big bag, archers had light weight clothes suited for well archery and
thiefs looked all thievish. When I was in a dungeon and I saw an acolyte I could ask for a buf. Te point is un-
like 3D MMOs you knew who was what, look at this WOW picture of armors and youll instantly know what I
mean. Plus the WoW armors changed every few levels and they all mostly have the same looks. Te fact is that
the when youre playing youre zoomed all the way out in any MMO you naturally want to see the battlefeld.
What made things worse for 3D MMOs is that recognizability falls of with distance drastically. So you cant
tell who is what and things just become complicated.
While you were a novice you could have something to look forward to. Tese was a lot of class mobility and
back tracking. It really enabled a lot of communication between people and made cosmetics stand out even
more!
You when you could see all the high level classes you might want to change your choice and say hey Hunters
are cool but I saw this bard once and he a lot cooler. Maybe Id become a bard later! Anyways the point was
you knew who was what.
Gameplay
Fixed drop rate, XP rate and item stats
Now this is by far the biggest diference in my opinion except for the graphics between Ragnarok online and
every other MMO out there ever. Now Im going to have to touch on a lot of points here so please bear with
me.
While this might seem to be insignifcant to some, its actually one of the biggest gameplay features in
Ragnarok online. While other similar games like lets say Diablo had totally randomized loot tables with
randomized items, other MMOs like WoW had drop tables so damn randomized you couldnt hunt anything
specifc in general. You had a chance that something uncommon or common would drop depending on your
level there was no control. Tey also had these silly limitations placed on them because of that system where
you wouldnt get any drops or XP if you were above a certain monsters level. For all intents and purposes all
the grey monsters 5 levels below you were basically irrelevant, removed gameplay, elements that had no
purpose and so were the areas you visited flled with these monsters. Once something was done and you were
above it, it was useless and that in my eyes that was a big mistake because it leads to a huge decrease in class
mobility. To this day a lot of MMOs continue this trend and I fear Tree of Savior might go in this direction
too but no info has shown up yet. Basically in a modern MMO you start at point A and go to point B. Te de-
signers designed areas and monsters for you to fght. Like a map in Ragnarok Online where it says from level
1 10 afer that its useless. Anyways on to the main point to make you understand why fxed XP and Loot
are great force in this class mobility.
So whats this class mobility I keep talking about. Well its the interactions of low level players with high level
players and replayability of content in low level areas. In Ragnarok Online as you know monsters have a fxed
drop rate with fxed stats on the items. If you kill this thing a certain number of times this will drop. Now what
this system enabled was making content relevant to everyone at all levels.
A Pupa would drop a Guard [1] or a Pupa card. While being low drop chances these two items were used by
medium/high tier players. Same with a lot of starting area monsters. Fabre cards, Peco Egg Cards, Picky cards
and so on, they were cheap alternatives or actually required equipment for some high tier classes. Tis would
lead to high level characters farming in low level areas for items and cards or at least buying them if they were
sold for quite a high price because the demand was big. Low level players would get to see the higher class-
es, they would see high level spells and could if wanted interact with high level players. Tat would lead new
players to this feeling of I want be that one day or I want play that class next plus it enabled an economy
for new players if they were smart and new prices, naturally this also lead to a lot of stealing and unfair prices
but that was also one of the charms of it... If you just started the game and found a Pupa card you could sell it
depending on what server you were on for a lot of money by starting players standards.

Tat was very valuable starting money that enabled you to buy items, consumables, travel or simply have the
security of money. Tis made interaction between players a lot more exciting in the lower levels and it made
content of low level areas replayable to higher levels. If you farmed low level monsters you would still get the
XP and the loot. You were still doing something relevant. Even if your XP meter was moving along 0.01% per
Pupa.
And lets not forget the fact that a fxed drop rate basically gave you a meaningful grocery list. You knew what
items you needed, you knew where to get them. You went out there and you knew what you had to do. It was a
really good time waster and the game knew how to make grind seem fun.
Te combination of this fxed drop rate, fxed Base XP and fxed JobXP gave rise to content replayability and
farming diferent areas. Like I mentioned before Modern MMOs are all about hand holding while RO was an
explorative sandbox type of game. So you had basically 4 types of farming spots. And then these was a mix of
these depending on the area.
Great Base XP, Okay Job XP, No worthwhile moneymaking loot, No Good low chance drops
Great Job XP, Okay Base XP, No worthwhile moneymaking loot, No Good low chance drops
Really good low drop chance loot, no money making loot, okay Job XP and Base XP
Tons of good money making loot, okay JobXP and BaseXP but no good low drop chance loot.
Tis system also forced you to think. How fast am I killing this monster/s? What is my hourly XP average?
What is my gold average? How efcient is this area compared to others? Te game had depth and a lot of
things needed to be considered and explored, if you were in a high level area and you were a VIT character
there was always the question of how much am I spending on healing and how much am I earning . To level
in this high level area I have to spend on healing compared to a safer place so whats my balance? In modern
MMOs this never comes up because healing items are always highly limited to prevent spam and most mon-
ster combat is at most 5-10 vs 1 and maybe at most 5 levels higher then your character while in RO by drag-
ging creeps around you could easily end up in a 40 vs 1 situation if you werent careful and these would be like
monsters 20 levels higher the you.
In a modern MMO the designers design 2~3 areas for your level range and later maybe just one. Tey hand
hold you with quests give you gear to progress while you kill monsters for irrelevant quest aka Bring me 5
Wolf Hairs and you get these boots and then the funny thing is only every 3rd wolf drops wolf hair. But
what this system does it is it eliminates the class mobility seen in RO. Content becomes irrelevant and obsolete
as you complete it because even if you havent completed that one boots quest you know that in the next area
you will fnd another one just like that. Tis leads to a lack of replayability and it also leads to predictability be-
cause youve seen this formula a thousand times. At high levels it makes high level characters never want go to
the starting areas ever again. Tey have no beneft from that area, no XP, no Money making, no Gear, basically
NOTHING.
What RO did was tell you: Hey NPCs sell basic gear, want better gear HUNT FOR IT. Where? Heres the map
and what drops what. You were encouraged to go out to the wilderness and hunt and survive. And afer your
adventure was complete your gear while not visible would show were you have been. Kind of like Monster
Hunter really. Now naturally this system is more grind prone and it also user unfriendly if these is no interface
in game to tell you what drops what or where to go while this leads to more social interactions it also leads
to confusion on the new players side and thats something new MMO makers want to avoid AT ALL COSTS.
Gaming is for everyone and its a fun experience with quick rewards and no work.
Ro eventually solved this by having websites where you could easily alt+tab to them to see things. So this area
became at frst was a huge mountain to climb but afer a while the community developed to fx things and
then later an actual map ingame was made.
So basically the combination of NPCs selling okayish items but nowhere near as good the dropped ones, the
fact that fxed loot and XP gave you things to hunt and the fact that even if you came home with nothing you
still maybe got money and you could buy the thing you wanted on the market. All this lead to more commu-
nication between players, more replayability and more incentive to make grind actually fun. Honestly to this
day RO is the only game where I can just go into the wild and grind. I dont care about quests or anything and
its still damn fun!
Market
Now this is a low point for Ragnarok online and its mostly because the game was made such a
long time ago. As you probably know Ragnarok Online had a dedicated class just for well market-
ing and later crafing. Tey had a great idea together with it and thats the DC/OC system where
you could sell loot for more and buy NPC items for less. If you wanted to play and make money
efectively a merchant at least with OC/DC maxed was a mandatory thing. While a very interest-
ing class on paper they in my opinion were just a hassle. Slow to level, requiring totally irrelevant
stats for combat to craf. People mostly leveled these classes by leeching XP hidden somewhere on
a map from a leeching party.
Anyone that played Ragnarok online knows what a horrible market system it had. First at in
the beginning you had to basically leave your PC on with the merchant to sell things while you
werent there. Ten the fact that each shop can only contain a certain number of items was a huge
limit to the economy want to sell more items? Make another account with another merchant.
Ten the fact that items had weight so you actually had to have that too to sell them. Ten the
fact that there was literally no search system. Ten the fact that there was multiple markets spots
around the server. Ten the fact that people would some stores anywhere on the map. Te list
goes on and on
You had to click and visit each store individually and that could take around like from 2~20 min-
utes to do if the server was populated. Basically RO had a horrible outdated market system and I
know well get a normal auction house in Tree of Savior. Tank god for that too. I mean look at
that picture. In some cases it was so full you couldnt even click to move!
But still this was one of the charms of RO and its probably nostalgia speaking here. Its interesting
to note that a lot of Korean MMOs sufered from this too. Maple story is a popular example but
there was a lot more.
Skill and Stat System
In order to explain about the skill and stat system I need to explain a bit for about the classes.
Te skill system in Ragnarok online was based on Classes and JobXP. What made it unique compared
to a lot of other MMOs out there is you started as blank slate. A novice that had limitless potential a
Tabula Rasa . You could grow into whatever you wanted. As a novice you couldnt even sit down before
you had leveled a few job levels. You were literally new to the game. Te game told you : Hey! Look at
the skills you get when you level up and youll see what things you can do ingame. Sit to regenerate more
SP/HP, use emotions to communicate, make chat rooms, party up with people and use storage.
Its a very nice non hand-holding way of introducing people to the basic functions of the game. People
arent stupid but most new games dont agree. Tey tell you USE WASD to move or lef click to move. I
as a 13 year old kid sat down and right away I got it. Click on the ground to move, click on monsters to
attack, right click to rotate the camera. Like I said people arent stupid and Ragnarok respected that.
As you know there were 6 starting classes in Ragnarok :
Swordsman, Mage, Archer, Merchant, Tief, Acolyte
Each of then in turn could turn into 2 more classes and then they continued to evolve and specialize. Te
2-1 classes were basically extensions of the frst basic class. Mage turns into a Wizard gets more awesome
spells. Easy to understand right? Now what made RO so unique was the second set of classes (2-2) that
changed your play style basically fipping it a 180. Tings like Te Sage, a class thats based on a mage
that purely supports his team mates with really interesting game changing spells( a class that evolves
from a purely magic DPS starting class). Making your allies weapons change element, making certain
elements in an AOE stronger, making a feld of water where special Water Only spells could be cast such
as the highly damaging Water Ball.
Basically all the 2nd classes somewhat deviated from the frst obvious class they were made from. Aco-
lyte->Priest make sense bigger heals and such but when you turn into a Monk you suddenly become the
class that deals the most single target damage in the game, and thats a class made from a poor supporting
Acolyte! Te classes were really inventive and creative and ofered tons of customization.
Stats System
Now that I explained the class system, time to speak about the stats. Stats in Ragnarok Online where one of the
biggest customization options available to you. While your class defned who you where and what you basical-
ly did the stats expanded upon that and enabled you to build diferent kinds of builds in conjunction to your
skills. Todays modern day MMOs usually auto-stat you, hand-holding you so you cant make any mistakes but
you also dont have any customization. In Ragnarok Online this was diferent. Te game did tell you as a mage
you needed Intelligence and Dexterity and some Vitality based on your gear and hints in the favor text but
you were free to do whatever you wanted. Tere was a freedom not seen in todays modern MMOs. Want to
build a Wizard that goes out there and attacks people with his staf fast? No problem level strength and agility
and youre on your way to becoming a pretty unique wizard! Te same was the case for most classes. In fact
some of the second classes gave you just that option. You could build a battle sage and go around smacking
people with your books if you so desire.
Te stats were what made RO one of the things it was a sandbox game. Te freedom of a sandbox where you
could at frst ruin your character if you had no idea what you were doing but then learn from the mistake and
change to play totally diferently. Almost every class in the game had at least 2-3 reliable builds some more
useful then others but they were there. Priest could opt to go DEX instead of VIT to become fast casting buf
machines but at the expense of HP and Armor or you could level your luck and go take on the undead with
the Turn Undead skill.
Tere was some really nice things to go with the stats in terms of bonuses and gimmicks you got. Agility
characters had high evasion but low HP and they played this game of is my FLEE high enough for this area
to level in efectively. While Vitality characters had bonus pure damage reduction that enabled them to get
hit by lower level monsters for only 1 HP. It was this diference in play style that made Ragnarok online feel
diferent then your run of the mill MMO. Tere is usually no high evasion characters in modern MMOs they
simply dont work with their heal systems and automatic stat allocation plus the fact that most of them dont
even have a chance of you missing the monster, there is no glass canons that could cast incredibly powerful
spells AoE in the blink of an eye. Te combination of Rangarok having allocating stats with the fact that you
had things like evasion chance (FLEE) and hit chance (HIT) mean that all non-spell casting characters had to
at least have some point in dexterity to actually hit their opponents. Stats are one of the major things I liked
about RO and I think most people too. Simply the freedom of a sandbox where you could explore and play
in. Not everyone wants to make the min/maxed ultimate killing machine. Some people wanted to experiment
with diferent play styles.
Now that I did mention min/max-ing it was both a positive and negative thing with RO. As I mentioned be-
fore classes usually had about 2-3 builds you could build. But you had to stick to what was the best in compet-
itive. You knew Apple of Archer gave you +3 DEX and you had to build you stats around that. Te fxed drop
rate and fxed item stats meant that you had a grocery list of things to get. Tings that will ft into your build
and make you do as much damage as you possibly could deal. Tis system was prone to quite some change
with patches because in the early days of Rangarok there was no stats or skill resetting so if some new head-
gear with +4 DEX came out that was a point that could have been put else where and when this happens over a
span of multiple items it could become a problem.
So while the stat system was not perfect it enabled people to build things like Battle Priests, Battle Sages, Luck
based Crit Assassins and Two Handed Knights or VIT based Spear Knights and so on just listing all the possi-
bilities would take half a page.
Like I mentioned before modern MMOs dont simply do this. Tey auto stat you giving you stats based on
what class you were. Others give you technically the option to change your stats with gear but it never really
gives you the freedom and the focus RO stats do. In the next paragraph Ill also speak about Skills and why
they re both a limiting force and a very strong customization option. But do know this Modern games really
hate stat systems. From Tera, Wildstar, WoW and everyone else in between these stats became numbers that
dont really matter. In the case of WoW they snowballed to massive plus +300 STR numbers that dont really
mean anything. Ragnarok at frst, for years kept things simple. Maximum stats for a stat with pure leveling and
allocation was 99 you could go above that with gear and some crazy things would happen afer you went above
100+ such as instant casting as mages.
What Im trying to say here is RO kept adding classes and content yet it didnt scale up the levels like WOW
does. Every expansion literally eliminating all the previous content and saying THIS IS THE NEW CON-
TENT YOU NEED TO PLAY NOW THE OLD CONTENT IS OBSOLETE. Tis stands in stark contrast with
Ragnarok onlines system where new updates and expansion had new items that changed the game but the
changes didnt make you obsolete and that one item you grinded for weeks didnt suddenly become useless it
simply became a little less efective. Tis system was pretty much fxed with stat and skill resets that enabled
people to change their builds afer new items came out so the precious stat point could be reallocated to a
more optimum confguration aka MIN/MAX. Now things did change for RO renewal came out but lets look
at how Ragnarok introduced a whole new breed of classes improving on the old ones without changing the
game in any signifcant way to make content obsolete.
Transcendent Second Classes came and introduced tons of new content, new areas, new bosses it was a full
blown expansion to the game. Yet one thing didnt change. Te max level was 99. Tese new classes had new
skills and new gear but gameplay didnt become obsolete. Te new monsters and areas needed the new skills
and the new gear to be combated and so afer a good 5 or 6 years the good old Fabre with its card was still
there as relevant as ever with the only +1 VIT card that went into your weapon and the only for any class to get
a weapon that had +4 VIT on it. Content didnt become obsolete like on WoW it expanded on itself. Picture
below is a Transcendent class using old ear and a knight using new gear.
At the begning you could pick what
stats youd prefer to use.
Skills System
Now as you know skills point in Ragnarok Online were
limited. You had a certain number of skill points and
you got them by leveling your JobXP. Some monsters
have better XP then others and that meant you had
to decide what you wanted to do frst. Get money, get
base XP or get job XP. A lot of people wanted to get
out of their poor and limited frst classes when they
saw all the big high tier people running around so they
jumped on the JobXP ship.
So afer you were a level 9 job novice you could
advance to one of the basic 6 classes. But then afer you
were one of the basic six classes and you got to know
your class and explored a bit and you naturally
wanted to jump to your 2-1 and 2-2 classes. Now thats
were some interesting decision making came in. In
Ragnarok online you have an option. Do you want to
go right away and become a 2nd class at job level 40
or do you want to wait till job level 50 and potentially
bring a whole 9 skill points so basically one almost
maxed skill into the second class. For some classes
such as an acolyte 50 was basically mandatory. But for
some classes it was okay to go with 40. It really
depended on how you wanted to play. Can you take
the grind for another good 10-15 base levels while you
go from level 40 to level 50 job level? Some classes had
it easy such as acolytes that were always in demand and
did the same jobs as priest but more slowly because of
the SP restrains. Other classes had to go out and hunt
monsters and stand up to the challenge with the
limited skills of a frst class alone.
Now as I said there was decision making involved. Each class had a big skill tree such as the one a few pages
above the Mage/Sage skill tree. Tere was no way your skill points could cover all the skills. So you had to
decide what to level up and what to leave alone. Tere was numerous builds depending on the play style of
the character. And as such it stands in contrast again to the new MMOs found today. WoW and its countless
clones have you buying skills and basically at the end of it when you have all your skills you get ways to im-
prove the said skills with some form of improvement item or with equipment. You could also have a scenario
like Diablo 3 where you basically get all the skills but only a limited amount can be used at any time. To me all
these new iterations on the classic skill tree system give the games less diversity and less replayability. Now in
the early days of RO to make a new build you had to make a new character, this was a long process because the
grind was heavy. A lot of people gave up. Later came resets and they made things easier. But still they needed
to be expensive late game to promote traditional building. I liked that fact that a lot of efort was needed to
change builds. It made you unique, you stood out as a Crit Assassin or Ice Mage you used a certain array
of spells. It also dictated where you farmed and what you did. If a mage went for lightning spells he could go
farm in Izlude dungeon easily if you went some other element you did something else. Naturally a Vitality
Spear Knight wont farm the same spots as a Agility Two-Handed Sword knight. Same with a luck based Crit
Assassins. It promoted diversity in my opinion and made the game seem more interesting and personal. As a
teenager I always imagined myself as that cool Fire/Soul mage running around throwing down Firewalls, Fire-
bolts, Soul Stirkes and later Meteor Storms. It made you feel special. You picked a specialization for your class.
Now there are a few skills Id like to mention because of how they were designed and how they impacted the
game both from a gameplay stand point but much more importantly from a social stand point. As Ive already
said the game had an isometric view and was very clear on the graphical side of things. You could tell who was
what. Targeting for the most part was easy if not in a too crowded area.
Te Bufng /Healing Skills
Unlike most of todays MMOs Ragnarok Online had this HP/SP
system where HP and SP regenerated pretty slowly, this means if
youre broke and have no friends be ready for a lot of down time.
Tis meant for most classes they had 3 options.
One was the money option Buy potions, consumables
One was the build option Go for FLEE builds or Kill things
before they get close
One was the social option Party up with a support class.
Now no one likes downtime right? Well for all its bad sides it did promote one thing Social interaction. When
you were sitting there with no HP/SP what did you do? You tried to talk to the people around you because
honestly there was nothing else to do. And in RO this meant that low level characters would usually party by
necessity or simply because of boredom faced with a lot of downtime. Ten afer the party was over maybe
theyd keep in touch? Maybe they would make contact again and they would party again. Te synergy be-
tween DPS, Tank and Support classes meant that down time was reduced and introduced social features into
the game. It forced you to party up with people because with them youd progress faster but youd also commu-
nicate. Maybe become friends, form a guild? Tere was a lot of options for social interaction. Tere was even
marriage between diferent gendered characters.
Now the bufng healing spells all provided something for nothing. You could regenerate HP based on a few
SP points with the Heal Skill. You could buf your allies by literally the equivalent of 10 - 20 base levels of stat
points for like 150 SP! Tis really kicked the party gear into action.
Now compare that to most modern bufs that so called Support classes provide. Tey heal ,they dispel, they
maybe slow the enemy. Tere is nothing radical and there is nothing short duration in the new MMOs. Buf
classes are expected to fght together with the DPS classes.
Now in RO Bless, Agi Up provided you with a stunning +10 STR, DEX & INT and +12 AGI this is huge. (Max
leveled stats was 99 so thats a huge buf overall a buf that thanks to the scaling stats every 10 levels, stays
relevant from level 1 to level 99!) It literally meant you could go on take on monsters that you would usually
go farm 10 levels from your current level. Tere was no penalty in Ragnarok Online for going for monsters
stronger or weaker then you. Tey all gave static XP and loot. Not to mention that with AGI UP you have an
incredible increase in movement speed by 25% basically, the equivalent of a mount in game!
Te support classes in Ragnarok online were something to behold. Te sage/priest could double your weapon
damage against a certain array of opponent by changing its element, the sage could buf you even more with a
feld that gave you more damage if you had an elemental weapon or an elemental armor card this literally gave
you up to 250% damage increase in some cases against certain enemies. Who wouldnt want to party up with
that kind of improvement? Basically form the Bard that sang to give you +180%XP, + 25% Maximum HP,
30% Faster Cast & 50% Less Delay, +20% ASPD to the Priest that bufed and healed you and enabled you to
survive monsters many levels above your standard. Te bufers in this game were crazy good and unlike other
games there we just that. Tey were poor at combat but in a party they became crazy good! Te bufs were
also very short lasting so it gave the bufng classes something to do while your DPS and Tanks went around
mobed and killed monsters.
Warp
WARP - Now a skill that was exclusive to the acolyte class and its tree had a huge social impact and a
small economic beneft for the acolyte class. Before all the new MMOs had instanced dungeons that the party
would enter instantly together, before raids, before instance matchmaking there was the humble warp skill.
As an Acolyte you could level up the warp skill and you had the freedom to set up basically 1-3 Memo points
where you could instantly travel almost wherever in the world with the use of a blue gemstone. Tis enabled
everyone to travel there before the portal closed afer you entered it last. It was a huge thing. You could from
town get instantly to your favorite farming or leveling spot. You could get your guild or party to a dungeon
fast. You saved everyone time and money. And it was done by players not by NPCs. It gave power to the play-
ers. It gave the acolyte class the monopolies on fast travel anywhere in the world where they have been. Tis
promoted social interactions, this promoted partying and it promoted class mobility because the higher tier
people could mingle in towns with low tier people and still get to their farming spots fast. It was an ingenious
idea that allowed mobility and some moneymaking for the priests that are usually pretty poor because of their
limited farming abilities.
It also was a silly way for new players to explore since theyd go into the warps and end up somewhere silly
and very probably deadly. I remember once going into these things even as an experienced player and getting
surprised.
Hocus Pocus / Abracadabra
Now this was a really interesting skill and something I honestly never saw anywhere else except in Rangarok
online. So in RO the Sage class could if they wanted go the Hocus Pocus build. Your sage was basically made
just to do this one skill. It has some incredible skill requirements whooping 36 skill points just for prerequisites
and then another 10 to max the skill out! So 46 skill points total! It have you no room for anything and all the
prerequisites had to be kept at a very low level making them extremely inefective. Tis one was all or nothing.
And in rangarok that means a lot of grind and help from other people. Not to mention it costs 2 yellow gem-
stones to cast! With the Power Cords song it still took one Yellow Gemstone and for quite some time the only
way to get these was to farm them from monsters. Basically for a Sage to consistently use this skill you had to
have a whole logistic division supporting you.
But once you had the skill boy oh boy did you steal the show. Tis skill basically enabled the sage to cast a ran-
dom spell from all the spells ingame . You could fnd yourself casting some MVP skills you could fnd yourself
with useless skills like Auto Counter. Anyways the goal of this fancy skill was this. Te skill had certain skill
that could be only unlocked with its use. Skill such as instantly killing yourself, going down to 1 HP/SP, giving
yourself an orc head, turning any monster into a poring, spawning a monster like a dead branch. And the two
most important ones TAMING A MONSTER or TURNING A RANDOM MONSTER INTO A RANDOM
MVP.
Now taming a monster might now sound like something special you have to consider that some taming items
had like a 0.01% chance of being dropped from really high level monsters you simply had to hunt in a party.
Or like a 5% chance on MVPs. You can see how these kind of tamed monster eggs could be sold for A LOT OF
MONEY. Naturally you had to have these monsters present to tame them an ever grater challenge with strong
monsters.
Te other was is self-explanatory. RO was an open world where there was no instances and no raids. Raids
bosses or MVPs or whatever you want to call them were basically free for alls. Te party or guild that gets
there frst gets the thing. So within populate servers there was tons of guilds competing for this very hard to
come by resource. An expensive way was to well use the hocus pocus skill and make your own MVPs. Te
hilarious thing was this could be done in the newbie areas or maybe someone decided to set up a lot of shops
somewhere. Well this like dead branch use usually resulted in scenes like these. Tons of dead and/or angry
people. But it was also insane fun.
COSMETICS
Since Ragnarok Online was sprite based game it was really hard to change the outft based on the armor you
have. Tere was quite a great number of classes too, so editing the sprites would have been very costly and
probably not very productive endeavor. So what did the developers do? Tey used headgear as a major cos-
metics point. Ragnarok online was unique in the fact that it had so many cosmetics that looked so unique and
at the same time didnt obscure your class. It was still clear who you were. But it was also clear what cosmetic
you had on.
Tey also became status symbols. If you saw someone wearing a Bao Bao you knew this guy had 50 heroic em-
blems. Something that was only dropped by 2 bosses in the game! So that means he killed them at least quite
a few times or perhaps he was really rich? He also had to convince the people he killed the MVPs with to give
him he emblems. Te point is there was a ton of cosmetics in RO and they served a great purpose and were
popular among everyone. Some were dropped by monsters some had really elaborate quests where youd have
to get obscure items.
My biggest suggestion and probably the only thing I can really suggest to the Tree of Savior developers is this.
Follow the VALVE example. Look and analyze at what they did to TF2 and Dota 2. You could make your game
available to everyone with a free to play model yet still get tons of money from only cosmetic items. Dota 2
has a whole 0% of gameplay changing elements for sale. Crowd source your headgears, perhaps let them also
design the weapons and shields, maybe even sprites for cosmetic clothes. Im sure people would pay money
to insert a gem or something into a Shield or Weapon or Armor to make it look diferent. You have two most
creative and artistic nations in the world at your disposal Korea and Japan. Just look at the things people do
on Pixiv or the incredibly detailed and colorful Naver webmanhwa. Imagine if these great artist were to design
something in your game for a % share of the cosmetics sales? People on private servers designed cosmetics
by themselves and sold them for real money. Imagine what could have been done by professional artists and
managed by your company.
Emotions
Now another choice made by the developers because the game was sprite based. How to you express and
communicate quickly? By using emotions, but typing them in chat was kind of hard to do fast and these chat
emotions can sometimes fail to conveying the feeling they should express. So the developers opted for a great
design choice the Ragnarok style emotions. A simple little speech bubble above your character that displayed a
face or some text to convey what you really wanted to say.
Now in todays new MMOs they always use these 3D ani-
mated emotions. Tese are not meant for combat, theyre
not meant to actually be useful in my opinion. Tey are
there for fun and supposed social interaction. But they
really fail at it. So far Ive been disappointed with every 3D
emotions system made. If youre in combat things are too
messy with tons of efects and general stuf going on you
will never see someone use emotions in these 3D MMOs
in combat. Like I said earlier these kind of emotions are
intended for a close look at your character where you can
see a clear face. Tese kind of emotions make sense in
games like Te Sims, Dark Souls or if youre making some
movie about your game where you can zoom in on the
face. But in general use they FAIL MISERABLY.
Tis is where RO emotions were really awesome. Tey
conveyed your feeling, your needs and emotions with
cute emoticons. All that at the press of two buttons!
Tis could be done while farming, leveling in PVP or
in WoE. Not to mention these can be used for cross
language barrier communication
Tey hands down beat every other MMO communi-
cation system. And Im really happy to see them back
in ToS! Not only back but improved and an amazingly
improved chat system where you see the other persons
face with gear!
Te World Map, Towns and Dungeons
technical limitations. Back in the 2002 not a lot of people had the idea or for that fact the actual hardware to
make realistically looking open ended worlds. So what they did was basically make puzzle map like the one
on top showing the RO world many games did this one of the probably most famous examples Half Life 1 with
its many LOADING points.
Te world or Ragnarok was divided into sectors and players could enter these sectors and exit them in only a
few spots on the said map basically these were just like the warp skill but stationary and always functioning.
Tey would take you from one map to the other. Now this again might not seems so signifcant I mean whats
the big deal separate maps or open world who cares right?
Well no Te BIG THING was these were self-contained maps. Separate from others each had its own little
eco system of monsters and NPCs and they were free to all players to enter and leave as they wished. It was
truly open. Tere were no channels on servers, there was no separation of the populace. It was like EVE On-
line they basically did the same EXACT thing with sectors. Everyone was online at the same time on the same
server, no separation at all.
Te capital Prontera was there and everyone who went there was actually there. People werent divided or
scattered.
When you went to a dungeon they used the exact same system. When you entered Payon Dungeon or the Cul-
verts as a fresh new First Class youd see other people the same as you fghting the same monsters as you. You
could see all the skills they used you could see everyone and you never had the feeling of being alone some-
where. Tis was a HUGE Social interaction feature. Parties could be made on the spot, you saw a struggling
Acolyte and youd say Hey want party up even XP share? and he would very probably have no good reason
to refuse.
Even if you didnt talk youd still do things more efectively and waste less money. Tis also enabled the high-
er classes to come and go into newbie areas and to help out people. Ofen there would be big parties going
down to hunt the MVP at the end of the dungeon and there would be tons of newbies farming the frst level
of the said dungeon. Priests or Sages would come and give you bufs such as Bless, Agi or maybe a generous
sage would give you an elemental weapon for a whopping 30 minutes that would basically increase you dam-
age from 50-100% on the said creeps. Not to mention the pure fact of seeing really high level people moving
around as a group. Class Mobility!
Now all of the above made RO feel like really populated game. But this design also did something else. Te
developers werent stuck up like the new MMO developers in this SINGULAR path. Te world was big it
was HUGE and you could explore it all from level 1. No level restrictions, no NPCs telling you HEY MAN
YOURE TO LOW LEVEL TO GO HERE. You were free to go anywhere and explore. Te early game was
really designed that way.
Now this is an old MMO these is no mounts for every class there is no fying mounts that can make you go
places. Tere was three ways of going from distant point A to point B.
Paying for the Teleport Kafra service
Asking a priest for a warp point if he had it
Walking
Now the frst one was obviously pretty expensive for a new player who just started the game, the second one
was probably not even know to the new player and even if it was hed probably be REALLY careful about en-
tering one of these. And the third one was how it was basically designed to be done.
Te game was designed with exploration in mind. You could literally walk from Izlude to Hugel and then
back to Comodo on the other side of the world. On the way youd meet new monsters, youd see new things,
maybe meet some NPCs. Watch the landscape change from forest green to desert to volcanic rock. When I
frst started the game I had no idea you could actually use the kafra warp service. So I literally walked from
Payon to Gefen just to become a mage. I still to this day remember that walk and the wonders I saw. From
the wolves to the small cute bunny Lunatics to the awesome looking Rockers with their Violins to that one
Vocal that I had no idea about. I wonder okay so all these guys before this guy were peaceful. What did I do to
provoke this guy?
Tis is what MMOs should be about. Going into a new world with new people exploring things, discovering,
getting to know things.
But all the new MMOS really kill that feeling with the hand holding chain quests that never seem to stop. By
the time they let go of your hand you turned form the panel on the top to the panel on the bottom.