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After four years of development and a successful Steam early access launch, Erenshor has grown into a delightfully strange single-player MMO made by one person. That solo developer, Brian "Burgee," says Erenshor's Steam release "blew my expectations and sales goals out of the water," letting him focus more on game dev after dreaming up a game like this for years – or, if you really want to get technical, decades.
Burgee, as he's called online, tells GamesRadar+ that he's started some version of Erenshor "five or six times" through different lenses and game engines over the years. He only really started to put more time and ambition into the project when it started to get some attention online.
It wasn't his first game, or his first game released on Steam, but Erenshor has been the first one to pop off like this. His first Steam release was a 2D shooter called Azure Sky Project, which he now, almost regretfully, calls a "very hard, borderline inaccessible" game.
"It started out as just a normal open-world RPG, and I was sort of modeling it after the early MMO field, and I got this idea to maybe simulate other players being in the game," Burgee says of Erenshor. "I mentioned it to the guy who is helping me with marketing on the project, and he just took it and ran with it. He kind of started talking about it to other people, feeling out interest in it, and that's when everything, you know, all the attention sort of turned to Erenshor at that point. I was committed to the idea, and from there it just kind of took off."
Burgee is adamantly anti-microtransaction – "I hate buying a game and then getting hit with a window of other things I have to buy to experience the full game" – and says it was fond memories of Everquest that really shaped his vision for Erenshor. Ironically, he hasn't played another MMO since. "I think they had a really good formula for combat and difficulty and game feel," he says of the 2000s classic. "And I've tried to pull a lot of that feel into Erenshor. And I think I've gotten pretty close."
"I grew up in a place with really spotty Internet, and I ended up playing solo a lot of the time in Everquest, too, and found a lot of ways to enjoy that experience. And I think a lot of players didn't. They gravitated toward the group content and the raiding content in Everquest, and I'm just trying to share a little bit of that experience now with Erenshor."
I mentioned that I ended up dropping Final Fantasy 14, one of my handful of MMOs, after 250 enjoyable hours or so due to mounting pressure to find and support groups. Burgee reckoned "there's a lot of pressure in games to be the right build or to be the right DPS. And I think, inherently, MMOs come with a lot of stress for a lot of players who aren't looking for that in their couple hours of gaming they get every night. Eliminating that is kind of part of the appeal of Erenshor too."
"For me, in an MMO, part of the experience is repeating content, mastering content, not being in a huge hurry to move on to the next major setpiece, and the delivery of the story in most MMOs that I've played is a lot more subtle. You'll find bits of lore. You'll find little hints and dialog, but it's not cutscenes. It's not, you know, huge inter-party dialog between the characters in the game. That's kind of the same feel I'm going for here. If you want to spend your entire night in one dungeon making a loop and trying to get a rare drop, you're still going to have progressed and leave with a sense of satisfaction. And that kind of is the gameplay loop I was going for."
That loop clearly resonated with people. At the time of writing, Erenshor has nearly 1,200 94% positive reviews on Steam. Burgee just revealed the updated roadmap, tackling issues like endgame difficulty and variety, combat speed, and a big goal: the first raid, currently targeting late 2025 or early 2026.
Erenshor sold over 10,000 copies in one day, which was "more than my week one goal," Burgee says. "That was a day full of adrenaline, and that was a night of no sleep, and then the whole week was just kind of listening and making little patches and little tweaks. But it doesn't feel real in all honesty. I'm literally living the dream right now."
It sold over 30,000 copies in its first month. "Every game developer dreams of launching a game, and all of a sudden their traffic explodes and people are talking about it, and there's people streaming it," he says of launch. "And it was partially being worried about what was being said, but a lot of it was just not wanting to miss anything."
When it really started to catch on, Burgee stressed that, despite the requests of plenty of players, he does "not plan to add multiplayer" to Erenshor, keeping it as a proudly single-player take on massively multiplayer online gaming. The greatest irony of all this is that players have done exactly that, with Erenshor co-op by modder Mizuki getting pretty regular updates.
"While I definitely cannot support this mod in any official capacity, I think it's notable and very worth sharing," Burgee says.
