Ravendawn Online Beta Preview: Come Get your Nostalgia Fix

mmorpg.com:

With its first Open Beta phase coming to a close, Ravendawn Online developers were pleased with the support and constructive feedback the upcoming MMORPG received. In total, the indie MMORPG had more than 45,000 unique players in its month-long playtest and the Ravendawn team is already hard at work implementing a few of the requested changes as it gears up for the next round of testing.

If you haven’t heard of Ravendawn Online until this point, I wouldn’t feel too bad. Despite being in development since 2016, it’s been in a closed alpha state until recently and is being developed by the relatively small studio Tavernlight Games. As I only heard about the game shortly before the open beta began, I really wasn’t sure what to expect.

I honestly didn’t have very high hopes going into the open beta. I’ve seen a lot of indie studios pump out barely functioning shells of games and call it an open beta, but I was pleasantly surprised with what Ravendawn had to deliver. The game clearly knows what it wants to be and already does a good job at delivering that experience, and what that seems to be more than anything is a nostalgia engine.

Ravendawn borrows pieces from iconic games throughout history and sort of smashes them altogether. Based on my interview with CEO Nicolas Schrik, the game is heavily inspired by Ultima Online & Tibia, which is made very apparent with both the game’s top-down visual perspective and combat mechanics. The choice of color palette and artistic style also makes it hard not to feel like we’re in an old SNES RPG, such as Chrono Trigger or Illusion of Gaia. Then we’ve got the interactive crafting system reminiscent of EverQuest II.

Despite having seen most of what Ravendawn has to offer in other games, the