Erenshor is a single-player RPG that simulates an MMO experience, going as far as to emulate the genre’s quest structure and combat, as well as adding fake players into your game.
The game’s demo is available on Steam right now, which means that we can move through its tutorial zone and pretend to play it together, in all of its faux MMO glory.
If you are curious as to how a fake MMORPG would even work or if it’s even worth sinking a couple hundred hours into it, then continue reading our preview for Erenshor.
Erenshor‘s demo gives us access to one large tutorial island called Stowaway’s Step, as the actual land of Erenshor is just outside of our grasp during this early look at the game.
The player is briefly taught about the game’s quest structure before being let loose on the open world, which is very reminiscent of the way older MMORPGs treated their tutorial zones, like Runescape‘s own Tutorial Island.
The way the player interacts with NPCs is similar to the popular old-school MMORPG Tibia, where you have to greet quest-givers and vendors by actually typing what you want to say in chat. NPCs respond to specific predefined words and usually have highlighted text in their dialogue that will help keep the conversation going, but it’s not always that you’ll be told what to say next.
At the moment, the game’s quests are reasonably intuitive, mostly due to the demo area being limited, but the game’s general design philosophy hints at that being the case in the future as well. Erenshor strikes a good balance between Runescape and classic World of Warcraft with its quest structure, also featuring hints of other classic games here and there.
The loose quest design with dialogue interaction and no markers definitely helps to immerse the player into the world, as exploring and actually paying attention to conversations becomes more important than simply following a dot on your map.
The fact that Erenshor doesn’t do any hand-holding will either make or break the experience for you. If you want to explore every corner of the world and find hidden quests and cryptic puzzles, you’ll have a great time; if you feel like following a set path and just killing whatever is at the end of it, then it might not be as enjoyable.
The lack of a map, however, does become a problem, especially inside of dungeons. The demo area is not necessarily massive, but it’s full of NPCs and little paths that lead to other places, so a rudimentary one that gets expanded as you explore would have been better than nothing at all.
The game’s dungeons are especially confusing to navigate blindly, as they suffer from very similar corridors, so even if an overworld map is not implemented, a dungeon one feels necessary if these areas are going to keep their confusing layout in the future.
Even if its layouts are a little confusing, the dungeon experience in Erenshor‘s demo is pretty fun. It’s during dungeons and world bosses that you’ll have a reason to interact with the game’s simulated players, and Erenshor features some pretty fun and difficult encounters.
Most quests don’t seem to reward the player with experience, instead rewarding reputation with whatever place you are doing them in, meaning that the way to level up is by killing enemies with other players. Professions are also treated in a similar way, although they don’t have any experience or proficiency attached to them.
The player can mine ore deposits scattered throughout the island or fish when near large bodies of water, which is done by simply equipping the correct tool in your main hand and letting your character do the rest.
Professions are perhaps the part where the game’s method of replicating older MMORPGs backfires, as they are notoriously known for being boring. The player doesn’t have any sort of agency over what items they are going to get, and there is no mini-game associated with mining or fishing, it’s just watching your character slap a rock or catch fish until their inventory fills up, forcing the player to go do something else while the game runs in the background.
Erenshor‘s simulated players can be seen roaming around doing their own quests, and they might make you question how real your interactions in other MMORPGs have been. The simulated players are reasonably convincing, and someone who isn’t that familiar with multiplayer games might honestly believe they are actual people when seeing how they behave.
Inviting these players to your party does break some of this illusion, as they lose a bit of agency and instead just follow you around like minions. The system feels like a double-edged sword, because your party needs to be easily controllable, as they are basically required for dungeons, but being able to control them reduces the faux MMORPG immersion.
The simulated players do have unique behavior when in a group, and will ask for loot or comment on what happens during combat. Their dialogue can get a bit repetitive, which should be improved upon if the developers really want to make them more convincing, perhaps a good opportunity for AI-based text generation to make itself useful in gaming.
Erenshor‘s combat is of the “standing and hitting” variety, following the standard set by vanilla World of Warcraft, where for the most time you’ll be auto-attacking the enemy while using skills whenever you have mana available.
The game is a little annoying about having to turn on your autoattack every time you target a new enemy, but combat is overall enjoyable, if a bit purposefully clunky. Thankfully, the game is not as cruel as World of Warcraft was with its health and mana regeneration out of combat, so you won’t have to sit around for a couple of minutes between fights waiting to heal.
Walking around with a group feels almost required due to how hard the enemies can hit, and that seems to go especially double for the more support-focused classes like the Druid. The game definitely follows the old-school MMORPG convention of doing small pulls, and players trying to rush through a zone will be ganged up on by the enemies.
The game currently features four classes, which seem to be split between melee and magic. The Paladin and Duelist serve as the melee tank and DPS, while the Druid and Arcanist serve as the magic support and DPS.
New spells and skills are acquired by purchasing them from vendors or looting them from dungeon enemies. Both skills and spells have class requirements, but a good chunk of them are cross-class, which lets you customize your character however you see fit.
The player can also purchase different auras, which are essentially party-wide buffs that your character can equip. They are class-locked at the moment, but in the future they might be ways to change the role of your class.
Overall, Erenshor is a dead ringer for an old-school MMORPG, and at a glance might look real to most people. The game’s small demo is already incredibly impressive and will probably be even more mind-blowing once players are let loose on its actual open world.
It’s a bit jarring to see what is essentially a mixture of Runescape‘s gameplay with classic World of Warcraft‘s combat, but Erenshor definitely makes it work, and the freedom that the player gets when it comes to building their character with skills is very reminiscent of these games.
It’s already a massive undertaking to make a compelling MMORPG, so to see Erenshor attempt that while also committing to a layer of simulation on top of it is insane. Impressive doesn’t even begin to describe this project, and being able to play an old-school MMORPG without having to worry about it closing down or becoming steadily worse with time is fantastic.
Erenshor is set to release at some point in the future for Microsoft Windows (through Steam). You can try out the game’s demo right here.
