There is not much info at the moment about how cards will work. We know that they aren't embedded into equipment, but your character. And you maintain the same abilities from the cards on you as you change equipment and weapons.
However some data mining in the beta client reveals what looks like a playing card. You be the judge:
Some of the features in the new Ragnarok Online 2 includes:
Card system
RO1 had cards for weapon slots. There will be cards in RO2, but to avoid making few/non slotted weapons useless and encourage people to change equipment, the cards are added to your character instead. You maintain the cards abilities with different equipment.
Pet system Like in RO1, you will be able to tame and have cute pets. They can boost your abilities, but as of now they won't assist in combat.
Job system
There will not be any novice class. You start of as one of the 5 base job: Swordsman, Rogue, Acolyte, Mage, or Archer. Around level 15-20 you can make a job change to one of 2 new jobs branching out from your original job.
One race Like the old RO, there is only one race.
Chara system
Through quest and battles, players will be rewarded with Chaos or Order charisma points. Depending on these points your characters abilities might act different. You get chara points and later depending on which route you take you can be for example a Dark Warrior or Light Warrior. You can get point and switch if you so desire.
Second job
While having a battle job, you can also have a life job to create potions or equipment. For example, as a Swordsman+Blacksmith. Some life job skills can be used in combat to boost attack power etc.
Offline vendoring In RO1 you had to leave your merchant/blacksmith in town, logged in and vendoring. In RO2 you can go offline and your character will become an NPC to service others with for example potions. This way you can get money offline.
Kafra system
The kafra system is back.
And here is some gameplay footage, mostly showing the UI:
If you ever played the original Ragnarok Online in the open beta stages you are very familiar with the login screen and the music. Sometimes you had to type login a lot of times before actually getting ingame.
Here you have the new Ragnarok Online in all its early-stages-glory.
Starting over
As you may or may not know by now GRAVITY Co., the company behind the original Ragnarok Online MMORPG, decided to give up on their old version of Ragnarok Online 2. They are scraping most of the stuff and starting all over. The first Ragnarok Online has a special place in many peoples hearts and the sequal was never as popular and never made to the US and Europe like the first one did.
One of the things I heard people complain about was the look of the characters. They looked like small kids running around.
Sure the sprite based characters of RO1 looked cute and small, but it left a bit to the imagination that it wasn't 10 year olds running around. And it seemed like this part is changed. RO2 was also very different from the original, which is fine and all, but why not take what makes Ragnarok good and keep that. And now they have.
The new game will have lots of the well known classes and features of the original, while hopefully still inovating. It will be free to play and the Korean Closed Beta has started.
