Ragnarok Online/Unused Content

This is a sub-page of Ragnarok Online.

Myriad of gameplay expansions were planned but unfortunately never saw a proper release. Some got its way into its source code though incomplete or cast aside for one reason or another.

Class Aptness

During the Alpha Test period, various classes hinted at having exclusive abilities. Thieves were meant to find locked treasure chests found around the world, while Merchants could build items from scratch using “Materials”. In the current episode, no such mechanic exists whatsoever for the 1-1 branch. Merchant’s specialty carried over to 2-1(Blacksmith). Thieves can only steal items, not money. Their secondary class, Rogue, can steal Zeny from enemies through the Mug ability. Below is an early text of their class description.

Although both strength and defense are lower than the others, Thief is a character with quick agility and various skills. Has useful skills such as stealing money or picking up hidden treasure chests. ~ Thief class.

As a character with basic attack power and average abilities, he has the skill to distinguish and evaluate unique items, with the possibility to create new items by combining several other items together. ~ Merchant class.

Advanced Pet System

A player obtains a necessary taming item, then uses it on the monster. A slot machine appears with a smiling or frowning face. Smiling means the player is successful, and receives an egg. Frowning meant it failed and the player lost the taming item. Usage of Pet Incubators hatched those eggs who then followed the avatar around. Each has a hunger timer and a prefixed level attached to them.

The pet system was going to be much more complex like the Homunculus. Conceptually, taming used dolls to domesticate enemies, which were then replaced with monster specific taming items, separated from the Gangsi class who could tame several monsters and level them up from scratch to aid the avatar in combat, which got cut once again. There is an unused enum list for UPET with generic stats.

UPET_SIZE = 0, UPET_LEVEL, UPET_HP, UPET_MAXHP, UPET_MASTERAID,

UPET_MAPID, UPET_X, UPET_Y, UPET_HUNGER, UPET_INTIMACY, UPET_SPEED,

UPET_LOOKDIR, UPET_CANMOVETICK, UPET_STR, UPET_AGI, UPET_VIT, UPET_INT, UPET_DEX, UPET_LUK,

UPET_DMGIMMUNE, UPET_ATKRANGE, UPET_ATKMIN, UPET_ATKMAX, UPET_MATKMIN, UPET_MATKMAX, UPET_DEF,

UPET_MDEF, UPET_HIT, UPET_FLEE, UPET_PDODGE, UPET_CRIT, UPET_RACE, UPET_ELETYPE, UPET_ELELEVEL,

UPET_AMOTION, UPET_ADELAY, UPET_DMOTION, UPET_GROUP_ID,

Guilds & Clubs

Each class had a specific Class guild with privilege benefits depending on the players reputation. Multiple branching jobs based off of reputation and stat parameters were implied, though the now-defunct ragnarokonline.com website never stated anything concrete.

Separated from Class guilds, players could also “subscribe” to multiple club organizations at once regardless of their class, level and reputation. Clubs would serve as a social aspect where people could gather together and vote certain decisions through a Bulletin Board. There was no benefit to do so other than meet and greet.

CARD Games

Ragnarok Online had a minigame in mind using obtainable monster cards against NPCs and other players. One of the preceding websites listed CARD Games as a major feature until they changed the domain name following the release of the game. This is the only official description. Below is a translation from Hangul to English.

"You can enjoy a separate sub-game using cards that can be used closely related to character development. You can play a simple limited card game using different cards with the opponent you meet in the game, or enjoy the card-type board game Aegis that allows for more immersive battles. Cards obtained or exchanged through this card game are used as an auxiliary in the game, adding to the fun of character development and item development. The game will not stop as a simple sub-game, but will act as an addictive element and increase the additional fun of the game."

Two Game Master cards supporting this feature were left in the server files for some time until they were eventually replaced with Rune Stones.

4998 GM_Aegis_Card

4999 GM_Valor_Card

3D Monsters

Gravity had a concept of making all boss-type monsters in 3D polygons, but the staff found it very difficult to implement such a thing due to being inexperienced with 3D modeling. Players who tested these monsters reported back that they had many issues with cell grid targeting, clipping, and even client crashes. 2D style would soon take over 3D, and the concept was dropped.

Although Zombie Dragon is nearly extinct from public information, a look at Ragnarok.exe shows remnants of the boss that points to a file that no longer exists in the game. Trying to recall it leads to a client crash from a resource load failure.

.data:0063D394 aDragon5Gr2 db ‘dragon_5’.gr2, 0 ;DATA XREF: sub_5AA830+1E65↑o

There’s also an absurdly large 3D Poring named Hugeling that is referenced but not used. Like the Zombie Dragon, the file is absent and cannot be called.

.data:0063CF10 aHugeling906Gr2 db ‘Hugeling90_6.gr2’, 0 DATA_XREF: sub_5AA830+25D9↑o

the other 3D monsters who were originally MVPs are still present in the game in the form of War of Emperium Guardians, who allies you in battle if the castle belongs to your guild with a certain skill enabled, or is against you if a castle does not belong to your current guild and they have said skill enabled on their side.

On the subject of the Guardians; all of the War of Emperium monsters and Treasure Chest have an unused damage animation that can never be seen in-game as hitting one makes them stand still. In the case of Treasure Chest, this animation can never be played normally as their HP is 0 by default.

Visual Shoes

Similar to how a user can have headgear in one of 3 slots, along with special looking weapons/shields it was originally planned for a user's shoes to have a different appearance as well. It's likely that the code for this was dropped because adding different sprites for different gears was already time-consuming enough (Only a few weapon and shield sprites exist currently, as well). It's possible that certain shoes were meant to leave different footprints, perhaps after stepping in water or when walking in soft areas such as desert sand. Later, the Stalker skill Chase Walker used the leftover code for footprint rendering. Images of various shoeprints still exist in the current database.

Dynamic Terrain

In Ragnarok Online, all terrain seems to stay the same. However, there is a removed item named 'Shovel' which was possibly usable to dig in terrain to discover items. Furthermore, code exists in the client that can process raising terrain, but not actually render it in any manner.

Skyboxes

Familiar to those who play FPSes, there also exists unused code for handling skyboxes in-game. There were at least 2 types, a cube type and an elliptical version. The cubed version seems to be completely abandoned but would have allowed them to place a different texture on each vertex to see from the end of the map. Textures that are used for this by default are still referenced by the name effect/skybox_back/front/top/right/left.bmp but they may be lost to time or never made public. The elliptical version loaded a 3d actor, "skybox.rsm" and likely was projected against the map. It's possible that they removed the skyboxes from the game because it was too laggy. In lieu of this, they just set the render clearing color to something else depending on the map. If they wanted a map to look like it was floating in the sky, the clear color would be made into sky blue, otherwise, it'd just be black. There was also code related to the skyboxes that would cast lens flares onto the screen, based on where the Sun was set to be by the weather system. Fortunately, the good lord had mercy on us all.

Item/Skill Hotbar

A player can assign consumables, other types or spells to a hotbar by pressing F12. They were once two separate entities where pressing F11 would bring up a new window that would hold skills, and F12 were to hold items. The concept ended up being scrapped and the two merged. Concurrently F11 does nothing but hide some of the UI for the players to take in-game screenshots.

All Class Madogear Mount

On August 13th, 2008 an artist who used to work at Level Upǃ by the name of Chris Ruiz Burn conceptualized a class mount where players could sit inside a custom Apocalypse that would be produced from player Mechanics, an inspiration taken from the Ghost In The Shell series. All classes could ride it with an exception of ranged classes such as Hunter and Ranger who would've obtained a Blue Wolf sidekick. The wolf presumably became Warg, a Ranger only summon. GungHo and Level Upǃ liked the idea so much that the concept became a reality. Sadly, the Mecha-All-Class became a Mechanic exclusive robot. Other jobs ended up having different types of animals or monster themed mounts. Players of the Mechanic class would have the ability to create a customized Madogear and repair others if they were damaged.

The Apocalypse and the Blue Wolf mount never came to fruition, but a screenshot of an unknown class and a Hunter riding one can be seen here.

Arcadia Class

A fusion class was in place where 2-1 and 2-2 had the ability to obtain additional skills from their counterparts. Meaning that an Assassin could've had Rogue skill tree, Blacksmith of Alchemist, so on, and reverse. Plausible it was thrown away due to the swapping breaking the immersion and the characteristics of each individual Jobs and what it would do to the overall game design. To give an example; a Priest makes a vow to never hurt living beings and always devote themselves to protect players with their magical powers and unwavering faith, only to swap aptness with a Monk and Guillotine Fisting one in the face. Imbalance issues would arise within some Jobs, namely if a Knight swapped their skills with a Crusader, as Crusader use chunks of their SP to cast various skills, something their counterpart is not adapted with, having a severely low natural SP pool of their own to begin with.

Amatsu

During the development of Episode 6 and its add-on – Global Project – a Japanese Gravity book mentions that Amatsu were originally a gigantic standalone region. This was later shifted to create three other islands for the sake of world immersion.