Day and Night Cycle (Ragnarok Online)

The Day and Night Cycle was a partially-implemented feature of the Ragnarok Online client which was first referenced in the Korea Amuse World Game Expo as a feature of Ragnarok's game engine Game Framework Class (GFC) version 3.0.

Background

During the Korea Amuse World Game Expo in December 2002, Gravity announced that Ragnarok Online's game engine, RFC, would be updated from 2.0 to 3.0, and part of that change would include 3D boss monsters, and also environmental effects and the concept of day and night, as well as natural disasters such as meteor storms.

The presentation included the feature referred to as "passage of time", which showed images of a wizard located in Al De Baran, with the hue of the map changing to indicate that the map was displayed in morning, afternoon and evening.

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  A screenshot showing Al De Baran during the morning.

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  A screenshot showing Al De Baran later in the afternoon

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  A screenshot showing Al De Baran later at night.

The presentation also suggested that interactions with NPCs would change depending upon the time of day (likely their dialogue would be different), and that they would also change the items which they sold depending upon the time as well.

The main effect of the system was to be had on monsters, suggesting that the weather would make the performance of some monsters change, and that some magic would become more effective (presumably, thunder-based attacks during rainfall), and that certain monsters would only appear during the night or during rainy days.

Later posting an update to its roadmap on the Ragnarok Online BBS in April 2003, Gravity outlined that the time would also be linked to weather on certain maps, giving Lutie as an example of a map which had snowfall, and also showing the blue hue displayed in the Geffen image during Korea Amuse World Game Expo 2002. It also expanded the idea of weather affecting monsters to state that fire magic would become stronger in areas which would experience heat waves (presumably the Sograt Desert) or water-based attacks when in rainy areas.