Ragnarök is a Brand New Upcoming “AAA Budget” 2021 MMORPG

In the first update since its announcement, the developers behind the upcoming “Project Ragnarok” MMORPG have revealed quite a bit of what we can look forward to when it approaches its release later this year.

• As of March 2021, NetEase have confirmed that the Ragnarök development team has over 60 staff members working on it.
• This is going to be a full sandbox strategy MMORPG. It will provide players several large, open worlds to explore all heavily inspired by Norse mythology.
• Players will be able to hunt monsters, gather resources, create and join guilds and everything you can find in traditional MMOs. They confirmed that player capacity per area (or, according to them “per single battle”) will be “40 – 50 players.” Whether that means each channel per area will have at maximum 50 players, or there can only ever be 50 players on screen at a given time remains to be seen.
• There will be both dungeons and raids present in-game. These will require teamwork and coordination to execute, so you know that means I’ll probably be dead a lot.
• Interestingly enough there won’t be a class system in-game. Instead, players will play as Valkyries, (both male and female Valkyries,) with players collecting “einherjar,” which are essentially classes you can equip, allowing you to take on traits and abilities from the class in question. This, unfortunately opens up the game to a lot of Gacha mechanics and pay-to-win in the form of specific einherjar being sold via the cash shop specifically.
• Players will progress in a traditional “skill-upgrading and gear-looting” fashion. You’ll be fully capable of obtaining artifacts to enhance both your stats and skills.
• While player-housing is confirmed, it’s not something they’re planning on adding until later through development.
• Even with Unreal Engine 5 being available this year, it seems as though they want to keep the game on a functional, tested version of Unreal Engine 4.
• Ragnarök is going to be fully cross-platform compatible. This means it will be available on PlayStation, XBox, PC and Mobile devices, however they confirmed “mobile is our top priority right now.” This is unfortunate, as that means the MMO will likely be developed for mobile devices first, with other platforms as a mere afterthought.

Ragnarök is scheduled for a Global release. They don’t have a 100% confirmed date currently, stating that “the game will distribute globally, but the release dates for different countries and regions may differ due to their respective policies and regulations.” The MMORPG will be holding a Beta test later this year for players interested in participating, however, which means the game is much closer to being in a fully-functional state than anyone had imagined.