I dunno how many times I sat LFG in EverQuest, just wasting hours away chatting or doing busywork or shooting the breeze at a dungeon zone while waiting for a spot to open up in some group. If I could just have NPCs with me, I could just do it myself.
EverQuest I and II eventually added “mercenaries”, powerful NPCs, that you could hire to duo. Final Fantasy XIV has their “trust” system that lets you hire NPCs to come with you, or just use named NPCs to handle new content. But these are, still, in an MMO, and there’s always the chance you’re going to have to share a spawn with actual players.
Not so in Erenshor. You’re the only player there. The rest of the OOC, LFG and local chatter are all NPCs who are LFG and mostly want to group with you and they feel like doing just whatever it is you feel like doing.
The game evokes the original EverQuest. The terrain is low polygon; so are the characters and the monsters. The textures aren’t quite up to EQ’s standards, but anyone looking at the game will instantly know exactly which game it’s supposed to simulate.
The demo, currently live on Steam, is the prologue of the final game. It takes you through character creation, getting quests, making a group, clearing out a bandit camp, killing an open world boss, crafting, and a legitimate dungeon crawl with a quest to take you through it.
While I was streaming it, I had a chat with a player who had gone through the prologue with all four classes (Paladin, Druid, Duelist and Mage) and hinted at secrets I hadn’t yet found.
Erenshor isn’t the first game to simulate an RPG. I think the first one I played was called “It’s a Wipe”, where you played the leader of a raid guild where actually winning a raid was overshadowed by guild politics, making sure everyone was kept happy with loot, defusing fights between members and such. Then there was the goat game MMO that just parodied everything you probably DIDN’T like about MMOs.
I played for a couple of hours and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Erenshor is not an EverQuest parody; it’s a legit game that’s perfect for short or long playing sessions. While there is no main quest leading you through the demo, NPCs will gently point you toward the things the game thinks you might want to be doing.
While I did “finish” the demo by solving the puzzle on how to get off the island, I still left quests undone. And, I’ve only tried the Duelist. I think the mage looks like a lot of fun. As for the tank and healer — well, I’ll let Scrubby go pull and Cyndara go heal while I deal the mad deeps that makes all the NPCs go OOOOOOOO.
You can try Erenshor for yourself at https://store.steampowered.com/app/2382520/Erenshor/.
There’s a bunch of Sword Art Online games that go this route, too. They tend to peak at “OK” though. Some of them are just bad (IMO).
Yes, and the .hack series on the PlayStation not only simulated all these things, it also had out of game stuff like e-mail, forums, and TV broadcasts you could stream. I probably should have mentioned those 🙂
The only SAO-adjacent game I actually finished was Fatal Bullet, and that’s also the only one where you don’t have to suffer through Kiriko’s harem fixation (although he is there with his harem as an NPC). Well, Alicization doesn’t have that, it was just plain boring if you’d seen the anime.
I think they eventually patched Alicization so you could skip all the content that just replicates, point by point, the anime. Though not sure how much game that left!
Hey, developer of erenshor here – thank you for the fantastic write up and for streaming the game!
Oh wow!!!
Hey, this is the game that all us old time EQers wanted back in the day. I can’t wait to play the full release. And I’m probably headed back into the demo to see about the fort ruins at night and to try and catch that dang fish again 🙂
I played Erenshor in one of the Next Fests and enjoyed it. Someone from what looked like the marketing dept. later sent me an invite of some sort to whatever testing they’re running but it seemed to require some non-Steam client to access and I never followed it up.
Ironically, this is the kind of game I kept asking for backwhen I was playing EQ regularly (What I actually wanted was an offline version of EQ itself.) but now there is one I’m not really all that interested any more. It is well done, though, and I might well take another look at it when it gets a bit further along.
If you start a new character on the live servers, you can experience having EQ all to yourself if you go to the racial starting cities. It’s more fun with people.
There’s lots of MMOs trying to replicate the EQ experience, but precious few straight RPGs. Sure, there are plenty of group-focused single player RPGs out there — Dragon’s Dogma 2 is one that just came out — but few are leaning into the retro feel as hard.
The reason I wanted an offline version of EQ back in the day was that I didn’t believe the online version would last long! I wanted to be able to play when the servers had all closed down. And that was when the game was booming and new servers were popping up every month or two. I don’t think anyone imagined we’d still be able to log in our same characters a quarter of a century later.
Yeah that’s crazy. I’d add up all the hours played for all the characters but I am pretty sure the LAST time I did that, I didn’t like the numbers. Way. Too. High.
All of the testing has been done through Steam, and actually I haven’t done a next fest yet so there’s a small chance you played something else?
Regardless, this upcoming next fest is going to be the one I do, and the demos getting a huge content update for it – check in!
Tipa – I’ll try to pop into your stream tonight if it’s up when I’m around 😉
I’m headed to California tonight but I’ll be playing some when I’m back 🙂