What is Ragnarok Online?

Ragnarok Online (often shortened to RO) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game made by Gravity. Its world and characters come from the Korean comic (manhwa) Ragnarok drawn by Lee Myung-jin, and the game opened in South Korea on 31 August 2002 for Windows PCs.

You create a character, fight the monsters that live on each map to gain levels and items, and grow stronger by changing jobs. You can adventure alone or with others; towns offer shops, quests, item storage and teleport services, and every town's shops lean towards the job linked to that town. To begin, see Getting Started and the Class Overview.

• Many jobs: the official guide speaks of more than 20 job classes, and Wikipedia notes that the first 13 classes have grown to more than 50 through updates.
• Look: hand-drawn, anime-style 2D characters move through 3D backgrounds, drawn from front, back, side and diagonal angles.
• Cards: almost every monster has its own card, which can be fitted into weapons and armour for extra effects. See Cards and Card Slots.
• Ways to play: fighting monsters, player against player, and guild against guild in the War of Emperium, plus arenas, contests and special instance maps.
• Controls: most things are done with the mouse in movable windows, and the interface can be adjusted. See Interface and Controls.
• Music and servers: a large soundtrack composed by TeMP (credited as SoundTeMP), and AEGIS, Gravity's own server software that links many zone servers into one world.

Long ago, gods, humans and demons fought a terrible war and finally agreed to a truce. A thousand years of uneasy peace followed in Rune-Midgarts, and humans slowly forgot the war while greed and corruption spread.

Then the peace began to crack: strange howls came from the borders between the realms, gentle creatures turned violent, earthquakes split the land and storms wiped out whole species. Tales of the pieces of Ymir spread, and adventurers set out to hunt for these relics, mostly for wealth.

After Korea, the game spread to other regions, each with its own service run by Gravity or a local partner. The North American version, International Ragnarok Online (iRO), is run by Gravity Interactive, which Gravity set up in the United States in March 2003.

Some services have since closed. The Oceanic servers for Australia and New Zealand shut in March 2007, and their players could move to iRO. On 25 May 2018 the servers in most of Europe closed (the CIS countries excepted), and the Malaysia, Singapore and Philippines servers closed on 28 November 2021.

In 2010 the official servers received a huge overhaul called Renewal. It reworked the game mechanics, changed how stats, gear and modifiers work together, changed how much experience characters earn, brought in the Third Classes, and also changed the interface, hotkeys and many skills.

Critics rated the game well (79/100 on Metacritic, 9.1/10 from IGN), and it was a big commercial hit, above all in Korea in the mid-2000s. Its success turned Ragnarok into a wider series:

• Ragnarok the Animation, an anime series first shown in Japan in 2004.
• Ragnarok Online 2: Legend of the Second, the sequel MMORPG, released in South Korea on 26 March 2012.
• Spin-offs such as the beat 'em up Ragnarok Battle Offline and Ragnarok Odyssey for PlayStation Vita (February 2012).
• Mobile games including Ragnarok: Eternal Love (2017) and Ragnarok: Origin (2021). Ragnarok Online 3, for PC and mobile, is set for 2026.