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Erenshor, the newly released single-player MMORPG heavily styled after classic games like Everquest, is largely defined by its NPCs. Solo developer Brian "Burgee" cooked up over 100 "simulated players" with their own arcs, items, and behaviors to sell the feeling and atmosphere of this paradoxical offline MMO.
Burgee plans to add many more NPCs to Erenshor as it progresses in Steam early access, and hopefully without repeating an issue that's come up in player testing in a stroke of unbelievable irony.
"The simulated players are definitely a big focus for a lot of the players now, getting them to behave a little bit more predictably," Burgee says. "We've had players report that they're staging up for a boss in a dungeon, and then one lone simulated player, wearing no gear, will engage the boss instead and then train it on top of them.
"[I'm] trying to minimize those events a little bit more, and then just the quality-of-life. The UI needs a lot of work. Getting that to be a smoother experience for people have been the two main focuses this week."
It's hard to unpack the irony of a solo developer, who hasn't actually been a big MMO gamer himself post-Everquest, stumbling into a recreation of arguably the biggest MMO's most memorable player. It's nearly shot-for-shot perfection, right down to third-partying your own teammates. All we need now is a pre-pull number crunch.
I'm reminded of Bethesda veteran Joel Burgess' theory that "good things often happen by accident." Even in offline MMOs, Leeroy Jenkins lives on.
I'm not sure if I'd call Simulated Leeroy a bug or a feature, but Burgee says it's happened "a couple of times." To that end, "the latest patch notes I just pushed said simulated players will always wear pants now. I saw a lot of streams where they, for whatever reason, weren't. The logic wasn't quite there but it should be fixed."
This is almost as ironic as a developer making a solo experience emulating a multiplayer one and players suggesting that he add actual multiplayer.
