I read a lot as a kid. Mostly a combination of mainstream books from Scholastic and Michael Crichton novels. Around the time I got my first real desktop computer — a Compaq Presario — my interests shifted from reading to playing games.

I had a Nintendo NES, of course. Also a Gameboy. But the arcade style game never really did anything for me, so I lost interest in ancient console gaming fairly quickly. The PC changed that.

With games like Command & Conquer, Wing Commander, and the King’s Quest series, I’d found a new source for the bulk of my entertainment.

That changed again when I became old enough to drive, at which point I spent much less time playing on the PC and more time on the road, hanging out at Autozone, and working on cars.

The passion for driving led me to one of my earliest jobs — delivering for Domino’s. I had no idea that my job carting pizzas around town would lead to what probably qualifies as my first soul-crushing addiction…

Everquest

I feel like Everquest has become a footnote (or worse, a joke) in the annals of MMO gaming…unless you happen to be someone who was playing it in the late 90s.

For us, EQ is often remembered as a life-altering experience. Our first video game obsession.

It makes sense, because other than Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and Ultima Online, there hadn’t been much in the way of massive online gaming until Everquest launched. (I do remember using a dial-up modem to connect directly to my brother-in-law’s computer so we could go PvP on Command & Conquer. Other than that, I don’t think I had seen any real online gaming.)

Look back on EQ now and you’ll see horrible polygon graphics, unforgiving mechanics, and a UI that needed a lot of help. But I still vividly remember my first encounter with the game, and none of those factors tainted the allure.

It’s all thanks to my best friend at the time, Joe. His step-dad, Sam, owned the Domino’s where I worked, and I remember visiting their house one day and seeing my boss glued to his computer like a zombie.

Joe told me that Sam had been introduced to a game called Everquest by one of the other delivery drivers, and he’d been rooted to that computer since. We both laughed it off, called the whole online gaming thing a stupid waste of time, and moved on.

Over the following days, I noticed that more and more people at work were talking about the game while they were tossing pizzas or washing dishes. The tendrils were growing.

The next time I went to Joe’s house, it wasn’t Sam glued to the PC in the living room — it was Joe. My heart sank. I didn’t know Everquest, but I’d picked up enough about the players that seeing him hunched over a glowing screen signaled I was losing him to this weird, new online game..

For sure, it had already taken hold. Joe had no intention of leaving the PC, since he could only play Everquest when Sam wasn’t home, so he told me I could go watch his DVDs or play his Playstation in the other room.

Oh man. I went into his bedroom and watched Shrek for the first time. An awesome movie, but I was pissed. I spent so much time at Joe’s house that his family was practically my family, and now he was getting sucked into a game. Normally we’d go to the mall, take turns playing Gran Turismo, and drive to the race track in West Palm on the weekends…but what was gonna happen now?

After a while, I came out to the living room to announce my departure, but Joe told me I could play the game while he went to the bathroom and made a sandwich. At first, I rejected it. Then I sat down.

And in two minutes, I was hooked.

Running around the tree city of Kelethin was cool. Talking to NPCs, also cool. But once I ran down and fought a Crushbone Orc — then realized that enemies drop loot — I was very engaged. Suddenly, it felt like the possibilities were endless. I was mind-blown by one section of a town and one enemy…in a world with multiple continents and thousands of enemy types.

The desire to see more and do more was instantaneous. I’d never experienced anything like this — first-person, open world, full character creation. It was like discovering a true simulated world when up until that point the most immersive game I’d ever played was Duke Nukem 3D.

Joe ate his sandwich and told me to get out of the chair. I broke into a sweat. The next thing I knew, I was driving full speed to Walmart in the next town, but for once it wasn’t just to have an excuse to be behind the wheel. It was to buy Everquest.

The Obsession

I was definitely obsessed. Some might say addicted. Like many people who had discovered the game, my brain was constantly locked on Everquest. I started skipping school. (I probably would have skipped work a few times if not for the fact that my coworkers and boss were always in the game, so they’d have known.)

When we were at work, that’s all we talked about. What quests had we done? What boss did you kill last night? What loot did you get? We started calling each other by our character names — and I don’t think it was to be ironic.

There were a couple of holdouts at Domino’s who weren’t playing, and I’m pretty sure they ended up quitting. I can’t blame them. If you weren’t playing EQ and you had to sit through six hour discussions about turning CB Belts in for XP or farming HQ Bear Pelts in the Commonlands, you’d go insane.

To truncate this story, I’ll say my EQ addiction almost stopped me from graduating high school. When I went off to Parris Island to train as a Marine, I thought about EQ every day. After exiting the military, I started playing again.

I played off and on for nearly a decade. And when I was on, I was on. It would become a second job every time I got back into the game. I even tried to monetize it so I could play more. Eventually, I convinced one of my high school friends with more money to invest over $700 into buying a trio of high-level characters so we could farm expensive loot and sell it online. (That didn’t end well.)

Of course, I tried other games. Dark Age of Camelot was okay, but I didn’t stick with it. I tried World of Warcraft, but it seemed so cartoony and easy compared to EQ. Nothing could replicate that original experience, so I returned often.

At some point around 2015 (I think) I spent a few months playing a private legacy server called Project 1999. What’s strange is that I thought I’d done this because the official EQ servers were shut down for good — but my research today revealed that EQ’s servers were never shut down, and the game is running to this day.

Shocking.

Though I can’t imagine the current EQ is anything like the one that originally hooked me. Toward the end of my time with the game, they were adding a lot of “modern” features and making the game far more forgiving (read: easier). I can’t imagine how ten additional years of development have changed things at this point…but since they’ve added in-game currency and your typical cash store crap, I assume it’s not good.

Anyway…

Erenshor: The Everquest Clone That’s Not an MMO

The only reason I’m writing this deep dive into my EQ-addicted past is because of something fairly new that’s hit the scene: an indie game named “Erenshor”.

I can only assume it was conceived by a die-hard EQ fan with real roots in the game that really started the MMO craze. (Yeah, everyone says WoW started it…but that’s just because it was nowhere near as difficult and frustrating as EQ. You can’t lose all your stuff when you die?! It doesn’t take three years to hit max level?! What crap.)

Erenshor plays very similarly to classic EQ (the version from the 90s) but with slightly modernized graphics and a somewhat better UI than the early game.

The fantasy world isn’t quite as rich as EQ, but it’s definitely got the foundation with lots of lore, areas, factions, gods, and so on. What I’m missing is the ability to choose playable races, but one guy made this incredible game, so I’m not going to complain.

It beats classic EQ by offering far more usable loot throughout the game, meaning that mobs you’re able to kill drop items that you can actually equip. (I know this is normal these days, but in EQ, loot was fairly uncommon, and at low levels you either wore trash gear or bought better items from high-level characters.) The shared banking system also makes it very easy for alt-aholics to twink their other characters, and I’ve yet to find any item that had a level restriction on it.

That said, Erenshor retains that old-school vibe by making it very difficult (if not impossible) to solo your way through. You need a group of mixed classes (tank, healer, DPS, crowd control) to survive after a few levels in.

And that’s where things get really interesting, because Erenshor is not an MMO. It’s not even an online game. It’s more like an MMO simulator populated with a couple hundred SimPlayers who you can ask to group with you (or even add them to your guild).

Now this is one of those ideas that could have been really stupid or really awesome — and Brian Burger did it awesome. (Brian Burger is the solo dev who put the game out under the Burgee Media banner.)

The SimPlayers speak to each other, shout in the zone, and send you tells (I do wish he would have stuck with calling the messages “tells” instead of “whispers”, though).

Fun Fact: In EQ, player-to-player messages were called “tells”. When you wanted someone to message you, you used the abbreviation PST for “please send tell”. In WoW, they called the same type of message a “whisper” — and in that game, I quickly noticed players would use PST or pst as a verb. Presumably because it’s the “psssst!” whisper sound. It drove me nuts seeing people say “PST me”, which in my mind would always translate to “please send tell me”. The more you know!

It’s worth noting that the Sims are not AI/LLM driven. They run from a scripted database of conversations and replies. That said, Erenshor has shown me the light, and I can absolutely guarantee that there will be a simulated MMO in the future that will be LLM driven. With as cool as Burger’s game is without the AI, I can safely say that one with true generative conversations will be dangerously addictive.(Which means someone will make it, become very rich, and probably ruin a lot of gamers’ lives.)

Now, bear in mind that Erenshor wouldn’t be an offline game if it had to constantly ping an AI model, so we’re gaining something from the omission. But when the tech catches up, I think we’re going to see TONS of simulated “real people” in games like this.

I want to point out that there are a few advantages to the simulated MMO route beyond avoiding real people. First you have to consider the freedom it gives you. You can play whenever you want and still group with the same “players”, and if you want to take a break or even let the game sit idle for a few hours, you’re not bothering anyone.

This also removes quite a few concerns around multiplayer balancing — the worst thing to happen to fantasy RPGs since pay-to-win. It’s even worse now because of the modern belief that every game needs to have PvP and leaderboards.

When you have players fighting each other for ranking, so much work has to go into balancing so that the fights are fair that it makes most modern RPGs into homogenous, bland, vanilla garbage. It’s the gaming equivalent of shoehorned equality — everyone has to be special…so no one is. It’s really counterintuitive to curtail players’ ability to become overpowered when the entire point of an RPG is to live out a power fantasy.

The Verdict

Erenshor is an absolute win — although I think younger gamers who’ve never experienced a classic MMO like Everquest will find reasons to hate it.

But if you have any history with the grandaddy of them all, I’d wager you’ll find a few hundred hours of enjoyment in Erenshor. Burgee did a fantastic job of keeping what worked and modernizing the elements of EQ that are much harder to forgive these days (like corpse recoveries).

If you want to check Erenshor out for yourself, go here.