Comment by opan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opan | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone here play Graal Online? That was the big MMO of my childhood (besides Runescape). I definitely put over 10k hours into it in total over the years. The unique format where different servers were like whole separate games meant you could burn out on Unholy Nation and then go play Era or Zodiac for a few months. It was hard to get entirely bored of Graal because of that. There were also small player-made servers not on the public list, and development tools anyone could download. I was a staff member on many obscure servers over the years, making amateurish levels and reusing scripts other people made. Made lots of friends, although only kept up contact with a couple outside the game. I dream of a similar game, but that's fully free software. The game very much died and it was more from all the admins leaving it to rot than the players leaving, imo. Some things just couldn't be fixed by the community. This game had GNU/Linux support before it was cool, but at one point there was some bug that apparently made it possible to steal account passwords, so they updated the Windows and Mac OS clients and didn't let old versions connect. They never updated the GNU/Linux client. Worse yet, the link to the useless version remained on their downloads page still, last I checked. This is basically what killed the game for me finally. I did play it in Wine a little some years later, but the magic was gone for me. I never liked having or using Wine, and the game was pretty dead on top of that. The bad vibes piled up and I moved on.

Wow! This brings back a lot of memories. Played a ton of Graal Online between 1999-2001. I remember the Graal 2001 and Graal 3D servers being marketed as the next big thing. Loved the playerworlds (n-pulse, unholy nation, bravo, delteria, etc). Not only was the game free but it ran great on bad dial-up and slow PCs.

I had my first coding experiences with Graal Online trying to make maps for it. I wanted to become a LAT (level administrator) for one of the playerworlds. The level editor was very easy to use and so was the game scripting language. It was great for creative people.

The game had a LOT of player made content. There were so many different heads, bodies, swords, maps, items, etc. When you opened the game folder, you could all the skins your game client had downloaded from other players.

There was also a local version of the Graal classic server which you could play split screen with someone. The map was huge and had all sorts of things. Good times just trying to explore it all!

I played a lot of Graal Online in my youth. The fact that the servers were player-made was very unique and gave each server a really distinct feeling in terms of graphics and theme (Personally played on Arkland Empires/AEON and Bravo Evolved).

Playerworlds usually had 25-200 players on at any given time, so the communities were tight-knit and you ended up getting to know everyone eventually, even the staff who were just regular players.

The game encouraged creativity since anyone could become a staff member and help shape the playerworld. Messing around with the level editor and tinkering with Graal's custom scripting language 'GScript' was my first introduction to programming, so it was highly influential for me. Come to think of it, it was also my first introduction to Linux! (Thanks Napo from AEON!)

I have very fond memories of Graal. I racked up massive dial up bills and hogged the phone line from my family while playing hundreds and hundreds of hours.

It also introduced me to memory/hex editing. I remember searching for bench.jpg which was located near some players and changing it to cloud.jpg, causing the bench near me to turn into a cloud which then would paralyse my unsuspecting victims. Ahh good times.

Other big MMORPGs for me were Helbreath and Ragnarok Online

Why did they leave it to rot did it not make any money?

Something like that. I think the iOS version was pulling in money via microtransactions and they paid more attention to that. A lot of the players that stuck with the PC version had Lifetime Classic subscriptions they were grandfathered in to and didn't plan to pay for membership anymore. That, and the restrictions for F2P players seemed to be reduced after a while. Somehow servers were able to get rid of observer mode. I used to think those restrictions applied across the whole game and couldn't be changed.

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