the strangeness of empty Ragnarok Online maps

03 Apr, 2026

Ragnarok Online (RO) is the one and only MMORPG I've played. My main period of activity was around my middle school years, with the tail end of it stretching into early high school. I'd spend hours upon hours grinding levels in that game, much to my parent's chagrin. The funny thing is that despite of this, I never made it to max level, because I was very inefficient and lazy when it came to grinding EXP. But I wasn't very competitive anyway - one of the main things I liked about the game was being in a guild and chatting / hanging out with the other members.

Now, RO is (or maybe was¹) a Massvie Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, which means its world is designed for thousands of people playing at the same time. Back then, RO was still very popular, and it did have a player base in the thousands ... on the official servers that is. But I couldn't play there. While my parents were grudgingly allowing me to play the game, they weren't willing to pay the monthly subscription. So I played on a private server.

Private RO servers had many advantages. First and foremost, the overwhelming majority of them were free to play on. Setting up a private server also allowed the admins to change some of the game settings, the most common one being EXP rates², custom items and expanded character customisation options.

Probably the biggest drawback of private servers was the relatively small player base. At least on the servers that I played on, there were usually only a few hundred people online at the same time. Of course, these players weren't spread out evenly. There was a strong concentration of people in certain hotspots (such as Prontera, essentially the "capital" of the RO world), leaving the rest of the world map relatively empty.

Because the most populated areas of the world were close to the starting area for new players, level grinding often took me to faraway places that were, most of the time, completely deserted. Except for the monsters, of course, and the occasional other player that happened to be the same job class as me and leveled at the same location.³ Sometimes it felt like I as running around in a world that had just experienced some sort of rapture event, where most humans had vanished, leaving only a handful of them (the NPCs, and the small number of other players) behind.

I didn't really mind. This is just an effect that happens naturally when a few hundred players play a game designed for thousands of them. But it also gave most of the areas outside of the "population centers" the same feeling you get when you stand in an empty school building all alone on a Sunday or take an exclusive tour of a closed-down airport. It's a classic "liminal space" experience: The locations feel way too big without all the people they're supposed to accommodate, and their wide emptiness leads to a feeling of subtle unease. Depending on your graphics settings, areas further away from the player character would also be covered in a thin fog, which only enhanced this effect.

The El Mes Plateau near the floating city of Yuno with the fog effect

Out of all of these empty maps, the most peculiar ones were those containing black voids. In areas of the overworld where the borders of the game weren't drawn by water or oceans but deep gorges or canyons, the terrain simply dropped down into nothingness. This kind of barrier was common in desert-type areas or inside of dungeons. Of course, this is just a simplified way of showing an intraversable areas, code for "you can't go here." I knew that, even back in middle school, and I wouldn't exactly call the resulting effect "creepy." But combined with the absence of people, I still felt that these areas created a very strong feeling of desolation and quiet sadness (desert terrain with dead trees and such helped with this).⁴

Od Canyon, northwest of the desert city of Rachel

It's been ages since I last played RO, and I'm not going to start playing again (it simply requires too much time I'd rather spend doing other things). But I often think about these empty game maps, and I think their atmosphere has become a core element of what I imagine when I think about "liminal (game) horror." They're not scary on their own, but serve as a very potent backdrop where a creepy story could happen. Sometimes I get the urge to explore their potential, either in writing or other creative ways, but I haven't managed to produced anything concrete yet.

By the way, I strongly recommend listening to some of the tracks of the original RO soundtrack. Unlike the game's graphics, it has held up great and there are some real bangers in there (maybe there's some nostalgia at play here). Here is a link to a YouTube playlist. Below are some of my personal favourites.

• Naive Rave
• Sleepless
• Can't Go Home Again, Baby
• Lastman Dancing
• Believe in Myself
• We Have Lee But You Don't Have
• Ethnica
• CheongChoon

Footnotes

#games #liminal spaces