Note: This is a development blog. As such, anything shared here should be considered a work-in-progress and can change at any point.
Today we discuss the new, ambitious future of ROSE Next and share our release of ROSE Next Classic.
The future
ROSE Online is an old game going back as far as 2003. In the time since its release there have been a lot of new starts and closures. Along the way different versions started to develop with their own unique aspects. We had the venerable Japan ROSE with their whacky items, the original International ROSE with its multinational community, NaROSE with their new "evolution" version, and many more. In that time we saw new items, new abilities and all kinds of variations to the game "ROSE". As time went on, these versions came and went and it was not uncommon for players to switch between versions as one closed or as a new one opened up and for a long time this kept the ROSE community alive and players happy.
However, as time marched on the community has shrunk. The number of ROSE servers available to play has diminished and if you were to ask, many would say ROSE is dying. The problem, in our opinion, is that while we have seen many creative takes on "ROSE", few have been bold enough to fundamentally change ROSE at its core. ROSE Online in 2003 was an amazingly fun and rich game but 2003 was 18 years ago and the gameplay mechanics from those days have not aged well. As a player of ROSE, at this point in time if you've played one version you've in essence played all the versions. Sure, some maps might be different or some skills might be different but the same core loop of: grind, craft, grind and simplified click-to-move/attack/etc. has remained unchanged for nearly two decades.
Until now.
Modern ROSE
As it stands, we will be abandoning our original plan to create "just another ROSE server" and instead will be embarking on a much more ambitious plan to reimagine ROSE using modern game development technologies. What does a modern ROSE look like? We're not quite sure yet but we know it's going to be cool! By freeing us from the shackles of the old code and old paradigms, the sky is the limit. Swimming in ROSE? Flying? Real physics on carts? Skill shots? Improved graphics? Mobile/Xbox/Switch/etc.?? YES! All of these things become possible if we are able to bring ROSE to modern game dev standards.
How will we be achieving this? While we are still in the very early stages we are currently reviving some previously abandoned projects and tools from the ROSE community to bring ROSE to the Unreal Engine. Once we bring all the assets into the engine, we will be able to move forward to build our new vision. In the meantime, here is a sneak preview of our work so far:
ROSE Next Classic
So what does this mean for our original server? We will no longer be continuing development on it as we will instead be focusing on our Unreal Engine work. However, since it will take us some time to achieve any kind of playable game and we know many were eager to try our server and our new ideas, we don't want to leave a blackhole in the community. ROSE Next would not have been possible without help from the community and so we feel it is only fair to give back/
As of today, ROSE Next Classic's source code is available on github for anyone to continue where we left off! We hope it will be useful to some and we will happily contribute fixes and support here and there as time allows.
https://github.com/rose-next/rose-next-classic
Conclusion
Thanks for those that have been following us patiently, we hope you are excited by our news and we will continue to share our updates as we have them!