This time, it's Ragnarok.

[randomness]

I'm in another Internet/Net Game parlor filled with high-school boys. This one's in Thailand, not Botswana. On one side of me is a kid playing some first-person shooter (could be Counterstrike), and on my other side is one playing Ragnarok, or some other similar Korean game.

Ah, the rattle of simulated automatic weapons fire. Brings back fond memories of Julian's basement, and those massive Halo-fests. :)

So, anyone ever play one of the Korean games? I'm under the impression they're like EverQuest or Asheron's Call, but I don't know this for sure. Have they arrived in the States or are they just all over Asia?

Comments

[bryant]

You can play Lineage in the US -- it hasn't done well at all, because a) US gamers look at the interface and go "Jesus, I could just play Ultima Online if I wanted 2d isometric graphics" and b) the game depends on highly organized webs of affiliation which we have trouble joining. But you can play.

Ragnarok has a smallish US following.

NCSoft has hooked up with Richard Garriot, and he's working on the American version of Lineage 2 to some degree. I don't expect it to succeed, just cause Lineage got a bad rep, but you never know.

Um, lesse. The Final Fantasy MMORPG has done very well in the US after a year of success in Japan.

[adamhmorse.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Ragnarok is a MMORPG with a large number of players. The Korean MMORPG market is huge: about the same size as the US market, maybe somewhat bigger, in a much smaller country. It's also rather different because the Korean games are mostly payed in PC Bangs like the one you were in, instead of from home, although I believe that's changing.

As noted, there is a peculiar feature of very few games being successful in both Korea and the US/Europe. Part of this has to do with release timing; Lineage and Ragnarok were both out for years in Korea before they were released in the US, so when they arrived in the US they had "old game" feels to them, without the buy-in and community development that similar age American games have. The same has been true in reverse for American games, which have generally not launched well in Korea.

Blizzard's World of Warcraft is gearing up for a simultaneous launch in hopes of the Holy Grail of MMORPGs: success in both major markets. It'll be interesting to see if they succeed. In part, that may help show whether it's really about "Korean gamers want different things from American gamers." Personally, I think the alliance systems of games like Lineage sound really cool and would add a lot to the critical development of community if they were introduced in American games. But I'm often not a typical player...

[bryant]

I suspect WoW will do quite well; Blizzard understands the Korean market and has great name recognition. Warcraft is a big brand in Korea.

And yeah -- the Korean market is currently somewhat larger than the American market for whatever reason. The top couple of Korean MMORPGs have > 1 million players. Nobody's hit that in the US yet. Mind you, the method of counting has to be somewhat responsible for this. You don't pay a monthly fee as a player; you pay by the hour in the PC Bang and the PC Bang owner pays a high monthly fee to cover anyone playing from his establishment.

if I have no monthly fee to pay I'm going to just leave my account "active" forever. It'd be interesting to see counts of the active player base; the numbers might come back into alignment then.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

The Economist's explanation for why the Korean market is so large is that broadband has really taken off there. They recently had an article on Korean online gaming which didn't really get into much detail about the games themselves.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I believe I've been in that cafe... or at least one of its three hundred thousand close relatives. :)

[marmota.livejournal.com]

Back when I was mostly unemployed and was filling up some of my free time as a beta tester for various games, I spent some time on one called Neocron, put out by a german company called Reakktor.
Since the servers were located in Europe, and thus a lot closer and lower-ping than most MMOGs of the time based on servers in california, it had a fair percentage of asian players.
As my knowledge of deutsch is limited to small amounts of yiddish and overexposure to "hogan's heroes" shows in my youth, I was flailing with the cultural gap, until the Asians showed up and made cultural gaps all around vastly more entertaining.
Perhaps not all that surprising, I hooked up with a group of players out of Singapore who spoke english as well or better than I, and they also played Phantasy Star Online, and sent me a key to try it out.
I was utterly lost. It was pretty, although the graphics were a bit simplistic in a Nintendo kind of way. Even with fan translations of the menus, I had no hope of getting immersed in it. If they've arrived in the States, it's through the otaku culture or they've had a major overhaul to be english-friendly.

[ishaa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I downloaded and tried Lineage, the graphics and UI do in fact blow.

To expand on what bryant said, not only would it be tough to join the existing structure, I'm not sure most American gamers would want to. Here's the thing: when you pick your character class at the beginning, one of them is Prince, and if and only if you pick this class can you eventually become a great leader. If you pick any other class you attach yourself to such a Prince and serve him faithfully.

Must be a cultural difference, because that sounds about as fun as my job. Give me a good American game, like Grand Theft Auto III.