It’s almost time to do my regular Ragnarok Online dive, this time live for the first time, servers open tomorrow 6pm CEST, but due to my day off and potential delays I’ll hop on Friday stream. Last nostalgia trip was in summer 2017 for Ragnarok Restart (think WoW Classic, but a bit different and speedily catching up with retail in content and updates) on iRO, pretty much disappeared there for a few weeks and those were some good times. Then some metagaming kicked in, bots, laggy servers and I left, server pretty much died in around 9 months and got merged with retail server less than 2 years after.
So why this game, what’s so special about it for me to return again and again and why now? All these questions I’ll try to cover in current post, but there will be a second post tomorrow to cover more potential questions about the game.
First of all, to start, what’s the connection between me and 18 years old weebish MMO. Like a proper boomer I’ll enter with a bit of insane L OMEGALUL RE. In year 2004 I went with my parents to our relatives 400 kilometers away during summer vacation, that basically was yearly thing, nothing special. I have an uncle who lives there and well it’s more like “uncle” since he’s around 5 years older than me and he already had proper city LAN access and decent internet connection at home, while I was using dial-up mostly, but also didn’t really need it, since I was playing single player games mostly and going to LAN cafe with friends for our CS needs. It was first time I personally encountered such thing as MMO, when WoW wasn’t even out yet and it was Ragnarok Online that my uncle was playing on biggest Russian server at the moment, private free-to-play server (official appeared years later). It looked fun and my uncle wouldn’t mind to have someone playing as support class for him, so when I came home I started leveling as Acolyte to become a Priest, still on dial up sometimes even. Got banned once for healing someone else’s mob and needed to get my unban through IRC chat with admins, fucked up my build and in the end never became a Priest since my uncle stopped playing on that server and I rolled Mage to become Wizard and to play solo. Around that time I got ADSL connection in my apartment block, dragged my childhood friend living in same block with me and this is where my actual story with this game starts…
But it’s way too long and you already heard (and will hear) bits of it many times on stream, probably better to hear it live when I remember some details while playing anyway tbh. To give an idea my story had many people I’ve met over next 3 years of non-stop regular playing, becoming part of guilds, becoming guild master multiple times, participating in Guild Wars, server politics, dramas, guild meetups IRL, getting into multiple relationships from distant to actual ones, changing servers, losing my childhood friend because of relationship he found there (they are actually still together I think) – whole bunch of memories, people and emotions connected to this game. I think people who were hyped for classic WoW and went ham when it was out can understand what I mean even though everyone has different stories and games are different. You can’t relive it, you can’t get back there, but you can get that pleasant feeling of all those memories flowing through you, even not very positive memories are now just funny stories.
Why all this now? Well I just was digging some kinda MMOish experience with my recent Fallout 76 grind and then I got an e-mail about new Ragnarok Online server opening soon, so it all kinda mixed into slowly rising urge to do another somewhat regular dive into RO and well apogee is now, with me actually doing it on Friday. They are opening new Russian official server with Prime mechanic that is already implemented on US server iRO Transcendence from what I know and I think similar to RO:Zero Korean servers. So basically new fresh start, a bit of new mechanics, official, not one of private servers that I’m not sure how safe is to stream on Twitch for example. Not partnered or anything (I wish) and not some hyped launch or something, just enabler for my nostalgia, hopefully won’t be completely boring, but I guess people are watching PoE and people watched my Fallout 76 shenanigans, so shouldn’t be too bas hopefully, it’s just very grindy and repetitive. Unfortunately on Russian servers though, but same company publishes EU servers, so who knows, maybe next nostalgia dive will be not far away and you will be able to join me. Current “run” is more like a game showcase really “for science”, because game is very unique (and I will talk about game itself in tomorrow’s post, for people who have no idea what Ragnarok Online is), showcase might become quite lengthy, but maybe I’ll get tired/bored fast – we’ll figure out soon. Basically every once in a while I get this desire to revisit RO, so it would happen one day inevitably and probably will happen again some time, would be great to play it together and to fill some more quiet in terms of new releases times. I also want to showcase Warhammer Online, will write about it soon too, at least about plans.
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