I have played MMOs since the EverQuest days, and I have played almost all of them the same way:
Solo.
Or, in EverQuest’s case, three-boxing, because at a certain point you either box your own party to do LDoN or spend half your night trying to find one and then logout.
That probably sounds strange because MMOs are supposed to be social games, but the social part was never the main hook for me. I did not need to be in voice chat. I did not need a guild schedule. I did not need five other people depending on me every time I logged in.
What I liked was being inside a persistent world.
I liked knowing the world was moving even when I was doing my own thing. Other players were leveling, camping spawns, buying and selling gear, finding upgrades, forming groups, wiping, recovering, getting stronger. You could see progression around you. You could feel that the game did not exist only for you.
That is the part MMOs do better than almost anything else.
But the problem is obvious: soloing only gets you so far.
Eventually, the game starts asking for a real group. And being in a group, especially as an adult with a job, starts to feel like work. You cannot just alt-tab for ten minutes. You cannot get up whenever you want. You cannot suddenly decide you are done without wasting other people’s time. The thing that makes the world feel alive also becomes the thing that makes it hard to play on your own terms.
That is why Erenshor immediately made sense to me.
It is not trying to replace MMOs with a normal single-player RPG. It is trying to keep the part I actually care about: the feeling of being in a persistent world where other “players” are progressing around you.
More importantly, Erenshor makes it possible to do something I never do in MMOs: play in a group, and now even raid, without the pressure of other real players.
No schedule. No voice chat. No feeling like I am wasting someone’s time if I need to get up, alt-tab, answer a message, or just stop playing.
That idea alone is interesting to me.
And as someone who has messed with this from the dev side also, Erenshor is even more interesting because it was built around that concept from the start.
So I wanted to ask the developer the question that actually matters to me:
How do you build that?
Editor’s note: Answers have been organized for readability, while preserving the developer’s original wording and intent.
Before Erenshor, what was your actual programming background?
Developer:
My programming background is just a mixture of mapping and modding for games ever since I was like 10 years old. I had released a few commercial games before Erenshor, but none were very large projects.
I don’t have any formal training and have never worked professionally in a software development field.
“Seriously programming” is a bit of a gray area. I’m still not good by any corporate standards and my work would likely put me at the bottom of any “hirable” lists!
I really enjoy all things software development though, I think of it as a game: Here’s a problem to solve, here’s your tools. Your tools can do literally anything in the right hands, so there aren’t any excuses.
Did old MMOs directly shape the dream behind Erenshor?
Developer:
I played on a private MMO server for a while, and I played classic EverQuest at launch.
EverQuest sort of sparked the dream of making something like that, so I’ve thought a lot about “what I would do” over the years, if I ever had the chance to work on something in the genre.
So much of Erenshor is based on my own personal experiences. A lot of the more detailed SimPlayers are based on people I once played with.
I really like the rhythm and style of an MMO in general. A lot of people call them “chatrooms set inside a bad RPG” but I think there’s something really comfortable about mindlessly grinding for XP or items, and being able to make small improvements to your character over time.
When did Erenshor stop feeling like an experiment and start feeling real?
Developer:
Erenshor “got real” in steps.
The first time gaming media wrote about me put me into absolute crisis for an afternoon. I was nervous, my imposter syndrome was raging, and I couldn’t sit still.
It sort of happened again when people started supporting the project, whether it was financially, or joining the Discord. I couldn’t believe people believed in it.
I’ve sort of accepted my place now, that Erenshor is my job, and that people actually like it.
I’m forever grateful for all of the support people have given it.
Erenshor is built in Unity, but it simulates things MMOs usually spread across servers, databases, clients, and social systems. Did Unity ever fight you on that?
Developer:
Erenshor came together really, really smoothly actually.
Unity requires a bit of optimization here and there but nothing wild. I wish I had a more interesting answer but, knock on wood, 5 years in, and it’s been really smooth development-wise.
How complex is the AI for the SimPlayers?
Developer:
I created everything for the SimPlayer logic and AI. None of it is generative.
All of the text is handwritten and uses a keyword parser to react. It works most of the time.
Their combat mechanics and abilities are just a whole bunch of conditional checks and state machines, checking things like “does the target AE?” or “Should I be behind this target?” or “Is that target crowd controlled?” and then they react accordingly.
When they’re playing alone, they’ll use their same logic for battle while their group leader takes them to points of interest around the map that are in their level range.
It’s all still very fun to watch for me.
How do you balance giving SimPlayers autonomy while still making the player feel in control?
Developer:
By casting the player as guild leader, raid leader, group leader, I can put a lot of their control in the player’s hands too for the fine-tune needs of an encounter.
Is a major graphics upgrade desirable, or would that risk losing the old-school MMO texture of the game?
Developer:
A graphics update probably isn’t in the cards.
It would of course be really cool to have a more unique look, but so much of the game geometry is built around the current art assets, I’d essentially be rebuilding the entire game world with new models and textures.
What system looks simple to players but is secretly difficult to engineer?
Developer:
Really the most complex thing about the game is all of the combat and defensive formulas.
Balancing a game this big has been a really, really, really hard task. Making balance changes at one level of content cascades through everything else and that ripple effect can really mess stuff up.
A lot of community members have built tools and spreadsheets and parsers and I’ve leaned on those tools too while creating encounters, especially raid encounters, in order to make sure players are fairly challenged.
Did any old MMO ideas turn out to be wrong once you tried them in single-player?
Developer:
There have been a lot of requests for “more MMO realism” in Erenshor: things like SimPlayers being “offline” or keeping “real-life schedules.”
SimPlayers “disconnecting” or “going AFK” and wiping the group. Or having them mess up combat mechanics. People have wanted them to grief and work against the player and while that sounds fun, it’s really not.
It’s different when a human is doing those things, and you can relate to it. But when it’s RNG deciding that “Jethro is going to wipe the raid now,” it’s really frustrating.
I actually tried having SimPlayers be randomly offline early on in development, and many players would constantly reload the game until their desired party was all present.
I quickly decided that realism isn’t the way. That’s not what most people come to Erenshor for.
At Least I Have Chicken
The more I think about Erenshor, the more I think the pitch is not really “single-player MMO.”
That sounds like a contradiction.
The better pitch is: an MMO for people who love persistent worlds, but do not always want the human scheduling system attached to them.
Because that is the part that gets lost in a lot of MMO discussion. Some of us were never playing these games because we wanted constant social interaction. We were playing because the world felt alive.
Erenshor is interesting because it tries to preserve that feeling without forcing the player into the part that starts to feel like a second job.
It is not nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia.
It is a very specific answer to a very specific MMO problem:
What if you want the world, the progression, the groups, and now even the raids, but you also want to be able to alt-tab without ruining someone else’s night?
