If you drop off for a week or a month or a season in a normal MMO, there’s a good chance that the friends you made won’t be there any longer, your guild may have dumped you, the game itself will have moved on and left you behind.
Not so with Erenshor! Pick it up six months later and your friends will have kindly not outleveled you, will remember you, beg to join your group, reminisce about fun adventures you shared and so on. I’d been away from Erenshor for some time, but when I logged back on, ready to continue my race to the end game, all my sim friends were there to help.
Erenshor’s world is an open one. It’s easy to get to a place too dangerous for you. I’d failed hard in Fallen Braxonia and the Blight (that last because, like in Rottenfoot, a wandering dragon wants to ruin your day as it ruined mine). But there were some solid experience spots — I made several levels in Abyssal Lake, and finally hit 35 in the Ripper’s Keep Mysterious Portal. Infinitely respawning mobs, not too hard to kill. I popped an XP potion and settled in. I had to keep resetting Eron, the puller/tank. He’d get lost or tied up. Eventually he refused to autopull, so I had to direct him to pull specific mobs, but we got there — we all did. All of my usual team are level 35.
We immediately headed back to town (taking on another nemesis, Savannah Priel, along the way), sold and banked stuff, then headed in to Vitheo’s Rest to finally put the shade to his final, final rest. And this time he had the Apotheosis equipped — the glowy staff I’ve coveted since I saw it on a twink many, many levels ago but could not afford to buy from the auction house. MINE NOW. And l farmed it legit, so there.
Now comes the time to go through the long list of Steam achievements I do not yet have. I’ll need to face Fallen Braxonia again. AND that annoying dragon in the Blight. AND some other zones I’ve never been to. AND do some quests. I have my dance card full. I play an Arcanist, and it is super fun to see all the boss fights I’m facing lead with the line “BTW if you’re an Arcanist, you’re f**ked”. Or words to that effect. Because we have low health and die easy. And over the long run, Duelists and Stormcallers do more deeps. Arcanists can’t even be mana batteries anymore.
I don’t care. I look cool. But the sim players keep begging me to get on my twinked Stormcaller, so… they know what’s up.
Alright! The new updates drops in a couple of weeks, and I’m there for it. I’ll finally be able to join a guild! I’ll finally be able to make a guild! And then recruit sim players to join it! Looks like everyone gets to start off in the “Erenshor’s Young” guild, a guild that is pretty popular with the sim players.
I’ll be able to make a guild hall, a “Reliquary”, decorate it, port to it from anywhere, summon my guildies to it. We’l be able to have Meetings of an Important Nature, and discuss how to Pwn our Rival Guild, the “Friends Club”. Yup, there’s going to be an uber guild that wants to see us fail, and we’re not gonna put up with that.
The sim players can answer (and ask) more questions, now. There’s a GM who will punish bad behavior. Not quite sure what that bad behavior could be, but probably training people would be part of it. Maybe kill stealing? If it’s training the “Friends Club” so that we can hit a challenge mob first, well, worth it. Oh yeah, the GM will also designate challenge mobs that you’ll compete with “Friends Club” to kill.
There’s going to be a new class, Reaver (AKA Shadow Knight). I did twink a paladin, but I think she’s going to remain unplayed. I usually play an SK whenever I can, and I’m hoping, for my second time through the game, that my Reaver will become the guild’s main tank and that the guild challenges won’t force me onto Moon Unit. But if they do, they do.
Really considering not playing between now and then so that my first kills on all the bosses I have yet to down will happen after I’ve raced “Friends Club” there.
Whenever you talk about this game I wonder if there’s a tiny ollama model or something running in there powering your Sim friends and their comments.
I wouldn’t bring this up on any other blog because, y’know, AI = burn it to the ground in most corners of the Internet these days…
It would be fun if the conversations weren’t all canned and they would actually respond, in character, to what things are happening and remember previous interactions, but having so many models running at once would be super expensive and slow.
This is kinda where Sword for Hire started, although I’ve entirely moved away from LLM for that one now.