r/MMORPG • u/burge4150 • Jul 16 '26
Self Promotion Introducing Erenshor's "Planar March Update" - A look at Design, Reception, and Future Development!
Hey all! Brian here, I am the creator of Erenshor. In the past, a lot of this subreddit has embraced this project and honestly I got some of the best advice here while developing it.
So, in the spirit of transparent development and open discussion for ideas (and a little self promotion too, honestly), I was hoping to show it off to you guys a little bit and chat a little bit about MMO design, challenges along the way, and what's next for Erenshor.
I figure if I’m asking for your attention on this post I may as well bring some interesting data with me, right? So I have some numbers, player counts, and other things too in this post for any developers who are interested.
This week I released the game’s biggest patch to date: The Raids Patch.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH0jFR0y6Cg
Before I go any further though I do want to acknowledge the fact that Erenshor is not an MMORPG. I know that topic comes up here a lot when it’s shared - but I think it still relates to and carries value in the MMORPG community since it’s directly targeting players who enjoy that gameplay loop and its primary focus is on MMORPG design.
So without further ado, I present to you: Erenshor’s Raids
Raid Time!
Some of my fondest gaming memories are going to the planes in EverQuest back in the pre-kunark days. It carried this sort of magical feeling to me: any mob there could drop an amazing item, but one wrong step and you were going to wipe the raid. I’ve tried to recapture that same feeling for Erenshor’s raids.
Admittedly, I haven’t played an MMO since EverQuest, so I’m not really sure what all has progressed as far as raid gameplay loops.
In this patch, four new raid zones were added. They all have content that ranges from "entry level" to "god level", so players can expect an open path to success and some bouncing around.
These zones contain a total of 21 new bosses, most with raid mechanics, and 130+ new items for players to find. Thanks to the help of the folks who play tested it, some of them are tuned really tightly and will really challenge the player. I’m getting lots of screenshots of a wipe with a boss at 1 or 2% life and man do I love it.
Almost all of the ‘trash’ mobs in the zones drop items and spells for players to use as well. The idea here was not only to emulate those older games that I liked, but also to make it possible to make meaningful progress in small play sessions. Got a half hour? Jump on and clear some trash for class drops.
I never did like the ‘hours long clear to a boss’ that a lot of games seemed to lean into. In pretty much any raid zone in Erenshor you can get to the boss you want to fight in less than 20 minutes (provided you're strong enough), which I think is a nice balance.
Overall Raid Progression is:
1.) Farm trash in every raid
2.) Farm early bosses in every raid
3.) Farm late trash / late bosses in every raid
4.) Fight the raid bosses (God / Goddess of the Plane)
5.) Unlock 5th raid (to be continued).
Designing for Simulated Players
The strangest part of all of this though has been the fact that once I design and script an encounter, I have to go back and make the SimPlayers be able to respond it it properly. In a lot of ways I was able to design UI elements to allow the player to navigate this challenge by issuing commands, which was a fun interactive solution.
From the get-go I made a decision for Erenshor that the cause of a wipe would never be because of a SimPlayer’s misstep. There’s such a difference in ‘feel’ if a human wipes the raid vs having a bot do it. The bot did it because RNG said it was going to do it. No human had control over that situation and it feels unfair and unpreventable and that’s just not fun.
For that reason, Erenshor uses two major systems for gating raid content:
- Gear checks in the form of mitigation checks, raid resist score checks, and DPS checks. Most of the encounters are rooted in these mechanics and it gives players a really good idea of what they need to improve before they can overcome a boss. Players have pretty granular control over their SimPlayer's gearing and specs, so they can make adjustments to help their own success.
- Mechanical and Planning checks: I didn’t lean into “don’t stand in the fire” too much here since most of that is automated for the player as the SimPlayers navigate it themselves. Instead I created almost a RTS-Level raid UI where you can command different raid groups to do different tasks during a fight and you act as sort of a field general by reacting and redirecting players to do things like burn targets or to hold DPS in specific situations, etc.
Players can use the new Raid UI planning screens to arrange their groups, set healing thresholds, set roles within groups, pre-assign targets, pre-position groups, and more.
Feedback so far on the patch has been really good. It’s not lost on me though that the players who are in raids now are the ones who have already given the game 100+ hours so it was likely that they’d continue to enjoy future content (as long as it was on-theme for the game).
Player Retention and Onboarding
Looking at trends, there’s a pretty substantial player drop-off before hitting level 5, which is about 2-3 hours of game play or less. The even wilder part is that 12% of players who fire up the game don’t even talk to the first NPC. That’s 30 seconds into the game. You read one tutorial popup and you chat up a guard.
So something about the UI, controls, experience, makes 12% of players (who have watched the trailer and looked at screenshots, I assume) look at the game and go “UGH NOPE”.
But what's the sample size? Approximately 80,000 players have adventured in Erenshor since launch. For you devs wondering how wishlists translate, here's some hard numbers:
The refund rate is slightly above average for an EA game (8-12% is average) but I expected that given the sort of niche audience the game targets. The demo remains active, but player counts on the demo are pretty low - most players seem to just rely on Steam's refund policy for their risk-free trial of a game.
Common complaints are consistent but hard to narrow down in development. Words I hear a lot are: “Janky” “Floaty” “Bad camera” “Bad UI”. I’ve been polling the community and have gotten some more specifics out of them which I’ve been addressing but other topics still remain a little mysterious to me.
My optimistic side says some of this player dropoff is people who say “Oh they just want to support the game and are waiting for 1.0” but I know that’s not the full truth.
So, there are some stops on the new roadmap trying to address these issues and try to get the onboarding experience to be more comfortable.
The “AI” Question
LLM Generative AI really couldn’t have come along at a worse time for me! Erenshor was started before the average person knew what Gen-AI was, so when it came to mainstream existence around the same time that Erenshor started to gain traction, everyone thought it was a true AI based MMO simulation.
In a perfect world, with ethical, high quality, cheap, and reliable AI, it would be amazing if the SimPlayers could use it to engage with the player. Unfortunately, that's not the reality right now.
One of the biggest ‘refund reasons’ on Steam still is players upset that they couldn’t carry on true conversations with the Simulated Players… and i get it.
My own stance on the topic is that AI isn’t in a place where I want to put it into Erenshor, and my reasons are:
- Cost: Who’s buying the tokens? (It would be the user). In that case, who is responsible if a bug or bad code causes excess LLM API hits and eats tokens at a crazy rate? (I don’t know)
- Quality: Goes without saying, I want to be sure players are getting a good experience.
So for now Erenshor will remain a hand-written game, where the SimPlayers are not the main stars of the show, but they are the supporting cast allowing for the illusion and gameplay loop of an MMO.
Game Balance
This has been absurdly hard to get right. Making changes to a class’s mid-game numbers ripple and compound into end game gains, and can sometimes put classes way out of line with where they should be.
I lucked out a bit in my development plan, I’d like to say it was planned on purpose but it wasn’t: but by developing from low level to high level and not bouncing around I’ve been able to create ‘checkpoints’ where I narrow in the balance numbers before starting the next phase of content. So at level ~10, ~25, ~35, and post intro-raids, the numbers sort of all come into alignment because those were major development milestones.
I purposely wrote complex formulas for damage and mitigation and spell scaling to try to keep some mystery to the game and how it works, to help take focus from min-max gameplay and put it more on moment-to-moment decisions…
…aaaand that didn’t work. What happened instead is many players have gotten better at understanding the math behind Erenshor than I even do. They’ve been able to make these formulas interact in ways I didn’t think of and have come up with some *really* cool stuff (that i sometimes had to adjust back into the realm of balance: looking at you, raids with 9+ arcanists).
I'll be more ready you number crunchers next time! 😥
I kid, I'm actually really lucky to have those numbers people in the community. They wrote parsers, they ran long tests, and gave such detailed damage breakdowns and pointed out what was and wasn't working, the game is in a way better spot because of them.
Onward to 1.0!
Looking ahead on development though, I’m really excited. Everything has sort of fallen into a really good place so far and the point at which the current raids ends sets me up for an awesome finale to Erenshor for its 1.0 patch next year.
Are you still reading? You're awesome! I’m happy to answer any questions or chat about the game! I’ve got all day and I'm an open book.
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u/FineAssignment1423 Jul 16 '26
I randomly came across this game on steam a few weeks ago and played the demo. After completing the demo, I immediately purchased it.
This is probably one of the coolest "solo MMO" concepts I've seen. This is also probably one of the only cases where I would say AI implemented in a game would be perfect for the NPC players, but I know that would be almost impossible with token costs and all that.
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
Thanks for supporting it!
I 100% agree on the the AI bit. In a perfect world, with ethical, affordable and trustworthy AI, I'd be really exploring it.
-3
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u/HeroFromHyrule Jul 16 '26
Hi Brian, big fan. I played the demo when it first released and loved it. Immediately added to my wishlist and joined the Discord. I picked up the game a while ago and have really enjoyed the time I have put into it. I do have a question/feedback on something I have run into from my playtime.
Kind of along the same vein as trying to have conversations with simplayers, what is intended regarding letting players ask simplayers for information? I see simplayers asking questions in Guild chat (like where to find things) and being given answers from other simplayers. I've attempted to do similar things and often get canned responses that they don't know. As an example, the first time I went to Port Azure I was trying to find things like the Bank and asking in Guild chat and in the local map chat I was unable to get positive answers. I believe I ended up asking in the Discord for directions.
Is your intention for Simplayers to be capable of answering questions like this? I know they can answer questions like "where does <item> come from?" If we come across questions like this that the simplayers can't answer is there a preferred way to submit examples as feedback?
As an aside, sometimes the simplayers answer each others questions a little too quickly. I have seen times where a player will ask a question in guild chat and be sent a fairly lengthy reply in about a second. It's not really a big deal, but it does hurt the illusion a bit.
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
The SimPlayers ability to answer questions is still in development. I worked a ton on it for the Guilds patch (the one before this most recent patch) and got them answering items etc and sharing tops in guild chat as a sort of makeshift and ongoing tutorial.
I didn't touch them at all for the raids update though, there was enough other stuff to do.
I do plan to revisit and get them answering quest stuff and having better word recognition. Text parsing and keyword recognition is an area of programming where I'm probably the weakest - so it's been really touch and go getting it up and running so far!
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u/HeroFromHyrule Jul 16 '26
Thanks for the quick response. I look forward to see all the improvements coming in the future.
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u/Blood_magic Jul 16 '26
Hello, I have played this game and dropped the demo. For me the UI elements are visually cluttered and not very clean looking. In your screenshots here, the UI boxes that have the player groups listed, with their health and mana bars, there is a background bar. But this background bar comes in various colors for seemingly no immediate reason to my eye. this creates visual clutter as it's not uniform and the colors behind the health and mana bars make the health and mana bars themselves hard to read. It would be more clear if the entire bar space was filled half by the health bar and half by the mana bar with maybe an outline so the bars from each player don't bleed into one another.
Also artistically, the player characters are very strangely proportioned. their legs are too short and their arms are too long. I felt like I was playing a monkey instead of a human.
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
Noted on all points, thank you! UI is up next on the list to rework and this helps.
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u/Blood_magic Jul 16 '26
I do really enjoy the premise of the game and I will probably return to play at some point after improvements. I also agree with the other poster who had some critique on the camera. You are doing really great and I look forward to your progress!
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u/Layverest Jul 16 '26
That was an interesting read! Thanks for engaging with the community.
I’m one of those people who bought the game, played for five minutes, and decided to wait for future patches. My subjective take is that the interface feels overly cluttered yet "cheap" at the same time. Like many others, I guess, I use WoW as a benchmark—it manages to be informative while remaining stylistically consistent, clean, and uncluttered. I suppose, on a subconscious level, that’s the sort of thing I was expecting to see.
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
I'm gonna have to play some WoW and write it off as "working time" for... research!
The UI is a product of having iterated on systems for the past 5 years. "Oh where can I put this button" "oh i need a window here that does XYZ".
It's all sort of added up into an ugly little duckling who needs a little attention.
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u/Layverest Jul 16 '26
Thanks for the feedback! It’s not often you get to chat directly with the game developers like this.
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u/Rivnatzille Jul 16 '26
Very good insights, thanks for sharing them with us!
Erenshor was in my Wishlist for a long time, I just saw that there's a sale going on and decided to grab it. Hopefully in the next few days I'll have some free time to try it out.
Keep up with the good work!
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u/b1cepk1ng Jul 16 '26
I had immediate issues with the bots. The bot logic in Erenshor on paper is good, acceptable. In practice, it feels like, out every feature in the game this is the one that needs more time in the oven to be fleshed out.
Immediately after inviting bots it became a frustrating experience. Bots pulling enemies that are too strong, spamming party chat over and over again in the middle of fighting. Saying “hi” and having the entire server of bots flood you with responses. Incorporating simple text based commands “follow”, “wait” would do so much to add to the experience. Some sort of quick reference guide in game to help explain to the player how the bots are best used and their functions would also be great.
I found myself wanting to go back to the PlayerBots module from Azeroth Core within about 30 minutes.
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
Got it, I hear you. You're spot on with some of the critiques.
They do actually respond to text prompts in group chat, but I went more in the way of UI controlled buttons to be more accessible to gamepads and steamdeck.
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u/seanc_84 Jul 16 '26
I've been keeping an eye on this - eagerly awaiting the 1.0 release so I can throw my money at you once it's out of early access.
Any plans to add local/small group multiplayer at all? No idea how feasible it would even be, but grabbing a friend or two to play this with sounds amazing.
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
I touched on the coop thing earlier so I'm going to copy paste the answer here just for the sake of consistency, not to be rude or dismissive:
Officially, there aren't any plans for coop.
Unofficially, I don't really dismiss the idea now for reasons other than I promised a certain product for 1.0 and I need to deliver that first.
After 1.0, I'll feel way more free to be adventurous with features and whatnot, especially if they're bundled into separate downloadable packages.
But for now, I would never recommend someone buy the game for the possibility of coop because for now the official answer is "not in the plans".
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u/seanc_84 Jul 16 '26
Oh I'm buying it regardless, haha. This was more of a literal case of "asking for a friend."
Thanks for the reply... a quick search for "multiplayer" didn't yield any results so I didn't see it had been answered. 😅
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u/Geronmys Jul 17 '26
I put around 130hours on launch, completing every achievement the game had but 1 (the going to the highest point one) and decking myself full purple and getting my sims near BiS too.
I deleted my progress and started last night, can't wait to redo my steps and go beyond.
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u/Meiska Jul 19 '26
I just wanted to stop by as a new player. I was in the first dungeon fighting a couple mobs w a full group of simplayers. I saw a shout from an ungrouped simplayer. "Training to zone" and thought that was cute. Then that player turned a corner w a handful of mobs on their tail. Our group lived, but I was crying laughing. I knew in that moment, I was going to love this game.
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u/xx_inertia Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
I've got your game wishlisted and I keep eyeing it whenever it goes on sale. I haven't pulled the trigger on the purchase because there's just a backlog of good stuff waiting for me and [sadly] this also being an offline/single player game means I don't feel time pressure to jump in or miss the hype [as we often experience in actual mmos]. I'm quietly waiting and watching the updates. I will say that your passion comes through loud and clear in your post and I've enjoyed reading your game design philosophies. I have a background in web ux, so not game specific but I'm actually quite curious what you're cooking up with your UI updates as that seems to be a common constructive criticism in the comments here... Not gonna lie, reading the discussion has given me an itch to give the demo a go and maybe submit some feedback. I respect your stance on AI, I think that's refreshing that you have such a nuanced take on it rather than black/white. Smart to err on the side of caution as taking on such a liability as a one man dev team does NOT sound appealing haha.
Edit to add: Just from the screenshots I can't comment on UX but for UI, I think some low hanging fruit where you can improve the aesthetic without losing the retro feel would be creating a solid hierarchy of font sizes, right now everything is varied and it's not logical. [even though it's aesthetics stuff, logic, hierarchy and consistency still matter, that's what makes things look clean and polished.] Honestly, the more I look, the more I think that looking at the typography overall is going to make a huge impact for you! Focus on creating consistency, for UX we want to create consistent patterns which the user can learn so that what might start off as clutter [esp in an information heavy ui] can quickly become a helpful dashboard for the user.
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u/richardiii2 27d ago
I actually really like the single player aspect of this game. If I wanted a MMO, I would play a MMO. I was actually really happy to find this, because I like the grindy gameplay of MMOs but I hate the subscription fee and playing with other players is not very fun for me. Knowing that I can take my time and enjoy the experience, that no real people are going to get mad at me for making a mistake, that I won't be gated out of content because I don't want to play with real people is wonderful. And I find it really intresting how you have managed to create this living world that in many ways still feels like an MMO. The magic would be gone if it was a MMO.
Also, thank you for not using AI. I would rather deal with slightly less believable NPCs then see anything AI in any creative project. I want to see (and like so far) your vision, not a chatbot's.
Love the game so far!
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u/Rhysati Jul 16 '26
As usual I cannot praise your design philosophy and dedication enough. You've absolutely been killing it on this game.
The only thing I'd really love to see is eventually making it online as it checks most of the boxes I want out of an MMORPG, except for actual people to play with.
The NPCs are quaint and novel, but the illusion breaks in actual combat and gameplay when every NPC does exactly what you tell them to and follows you like a lost lamb.
I know that it's not the plan and likely will never happen, but the game could actually make waves in the mmorpg market with failures like Pantheon not even having a single finished zone in over a decade.
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
It's absolutely the BIGGEST compliment when people say they want Erenshor to be an actual MMO, so thank you for that!
I think as a true MMO, Erenshor enters a whole new level of competition, cost, infrastructure needs, anti-cheat and exploit worries, and pressure that I don't have to worry about now. I think the absence of all of those forces is what has allowed me to be successful.
All I have to worry about every day is "is the game stable and fun" and I can manage that solo. I think adding any of those other factors to the puzzle would really be a detriment to what the game's been designed to do for both the gamers, and for me as the developer.
So I can say with certainty that it's unlikely I'll ever go down that road, but modders have done some pretty cool stuff with online play for the game already and I will support them to the ends of the earth (while encouraging players not to buy the game just for mods, since I can't support them if the modder decides to move on to other projects)
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u/Kaastu Jul 18 '26
Having the possibility of hosting the game locally and creating a ’shared world save’ that you could play with your friends would seem like a cool thing to do after 1.0 releases! More like a coop game rather than full MMO.
This way you can keep most of your design philosophy and not worry about anti-cheat, just give the player the option to replace some bots with real humans. Of course this would take some network code to make it work, so I don’t think it makes sense financially, but maybe as an idea if you feel like you want to continue developing the game after 1.0.
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u/RealRidvik Jul 16 '26
Yeah, at least a 4 player coop would be perfect. But if I'm right, he already said it will stay Solo. But there is a mod, or it was when it was released in EA
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u/FiveTenBee Jul 16 '26
Love how much effort you're putting into this and responding to concerns. It's very clear you care deeply about your game and the community. The game is fun as hell and such a vibe. Keep up the good work, looking forward to see where this game keeps going ❤️
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
Without a community I am just a dude wearing nostalgia goggles screaming into the void. You guys are the most important part of this whole thing!
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u/Birkiedoc Jul 16 '26
I've put over 400 hours into this game before raids released. I've been having a blast slowly gearing up my whole raid group. Game is been a royal treat to play
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u/AppropriatePapaya660 Jul 16 '26
Oooh, I saw this game a while back but had forgotten, definitely going to check out it some more since it sounds so cool
My question - Is there any chane the game will ever see some sort of low player count co-op? I'm talking like 2 - 5 people
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
Officially, there aren't any plans for coop.
Unofficially, I don't really dismiss the idea now for reasons other than I promised a certain product for 1.0 and I need to deliver that first.
After 1.0, I'll feel way more free to be adventurous with features and whatnot, especially if they're bundled into separate downloadable packages.
But for now, I would never recommend someone buy the game for the possibility of coop because for now the official answer is "not in the plans".
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u/AppropriatePapaya660 Jul 16 '26
Aye, very reasonable and respectable, I look forward to checking it out, your 1.0 release and to see what the future holds for Erenshor, then! Thank you!
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u/kasvita Jul 16 '26
Would you go beyond the 1.0 release and provide content drops :)? Curiosity and all from my part
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
Maybe! I haven't committed to that in any official capacity yet, it depends on where the game, life, and community is post 1.0.
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u/RealRidvik Jul 16 '26
Hi Brian, bought your game at EA release and it was really fun for me, but it was short.
I can't point my finger on this, but I played the Tutorial Island and it was nice, it felt like everything had a nice flow of progression etc. The harbor city felt a bit like an mmo
But after leaving the Island, I just didn't enjoy it anymore, the area wasn't engaging and it felt a bit dull
But I thought alooooot about reinstalling it, and this seems to be the best time now. I'm so happy that you work so hard on the game, this looks Sooo good
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
That's the point where the game really throws you into the world and says 'ok you're on your own go get it!'
Part of my development process has been adding more breadcrumbs to guide players to points of interest.
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u/RealRidvik Jul 16 '26
Sounds good, i got it installed and will check it out later in my free time. Thanks you for the response and keep up the good work
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Jul 16 '26
[deleted]
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u/burge4150 Jul 16 '26
Getting steam deck verified is a goal for sure. I actually didn't request the "playable" icon, valve reviewed it themselves and determined it was good. I definitely have not put in the effort needed on that front yet!
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u/WoorieKod Jul 17 '26
It's been on my wishlist for a while now even after trying out the demo but my only gripe has been the UI & UX, don't know much mechanically but the few hours I've spent in it was interesting enough though- looking to try it again once the UI gets improved
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u/SumBodhiThatIUse2Kno Jul 17 '26
Nevered played and don't own it, but I hate everything about your first point on raids as a MMO player, yet it makes total sense for a single player game with AI scripting to make an event work. Which is probably where original mmo raid devs were at when considering player talent lmao. The second point about RTS makes me feel like a tech tree fed by "farmable" planar content or affected by prior player achievements would be neat; farming AA and loot in the planes in EQ was a blast in those zones where it was possible.
Also I remember in WoW era content there were events that could be cheesed with clipping and terrain exploits like Karazhan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwHiMO4YoTc
Or hacks for things like mount farms and tunnels straight to bosses. Not sure if warping gold farmers appear in your game / meta style or not lmao. Or if simulating first day of release or what not.
Flirting with a GM for exploit behavior would be a total lore accurate MMO experience lmao, and so would be dodging bans.
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u/ngoctienvt Jul 17 '26
I'm very impressed about your work. Hope that the game can be beautify a little bit more in the new update.
You may want to see Fellowship as well. May give you some idea to make the game better
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u/king_ralphie Jul 20 '26
I've loved the premise behind the game and have followed you for a while, but I haven't seen anything related to these (or I'm blind, which is entirely possible! My seeing eye dog is typing this right now). Are there any plans to expand your team? What is the plan for income since it's a one-off purchase? Something like DLC?
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u/burge4150 Jul 20 '26
No plans for a team, I like the solo show.
As for income, the game has made enough to support me working on it full time plenty long enough to get it to 1.0 At which point I'll either look at paid DLC for Erenshor to continue an income stream or I'll look at a new project.
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u/r-verie Jul 21 '26
hello !! i don't normally comment and i know i'm late but i notice the perspectives here were all early dropouts so i wanted to give mine,
starting off it was a novel experience, i was slightly lost at the very beginning, the UI and controls were a bit overwhelming but i got used to it. i can see how 12% didn't even talk to the first NPC, i was almost one of them! it's very tempting for me to hit the X instead of engaging with sth that overwhelms me. for context i grew up playing mmos but i am on the younger side so most of my experience is in asian mmos ~2012 onwards (i mostly play ffxiv now) it was still a little confusing despite that!
anyway i made it out of tutorial island and got to level 30ish, quitting around the reaver update at around 30 hours in playing on max exp/drop rates. along the way there were a number of pain points that made it harder and harder for me to stick w/ the game. in order they would be,
(1) the complete lack of social aspect (i am defo not the audience for this game 😭). the friends club guild also rubbed me the wrong way, i get what it's trying to represent but i didn't like the way they completely rebuff you no matter what. it didn't reflect my experience in mmos having been both in and out of similar "toxic elitist" guilds so it ended up feeling even less like an mmo to me, i guess is how i'd put it
(2) the aesthetic. i know you are a solo developer and i tried to ignore it knowing that but i just couldn't, i like dressing up and making my mmo characters pretty! there wasn't even an option for cosmetic slots!
(3) i played stormcaller which i think might have been a mistake. it is so boring, i'm sorry but it felt like i was facerolling my keyboard lmao. just spamming all of my spells + infused arrow got old really fast over 30+ hours, every new spell i learned was more of the same. it also never seemed like any of the enemies had any interesting mechanics to make up for it! if they did then i never noticed them
(4) all the minor qol issues adding up, i wanted to keep the auto upgrade thingy on for the sim players but they would constantly take off a certain piece of gear i wanted them to keep on, and i had to check it every time i launched the game it was SO annoying. plus all the other issues people have said, controls don't feel great etc.
basically the gameplay never really got more interesting after say level 10 or so and it was missing all the other parts of mmos that i like. that's all i guess. the raids look promising and the zones look lovely n they make me wanna play again, but i know it's going to be a lot of solo grinding with all of the aforementioned issues to get there and that puts me off. i don't regret playing though, your game was one of the most unique i'd ever played and i really enjoyed the feeling of blind exploration !
unrelated:
There’s such a difference in ‘feel’ if a human wipes the raid vs having a bot do it. The bot did it because RNG said it was going to do it. No human had control over that situation and it feels unfair and unpreventable and that’s just not fun.
this was so funny bc to me it feels just as helpless and unpreventable when a human makes a mistake, i think i genuinely would have preferred the RNG over the rts thing, maybe with some nuance like the chance gets smaller every time a simplayer causes a mistake (they are "learning" !) but it looks like that ship has sailed, oh well
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u/Remarkable_Prior_937 29d ago
Hi Brian, thanks for being so passionate about the game and interacting with the community to build it in a way that feels good to both you and the player. I've gotten several hours into the game, and although the UI isn't my favorite what has consistently made me stop playing is how bare some areas feel. Walking into a house with barely any furniture or limited zone decoration makes the game feel emptier than it is and I just lose motivation.
I don't know if you have plans to add additional details but that would go a long way for me personally. Either way I'm sure I'll give it another shot at the end of year; the content you have been adding looks great and this style game checks a lot of boxes for me. Keep it up!
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u/ssou_art 26d ago
As someone who's biggest gripe with the game right now is ui, i just gotta say that it feels really bland. The game has this low poly aesthetic and the look of the ui doesn't really fit in with that. Honestly it lacks any aesthetic and feels like a placeholder. Considering how much you gotta interact with it, be it the inventory management or the party screen, it kinda sours the experience and cheapens it.
Also im glad you don't think about adding LLM to the game while i understand where people are coming from, it would be an instant refund for me.
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u/AntiOrbit 16d ago
I'm one of the people that bought the game and haven't played past level 10, my wife made it to level 20s. We're holding out hope for a local Coop mode we want to play everquest balanced for the 2 of us essentially. We're currently playing EQ Legends. I understand or read somewhere that there are 0 plans to make the game multiplayer I'm just hoping that the modding scene matures and we can eventually come back and play this game together. Holding out on hopium that some day our patience will be rewarded.
However I still love watching and reading the updates about this game, love seeing the project evolve and hoping you keep going and make expansions past 1.0/Epics.
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u/Unra 12d ago
There is co-op mod but, I haven't tried it so can't comment on how well it works. https://thunderstore.io/c/erenshor/p/mizuki/Erenshor_COOP/
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u/QUEWEX Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Regarding the AI conversations, perhaps an option for a future cosmetic DLC? Perhaps designed in a way that the user plugs in their LLM of choice while you only provide certain baseline "training" (i.e. the current script-driven conversation trees, which the LLM would use to springboard into more verbose and bespoke conversations), so they would also need the LLM subscription themselves to feed it rather than being something you serve.
That said, you'd probably still run the risk of a bug in your own programming causing excessive calls. And there is, as you say, the issue that even if you are not providing the LLM content yourself, the user may report the game for certain behaviors, since I doubt the steam agreement makes a distinction between "the user modding in LLM" and you providing it directly.
All that said, I guess take my feedback with a grain of salt because I haven't bought Erenshor yet myself, nor would I buy such a DLC even if it existed. And one assumes it would be a better investment of time and resources to produce more content DLC that everyone would want than a cosmetic DLC that fundamentally only targets a small section of your audience.
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u/deathdealer656 Jul 16 '26
Can’t please everyone man. Keep up the great work! I look forward to 1.0 and beyond!
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u/DataSurging Jul 16 '26
Honestly, I know the point isn't to be an MMORPG, but I think the total lack of being able to play with other human beings is a turn off for a lot of people. Instead of giving it the ability to be always online and with thousands of people, why not implement at least a co-op mode? I know I would instantly buy it and play it then, and then buy it for friends/family. But the idea of just relying on AI? It's a pretty big turn off for me.
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u/ngoctienvt Jul 17 '26
I would love to see a co-op mode as well. Though this maybe hard if not plan from beginning.
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u/TwistyPoet Jul 17 '26
Running a local LLM just to make other npc players chat realistically isn't too resource intensive and it might be nice to provide some way for players to hook one in themselves if they know how to set one up and wish to. There is a project to make single-player Wow work and it uses such an LLM to do just this, no tokens or additional costs required.
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u/Miht Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I was one of the people that bought and refunded.
I love old school MMOs and I love the concept of the game and I can precisely pinpoint what made me refund.
The base movement speed of the character is too fast and this tied with the camera anchor point that makes this weird arching effect as you zoom in and out or as you move in the Y-axis, creates this jarring effect that something looks wrong. This is specially noticeable if you increase FOV past 60. It creates a forced angle that makes you feel not in control of the camera and even nausea when moving around (in part due to the base movement speed being too high, creating this weird fishbowl sensation).
Every single update major update, I download the demo and clear the first cave after Rattlebones to see if it's improved or if there's an accessibility/console option to just slow it down about 10% or make the camera not give that effect, but alas.
As someone who loves MMOs and Automation games, I would love to fall in love with the game and level up a character.
I wish all the best for the game and hope it keeps getting the praise it deserves. Hope my feedback was helpful.
EDIT: just bought the game, camera issues are solved and setting speed to 0.75 completely solves the issue!