Hakkyu Kim

Well, if this is true, we may be looking at the start of something big. Hakkyu Kim is, after all, undoubtedly one of the best online game designer out there, with Ragnarok Online and Granado Espada, or Sword of the New World, tucked in his wide belt.

Proof of the popularity and potency of Kim-designed games can be seen in the continuing adoration for Ragnarok Online. In my corner of the world, the game still retains a certain charm that pulls in gamers both old and new. I’ve quit playing the game several times, but I keep coming back for more.

Granado Espada is a different story. Although the game has depth, it’s three-character system doesn’t appeal to some MMORPG players. I for one am an off-again-on-again player. Hey, I haven’t uninstalled the game from my gaming rig yet. So there must be some merit to keeping it there.

So what else can Hakkyu Kim say about these upcoming titles? Let’s turn to Gamasutra for the answer:

“It will be more action-oriented, but still an MMORPG,” he said.

Post from: MMOtaku

Not.

Actually, I’m just a little flustered after a few hours of playing my merchant TikaWaylan on Valkyrie, the free-to-play server of Ragnarok Online Philippines. Oh, yeah, she’s now a blacksmith. Damn job change quest!

The source of my frustration is, as you may have already guessed, the Blacksmith job change quest. The Merchant job change quest is a walk in the park compared to that of the Blacksmith.

Nah. It’s easy, really. The problem with the way I did it was I followed the instructions of a guide published before all the important updates were introduced. In hindsight, I should have consulted online resources prior to going on the quest. It would have saved me a lot of zeny, the in-game currency, not to mention time and exertion.

If you’re a Ragnarok Online old timer like me, you probably think the Blacksmith Guild, the place where you begin the quest to change from merchant to blacksmith, is still in Geffen. Well, it isn’t. It’s now in faraway Einbroch, and the only way to reach it is to ride a damn zeppelin.

My Ragnarok Online merchant character on board the zeppelin to Einbroch, home of the Blacksmith Guild.

The quest still starts with a conversation with Guildsman Altiregen (Altazen) at the Blacksmith Guild (ein_in01 18, 28). Finding him is the easy part. It gets muddy after that. He refers you to an NPC named Geshupenschte (Getsufenst) who, in the old days, stayed in Alberta. Nowadays, however, he “lives” in nearby Einbech (ein_in01 201, 27).

This was where I got lost.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the other details. Suffice it to say that I have learned my lesson, but don’t care to do everything all over again. I’ll leave my Ragnarok Online characters to my daughter, who has taken a liking to romping in my old MMORPG flame.

Post from: MMOtaku

The update, which was launched on August 5, 2009, on the Philippine server of Ragnarok Online, promises great features, including new maps, monsters, guild dungeons, and a quest to gain one of two godly items, Asprika and Brynhild.

Oooh, where to start. Let’s begin by checking out the description and stats of the new godly items.

Asprika is a garment just like your basic hood and muffler. It gives five points to your defense and is wearable by any Ragnarok Online character level 94 and up. What makes Asprika, or the “Light of the Gods,” special is the 30-percent resistance bonus to all elements, 30-point increase in flee and five-point rise in magical defense. It’s also indestructible. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the fact that it gives characters Level 1 Teleport.

Brynhild, on the other hand, is body armor that increases maximum hitpoints by 20 times your character’s base level. So if your toon is level 99, this godly armor raises your MaxHP by 1,980 points. It also boosts MaxSP by five times the base level, physical damage by 10 percent, and magic attack power by 10 percent. Whoever dons Brynhild in battle cannot be knocked back.

Great, eh? So is the quest to get them. The first stumbling block to players wanting a shot at the two godly items is that the quest is only available to guild masters who own any of the two new Agits, Valfreyja in Rachel and Nidhoggur in Juno. The second catch is that the Agit must have Level 60 Economy and Level 40 Defense. Tough order, that.

Regardless of how you manage to start the quest, it is highly recommended that you bring along 16 to 20 guild members for the dungeon. Ragnarok Online’s Okolnir is a dark, foreboding place which only gives a guild an hour to complete the quest. If you fail, you face a 12-hour cooldown before you can access the dungeon again, and that’s a long time considering other guilds come knocking on your Agits doors twice a week.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a Ragnarok Online character to level.

Post from: MMOtaku

At the moment, my toon, Brighid, is ahead by four levels, 29 to 25, to Jake’s character, `Sugo. I guess mages level at a more decent rate than swordsmen. Or maybe our choice of training spots make the difference. My preferred training ground is mjolnir_09, which is northwest of Rune Midgard’s undisputed capital, Prontera. Monsters in that map are pretty strong for low-level characters like Brighid, but with the right spells, she does okay.

`Sugo, on the other hand, is leveling at the Prontera Culvert. Although the mobs there aren’t strong, some of them are mobbers, meaning they gang up on your sorry behind, and a few are aggressive and attack on sight. This is the reason why Jake’s `Sugo gets killed almost as often as he gains levels in Ragnarok Online. One wrong sword slash on a seemingly easy prey like the Thief Bug and then you suddenly find yourself in the middle of three or more of the little buggers.

I have also revisited some of my previous characters, the Knight Tika`Waylan and her “twin,” the Merchant TikaWaylan. For the meantime, I’ve asked someone else to train the two Waylans to free up a few hours to play the new character. If I don’t, I’ll lose the bet. The wager: 10 million zeny, which is probably how much both our characters will earn at the end of our little race.

Reaching Level 99 in Ragnarok Online has been a frustration for me. Out of the dozen or more RO characters I’ve played, only two gained the once-coveted aura, an Acolyte-Monk-Champion and a Merchant-Alchemist-Creator, both of which are in Ragnarok Online Philippines’ Urdr, the player-kill server.

Let’s see if I can finally get rid of that frustration by getting this mage to Level 99 in preparation for the coming of third jobs.

I’ve put the Merchant TikaWaylan on hold to give way to a Race to 99 project between me and another Ragnarok Online fanatic.

Check out previous MMOtaku articles on Ragnarok Online:

Ragnarok Online Population Booming?
That is the question. If recent screenshots are any indication, then Ragnarok Online is definitely RoK’ing on.

MMORPG: Revisiting Ragnarok Online
A couple of months ago, I revisited Ragnarok Online in a bid to rekindle the flame. I guess by now we all know how that turned out.

Post from: MMOtaku

A few months ago, I posted an article on MMOtaku about the hassles of moving about in Ragnarok Online’s capital city, Prontera, because of the hundreds of characters left online by their masters to vend. More characters in one area equals greater lag, and this has always been the case in almost all servers of the popular MMORPG.

Here’s a screenshot of how the streets of Prontera looked like a couple of months ago:

When I logged in yesterday, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It seemed like the number of players has increased tenfold. Go check it out for yourself:

So does this mean that player population in Philippine Ragnarok Online’s Valkyrie server is up?

Post from: MMOtaku

What piqued my renewed interest in the game was Ragnarok Online Philippines’ Ultimate Game Guide, which features everything a player needs to know about the game, from characters to stat and skill builds to handy charts that clue you in on what monsters to hunt.

So with book in hand, I set off into the virtual world of Rune Midgard in search of more adventures for my swordie, TikaWaylan. In past incarnations, Tika, a name my wife and I borrowed from the popular fantasy adventure novel series Dragonlance by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, was always a merchant or blacksmith. That was way back in 2003, when Chaos had been the Philippines’ only server for Ragnarok Online, and in the following year, when publisher and operator Level Up! Games opened additional servers to accommodate the game’s growing population.

In Philippine Ragnarok Online’s free-to-play server Valkyrie, TikaWaylan is both merchant/blacksmith and swordie/knight. So with two TikaWaylans roaming the virtual world, a lot of players often mistake us as bots.

My first day back in Ragnarok Online was great. Tika had a relatively easy time transitioning from swordie to knight, thanks in part to the Ragnarok Online Ultimate Game Guide. It’s like cheating, just lifting answers from the book for quests, but in today’s fast-paced world, the faster you level up means fewer chances of getting bored.

Come to think of it, that’s what threw me off the path to greatness in Ragnarok Online. Leveling was—and still is—a chore. In this old school game, grinding is the name of the game, and offers little to players who have a limited amount of time to grind their way to the top. So unlike today’s generation of MMORPGs that allow leveling characters even when the player is away from the keyboard. No, I’m not talking about bots! I’ll tackle this topic in a later posting.

So TikaWaylan the Knight is now in her second job and I plan to play Ragnarok Online in the days and months to come, or until boredom sets in again. There are a few agenda on my Ragnarok Online plate, among these is changing Tika`Waylan the Merchant’s job to Blacksmith and setting both characters on the Path to Heritage.

Many thanks to Mon Macutay, GM Tristan of Philippine Ragnarok Online, for the image of the Ultimate Game Guide.

Post from: MMOtaku

I was supposed to write something witty for this screenshot, along the lines of “Even virtual worlds celebrate Christmas” or “Celebrating Christmas in Rohan” (since the screenie was taken from the online game Rohan: Blood Feud. Unfortunately, Christmas Day had forced me into a short hiatus.

There are a number of massively multiplayer online role-playing games that come out with Christmas patches, including, you guessed it, Rohan: Blood Feud, and Ragnarok Online and Fly For Fun. I’m sure there are others, and I’d love to list them down for you, but there’s a beautiful lady wielding a pretty mean candy cane standing behind me, and she’s mumbling something about “Not working on Christmas Day.”

Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is, “Have a very Merry Christmas and enjoy the holidays!”

Post from: MMOtaku

Okay. So we’ve established the fact that you are a player of one or more massively multiplayer online role-playing games. What we haven’t found out, however, is who you are in-game.

No, I’m not talking about the roles you play, including whether you cross-dress as much as your character. What I’m getting at, as the title of this post implies, is your what you name your avatar and how you arrived at such a name.

Let’s start with an example. I usually name my characters after, well, characters in books I’ve read. Yes, books are rich sources for MMORPG character names. My main Perfect World avatar is Malystryx, which I borrowed from the acclaimed Dragonlance series brilliantly written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

In Ragnarok Online, I tended to name them after characters in fantasy books as well. Take, for instance, the fiery haired Tika Waylan, who is a fighter in the Dragonlance novels but a blacksmith in Philippine Ragnarok Online.

For Granado Espada, however, I took a different tact and named my adventuring family “Estranghero” after a character I developed as part of a fantasy novel series. For the first names of the family members, I chose my real name and those of my wife, Joyce, and daughter, Cesky, or combinations of the three, like Joelle, Francesca Jadzia, and Joycelle.

I’ve always thought my characters’ names are well thought out. Yes, almost all of their names are borrowed, but I make sure they fit the genre, or at the very least the characters themselves.

In contrast, I encounter characters in all gaming worlds I’ve been to with names like Tiger and its myriad variations like Tigr, TigerMan, WhiteTiger, Tigger, TigeR … and so on and so forth, especially for characters that look like, well, Tigers. Then we have Foxxy, FoxGirl, Foxfox, FoxyGirl, Foxthis-and-foxthat for all the female avatars sporting cute doglike ears and fluffy tails. Of course, there are also characters named after their owners, examples of which are John, SirJohn, Jo[H]n, nhoJ, JohnAndYoko … ad naseaum.

I don’t know about you, but I just find it funny that most players don’t put much thought into what they name their characters. For me, your in-game name tells much about who you are in real life, whether you should be taken seriously or merely taking others for a ride.

Examples of how important names are in MMORPG dynamics: 1) Would you rather have an item crafted by a character named Theros or MyNoseIsBleeding? 2) Would you place the life of your avatar in the hands of a healer named Mishakal or PureKiller?

What’s your character’s name and how did you come up with it?

Post from: MMOtaku

So true to form, I did what any other gamer would do—I installed as many games as I can fit in its 250-gigabyte drive. Unfortunately, I was stuck with only a select number of games: MMORPGs like Perfect World, Granado Espada, Lineage II, and Ragnarok Online, and PC games such as Need For Speed: Carbon, Sims 2 (yes, I’m also a big fan of the Sims), and Total War: Rome.

The problem: Since the laptop was a new in the market, it came packaged with a Windows Vista, not the uber games-compatible Windows XP. How did our games, especially the MMOs, fare in gaining a foothold on the Vista-heavy laptop?

I’m happy to report that of the four MMOs that we installed, only Ragnarok Online failed to run. Although I’d like to point out that I had a hell of a hard time installing all the games, including the standalone PC games.

There is, however, a very simple workaround, thanks to some gaming addicts who’d do anything just to get a fix:

First, right click on the icon of the game you’ve just installed and click “Properties” and then “Compatibility.” Doing these will open a new menu for you where you need to tick the checkbox of the following: “Run this program as an administrator” and “Run this program in the compatibility mode of Windows XP SP2.” Done? Click “Apply” then “Okay.”

If your MMO encounters errors while updating the anti-hack program attached to it, don’t fret—there’s also a solution.

Still not working? Well, bub, you’re out of luck. Let’s just pray that if and when Windows Vista becomes the norm, game developers will follow suit and make their masterpieces compatible.

Post from: MMOtaku

From several previews scattered all over the worldwide web, Kingdom of Warriors, billed as one of the most anticipated MMORPGs in Asia, seems like a clone of other, already successful online games from China. At first glance, the game screams “Nothing new here, move on!” and presents nothing except gorgeous graphics to reel in gamers from the saturated MMO market.

Consider the game’s most publicized features and judge for yourself if it’s worth the wait:

• Ultimate Goal. To unite the nation under one guild is this game’s final goal. Despite promising to bring it when it comes to realism (by recreating the dozens of castles and fortresses that actually existed in ancient China and the epic battles these have witnessed), it’s subject to the been there, done that syndrome.
• Castle Siege Battles. From initial impressions, it seems the world map of Kingdom of Warriors will be much like Perfect World, which is divided into a number of territories waiting for a guild to pillage conquer control them. The one thing that seems different, though, is the promise of Webzen, developer of the game, to pay close attention to details, such as armors, weapons, siege weapons, and environment.
• Historic Missions. Now this is something different. Instead of concocting quests or missions from their collective imagination, the game’s developers have reached deep into China’s rich history for inspiration.
• Administration System for Managing Cities. Just like the castle siege battles, the management system of territories are virtual copycats of those from other games, from the five-year-old Ragnarok Online of Korea’s Gravity to the fresh Perfect World of China’s Beijing Perfect World Co. Ltd.

Despite these minor setbacks, however, it looks like Kingdom of Warriors is shaping up into an MMORPG to watch—and eventually play. Shucks, I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but the graphics is blowing my mind away. Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn out like Webzen’s first MMO offering, MU Online, which, sad to say, wasn’t nearly as exciting as it promised.

Post from: MMOtaku