Original Ragnarok Online did affect my life a lot in my late school and early college years and I do return to it whenever there is a good opportunity, but there aren’t many good ones recently. Official servers in regions with good ping happen rarely and end up being whale milking stations with barely any population after a few months, private servers are a bit of risky business for streaming. New Ragnarok games are just fanservice and nostalgia covering gacha, stamina system, autoplay and atrocious microtransactions. Which is sad, because some of those games are actually well made and fun, when you get to play them for those limited moments without autoplay on and when some whale isn’t soloing your full group in PvP.
So when there is some new MMO inspired by Ragnarok Online I’m automatically interested to at least check it out, sadly in over 20 years there weren’t many really going for it.
There is Tree of Savior that currently looks like it’s barely surviving and does the same whale milking strats, even though I did like it in the beginning. Launched too early due to the lack of finances and in hopes to raise some funds from release, but lack of content made people start quitting fast, so game slowly pivoted to farming loyal player base with microtransactions. Player base shrunk a lot over the years, but the game is still getting updates, so I guess it works for them still. Maybe there will be some relaunch without too much predatory monetization that will get enough hype? I wouldn’t mind giving it another go, but the part about monetization I really doubt.
There is Royal Quest, that is less known in the West, because it’s made by Russian devs, but ironically it is currently also in intensive monetization stage, but more alive than ToS I’d say. RQ would be really interesting to revisit, because it’s such a hidden gem for Ragnarok Online fans and it has an interesting history. Studio developing it was closed long ago and the game, also MMO at that, was left just floating as is with no new content or updates for years and it did survive that! Impressive when nowadays people start crying when there were no update for a couple of weeks and after a couple of months game is proclaimed dead and everyone starts quitting. Original foundation was that good, even though publisher did add some monetization that was a bit on a bad side, but that also saved the game from closing I guess. At some point they found some team to put in charge of making new content and released on Steam, but I think new content was quite mid, even though they are still working on the game, so props to them.
Currently there is a wave or Ragnarok Online inspired games coming (There’s Samsara Saga and Torebia for example) and some heavily customized private servers, some even could count as total conversion mods I guess. One of inspired games started as a playtest on Steam, one man made MMO on Unity called SpiritVale, that later went on Kickstarter and now released as buy-to-play game to a pretty good reception and amount of players. I did try the early playtest and then returned for recent Steam Next Fest “demo”, after that I went and backed it on Kickstarter, because I though it’s a worthy Ragnarok Online itch scratcher. Now that it’s out I’m sure that it is, since I’m quite addicted.
SpiritVale is obviously not a carbon copy and quite different, with some gamedesign decisions that I don’t really like, but title stays true – it’s still better than anything we got from Gravity. And it does work as a fix for my long lasting Ragnarok Online addiction, even though it might not hit all the right notes, but I don’t think any game will ever do, even modern RO Classic servers struggle.
Will review SpiritVale in detail later, for now can just say that if you liked Ragnarok Online and you don’t mind SV’s look (some people don’t like the style), then it might be worth trying or following the development. Or wait for more posts and info, there might be a few even.