Trivia / Ragnarok II: The Gate of the World

• What Could Have Been: Starting from the obvious that this whole game is one giant What Could Have Been, there are other things of note—
  • The Gate of the World was originally intended as a client upgrade for Ragnarok Online. RO's client was called "Master of Magic" by Gravity's founding developers. This new client was called "Master of Sorcery," and used the same Granny 3D toolkit as "Master of Magic," as well as a similar data file structure, a similar map generation system, and a modified version of Gravity's AEGIS software. It was also planned to have an integrated patching system and some other new in-house methods to combat both the runway problem of botters and pirate servers that plagued Ragnarok Online.
    
    Although "Master of Sorcery" could have readily been integrated into Ragnarok Online as far back as 2004—at the time kRO's files apparently had multiple references to content tested with "Master of Sorcery," in fact—there were legal and marketing concerns. For one thing, turning Ragnarok Online into a completely 3D game would have alienated all the players who liked RO precisely because of its sprite-and-polygon 2½D style. The bigger issue was that such a drastic change to the game could be seen as violating the hosting contracts Gravity Corporation had set up with various companies—after all, those companies were contracted to provide local (legitimate) servers for Ragnarok Online, and the "Master of Sorcery" upgrade could have been seen in legal terms as a completely different game.
    
    For those reasons, Gravity instead opted to develop The Gate of the World out of some of the assets for "Master of Sorcery," though it's not clear how much of that project was ported over, given the difference in the game engine used (among other things).

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