Interview: Chatting Ravendawn Online With Tavernlight CEO Nicolas Schrik

mmorpg.com:

Late last month, the upcoming indie MMORPG Ravendawn Online made the leap into its first open beta. The game features deep character customization and crafting systems along with old-school tab-targeting combat and a charming 2.5D pixel art style. In order to dive deeper into the game’s development and its systems, I had the opportunity to chat with CEO and Director Nicolas Schrik.

MMORPG.com: Can you please introduce yourself, studio, and provide a little background on Ravendawn Online?

Nicolas Schrik: My name is Nicolas “Knighter” Schrik, I’m the CEO of Tavernlight Games and Game Director of Ravendawn Online. I’ve been an MMORPG fan since I was very young, almost exclusively playing MMORPGs for the majority of my life. There are very few MMORPGs that I have not played in some capacity, others significantly more such as FFXI, WoW, Archeage, Tibia, and RuneScape to name a few (in order of playtime).

Ravendawn has been in development since 2017, with a year of concept phasing leading up to 2017. In late 2020 the project was publicly announced and in August of 2021 we had our first Public Alpha (Alpha 1). We have since had 5 total Alphas & a Closed Beta over the last 2 years, and two weeks ago went into Open Beta! It has been amazing to see our Discord community grow from 1000 members to over 26000 members since Alpha 1.

MMORPG.com: Immediately after logging into Ravendawn for the first time, I was hit with a wave of nostalgia from a few games I used to love in the past. Were there any specific inspirations that you drew from when designing/developing Ravendawn?

Nicolas Schrik: Absolutely, we like to say Ravendawn is a melting pot of all our favorite aspects of various MMORPGs! We’ve taken inspiration from many projects