Erenshor

If you are playing this game and saying "Man, this <mechanic> is annoying. It should be fixed right now!" then you're probably not the target audience. Erenshor has one job and that is to create an experience. And it NAILS it. This is flashing me back 25 years, back when $9/month was a stretch to spend on an EQ sub. But oh man...I'm now back pulling mobs to a zone wall, grinding XP and watching the chat fly by. Seeing bots talk about "wife aggro" and my guild yapping about what bands they are listening to. Randoms whispering me for a guild invite and then having to find me in the zone. The balancing act of "do I need to port and run to sell/bank or can I eek out some more pulls?" I'm level 10 and absolutely charmed and delighted. If you miss the glory days of EQ/DAoC and WoW, before things got so "theme parked" and on rails that the danger and adventure was lost, then drop the $20 and come to Erenshor.

A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one. Erenshor is a single player MMO where you play as an adventurer in a world filled with simulated players that grow as you do, each with a personality of their own who are going about fighting mobs, doing quests, and completing dungeons just like you. It's an idea I was not expecting to like as much as I do but it brings back feelings of yesteryear when I was still playing games like Everquest. The game does so many thing that I enjoy such as having a "server admin" panel that lets you adjust parts of the game to your liking such as adding or decreasing things like EXP gain, loot drops, or turn on features such as the map or quest markers which allows you to tailor the game to your preferred experience. Having Simplayers running around so the world feels populated, having them randomly comment or send you tells such as complimenting your gear or asking you to group gives them personality so it helps the world feel "lived in" as it were. While the game doesn't have everything I want, such as a true pet class or a martial arts class, at the time of this writing the dev is very responsive on Discord and open to feedback, the community is very welcoming, and the development itself of the game is at a nice, steady pace so I can't wait to see where it goes.

It's tough to see a game clearly made with love from a single dev and end up not feeling like it's great to recommend. As I keep playing through different early access versions, the game keeps upping the difficulty on existing content and asking more and more time to gear up your entire guild to do the next thing. Raids just came out. Yay! I hit 35 on my new character. Yay! Let's go rai-... nope, hard stuck with hours and hours and hours of farming and gearing to even attune to bosses. The sentiment, from patches past, was that you shouldn't need to spend time fully getting BIS pre-raid to be ready. The reality is: BIS is the only upgrades I could do to my group and we can't even kill the attunement bosses, much less start raiding. Vessel Siraethe is just such a harsh check already, and that's step 3 of 7 in pre-raid attunement. My tank and I have 3-5 purple BIS pieces, a few BIS or decent blues, and the best I can kill for in other slots. The other three are lesser, but still some purple/blue gear. Each level from about 20 to 35 is just less fun killing mobs and more time wiki-diving (or worse, trolling Discord searches) to find what I need to progress, where I might be able to get some precious xp and not fight pink con, become a master at 5 different classes of gear theory and lists because the AI does not actually gear themselves up reliably ever, and STILL struggle with progression fights. I'm sure it's just that I'm not the target audience. I'm fine with the "old school" feel, until it's me babysitting 4, and later 14, bots to make sure each session they didn't break their build and get the most optimal gear on them I can possibly theorycraft. It's ended up being not enough just playing my chosen class killing things and just a fantasy rehash of power-tripping 2000-era raid leaders having to babysit every minute detail of every player they ever come across.

Having played Everquest off and on for over 20 years, this game touches on all the things I loved about early MMO gaming without any of the hours long LFG sessions. With Raid Content just about to be released it will have everything I want in an MMO but in a single player game!

I want to like it, I really do. The idea sounds fantastic on paper. The sim players are great, and make the game feel like its alive, and you're not the only person playing it. But the ui, the quests, how you interact with NPCs is obtuse and dated just for the sake of being dated. And not just dated as in classic WoW type dated, but dated even past that. You have to open trade with NPCs to give them quest items that you just need to remember that they want, and you have to say certain key words to NPCs in local say chat to get them to progress quests. The quest log is vague, and you're just kind of expected to figure it out. Which is fun, for maybe the first 30 minutes, or if you don't take a break at all. Its a great idea but terrible, terrible execution.

I know what you're thinking. This shouldn't work. A simulated MMO. Isn't the fun of MMOs the people? The answer is yes, that's part of it, and somehow Erenshor nails this, despite the players being simulated. I love jumping on and seeing sim'd players I grouped with are around, looking for a group, and have progressed since I played last. Guilds are in. Raids were just released (haven't tried those yet but I can't wait). This game nails the nostalgia of what made MMOs a blast in the early days. And hey, not up for a huge grind? You can adjust XP rates, pretty much everything in your "server settings". This game nails the EQ era feel, and I've had a ridiculous amount of fun playing it. I'm currently chasing the "friends" guild, I want number 1 with my guild, the Coven, dammit! If you enjoyed playing games like EQ, and just want to step back in time for a bit? This game nails it. The world is full of lore, the classes are fun, and playing in groups gives that familiar feel of victory when you clear a dungeon. It's great. And with every update it just gets exponentially better. Can't wait to see what the dev(s) has in store next.

If the thought of recieving Jboots at the end of a questline triggers something primal deep inside you then you might just be the target audience for this game. Erenshor is a single player MMORPG-like game with a completely simulated playerbase. The graphics, interface and combat are all a beautifully realized love letter to Everquest and anyone who spent late nights in Crushbone or Blackburrow are going to feel right at home. Just like in a non-simmulated MMO, after you carefully craft your character and pick your class you can choose to quest and grind solo in one of 20+ zones or whisper some the simulated players to join your group and hit some group content. You set the sim player's group roles (healer, tank, puller, CC, main assist) and they'll act mostly autonomously while you carve your way through one of the 18 currently implemented dungeons. You can even create your own guild (or join an existing one) and recruit some of the sim players to join in one of the 4 currently implemented raids. That is of course after you hit max level and finish grinding out that pre-raid BIS. No one likes a guidie who shows up for raid undergeared, don't be that guy. Playing Erenshor is a wonderfully nostalgic experience. If any of the above sounds even remotely interesting to you I honestly urge you to give it a try - even in early access you can easily spend over 100 hours completing the current content on one character and many, many more optimizing the gear of your group of 15 "A" team raiders. Be honest, you've always wanted to be able to competely control the gearing decisions for your entire raid. Ain't no one is going to be allowed to spend DKP on alt gear when your main raiders aren't even rocking BIS in YOUR guild. You can even change the name of any of the simulated players outside of a select few that have scripted personalities. So feel free to get wierd with it. I know I did. Sorry ML - even in Erenshor you're still going to be the second best mage in the guild. Yes I do think this is perfectly healthy. No I don't care if he sees this review. He knows.

Erenshor sounded like a really interesting concept on paper—a single-player MMO with simulated players is a genuinely cool idea. Unfortunately, actually playing it made me realize just how sloppy the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ execution is. The first thing that stood out was the presentation. The UI is clunky, awkward to navigate, and honestly feels like it was thrown together without much thought. The visuals don't help either. Almost every environment, object, and character model looks like it came straight out of a free Unity asset pack rather than something built with its own identity. It all ends up feeling cheap instead of nostalgic. The gameplay has plenty of rough edges too. Camera movement is frustrating, entering buildings constantly jerks your view around, and visual glitches make the world feel unfinished. Once you get past the opening areas, progression becomes confusing, with little guidance on where to go next beyond grinding enemies and farming gear. The "simulated players" are also far less convincing than I expected, repeating limited dialogue until they start feeling more like lifeless scripts than companions and not to mention them just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ running to point A to point B. To make matters worse, the game has some punishing systems without giving you the tools to recover from mistakes. Important NPCs can permanently disappear due to awkward AI behavior, yet there are very few reliable rollback options if something goes wrong. That's not meaningful difficulty—it just feels frustrating. I really wanted to enjoy this game because the idea behind it is genuinely unique, I missed out on doing anything MMO related back in the early 2000s, but the clunky interface, bargain-bin assets, awkward systems, and overall lack of polish make it feel more like a rough prototype than a game ready for release. AlSo There Is No MuLtIpLaYeR ThEy LiEd To Me (I'm just joking lmfao)