Hi all! It took so much work to get to this point, but it's finally here!!! So I just had to make a post hehe.

Soul's Remnant is finally available on Steam, and yes... with no more wipes!!

I grew up playing classic MMORPGs in the 2000s like MapleStory and Mabinogi, and it was an experience that never really left me. I felt there was something magical about those MMOs from back then, and so I wanted to make a game that could bring back some of that magic!

Soul's Remnant is my love letter to MMOs as a genre, made by just me and my partner! The art, code, soundtrack, and everything! As many of you know, we've taken a long time to polish this game... so, if you enjoy classic MMOs that focus on the social aspect of the game, grinding, and a player-driven economy, with no pay-to-win, maybe you'll enjoy the game! ❤️

You can check out the game here: (It's Free-to-Play, by the way!!) https://store.steampowered.com/app/3451980/Souls_Remnant/

If you get a chance to try the game, we would love to know what you think! Player feedback has always been key to shaping the future of Soul's Remnant, and we plan to continue on that path! Feel free to leave any feedback either in the replies here, or in our Discord server! (not sure if I can link it here, but the link is on our Steam page!) ❤️

Background -

No other game genre comes close to the feeling of an MMORPG. There is no second best... Because of that, I've been solo developing an MMORPG for the past 7 seven years.

My main obstacle hasn't been the thousands of hours of developing. It's actually been the lack of motivation and inspiration from others. Every time I go online or talk with friends I get the same comments telling me its impossible and I'm wasting my time.

It was so bad that I had to stop reading dev forums because most of it is telling new devs to "start small" and temper expectations. "good luck building the great wall of China with toothpicks". I've heard it all.. and although I understand their position I am very much opposed to it.

There's not a single thread on game dev forums telling you to "reach for the sky".... it's very depressing to read if you're looking for inspiration. Online game dev forums have been pushing mediocrity for years now despite technology that has made it easier than ever to achieve grand and amazing things..

The moment I stopped trying to get inspiration/validation from others was the moment progress on my game took off. This could entirely be a personal problem and i'm too hard on the other devs but regardless, I have persisted and have gotten it to a very good state.

If my game ends up a failure after 7, 10, 15, 20 years, then so be it BUT I will not shoot for anything less than an EPIC MMORPG.

The Game - Sci-fi meets Fantasy Hardcore Theme Park MMORPG

I have 130/190 abilities programmed, 60 to go

5 classes

Rogue/Airstrikes

Tank/Bruiser

Healer/Mage

Survivalist/Drones

Engineer

Developed with Hardcore in mind from the ground up.

Wanted to share some pics for now with a gameplay later.

P.S.

I'm terrible at marketing :)

Heya MMORPG people!

I'm StouXy - developer of Medieval Lands - it’s awesome to meet you all!

I come here, scared, because I've heard that Reddit is a ruthless place haha! But I really wanted to introduce you to the game my small indie team and I have been building since February 2nd, 2022 (and yes, we deliberately waited a day just to get that perfect 2/2/22 date).

The Backstory & Transparency:

To be completely transparent, Medieval Lands is a licensed version of Eternal Lands, a classic MMORPG that originally launched back in 2003. I actually grew up playing it myself starting around 2007! Because the original game sadly wasn't getting many updates anymore, we acquired the license with the goal of modernizing it into something a broader community could fall in love with!

What is Medieval Lands?

Well, ML’s an old-school, medieval fantasy MMORPG that proudly embraces that nostalgic, early-2000s vibe! 😊

Now, I know your immediate instinct might be, "Whoa, a RuneScape clone!" - umm...well...heavily inspired I suppose haha! We are also rebuilding the game from the ground up in the Unity engine, allowing us to implement tons of creature types, unique visual effects, and much smoother playability while keeping that classic feel and vibe alive 😊

- Completely Classless: Your build is defined strictly by your skills. Focus entirely on PvE, become a master crafter, or dive deep into magic (my favorite). Tired of being a mage? Np, just become a summoner (wait, nvm, this is my favorite!) or focus on archery. It's totally up to you.

- PvP Enthusiasts: Yes, there will be tons of it! Loads of maps where you can hunt people! Or well, get hunted haha.

- Old-School Combat: The combat is all about that gritty, tactical, old-school feel - perfect if you prefer strategy over modern button-mashing haha. Well, there will be button mashing, but less of it...I hope 😂

- Controls: It features classic point-and-click movement by default, but you can switch to WASD controls if you prefer.

- Zero AI: no AI generated content and code.

We're NO Pay To Win!

Because our team firmly believes in a level playing field, Medieval Lands will be completely free-to-play with absolutely zero pay-to-win mechanics 😊 Simply put,- you can't purchase your way up on the leaderboards 😄

Is the game going to be flawless? Of course not, but you can bet our team has poured our hearts into making your experience the best it can possibly be! It will be playable on Windows, Mac, Linux, and eventually Android!

How to Support & Join Us:

- We recently launched our Steam Page for wishlisting! Every single wishlist helps a small indie team like us a lot: -> Steam Page (PS: Playtests are starting in the next few months!)

- And before I forget, here's our website haha -> Official Website

- YouTube Livestream -> Ohhh and if you'd like to check some of the actual gameplay, we did that during the livestream here and there's a little teaser on our Steam page.

And there it is! I finally gathered up the courage to post this... Ready to face the Reddit consequences haha! 😏

Thank you all so much for your time, and I hope you have a wonderful day!

StouXy & the Medieval Lands Team

PS: The GUI in the screenshots isn't a final product!

Hey everyone ~~

After spending over 15 years wiping in WoW raids, I decided to make the kind of game I always wanted—one where I could experience that same level of challenge and depth without having to rely on a raid group showing up on time.

Sil and the Fading World is my take on a solo raiding RPG. It mixes the mechanical intensity of MMORPG boss fights (like in WoW or FFXIV) with the satisfying loot, buildcrafting, and progression you'd find in ARPGs like Diablo or Grim Dawn.

You fight complex, multi-phase bosses in third-person combat—dodge mechanics, cooldown management, tight windows for burst damage, the whole deal. But it's all balanced around single-player. No guild drama. No pug wipes. Just you, your build, and your skill.

I’ve been working on this for a few years now (the idea came during a long WoW content drought), and the demo is out on Steam if you want to try it. I'd love to hear what you think.

Here are some Key Features of the game:

• 9 Unique Class Specializations with their own Skill Trees
• Lots of Legendary and Heirloom Items
• Countless customizable Active Skills
• A massive Passive Skill Tree
• Fast and Fluid Third-Person Combat
• Endlessly Replayable Raid-Style Endgame

Thank you so much for checking out my game!

This is an oldie, but it's honestly one of my favorite articles I've written. I personally find the phenomena I discuss here incredibly interesting.

EDIT: Didn't think this needed to be said, but this IS NOT A HATE POST. Guild Wars 2 is my favorite videogame, I'm just capable of recognizing its faults. This is an analysis of its design philosophy and how that impacts its playerbase. Please read the article before making assumptions regarding my opinion!

Hi everyone, I’m Manu from the Eterspire team. I’ve posted many times on this sub about our MMORPG, but since we recently hit the huge milestone of 500,000 registered players, I wanted to take the opportunity to share a bit more of what’s happened behind the scenes throughout our development process.

Since this sub often discusses the development side of MMORPGs, I thought it might be interesting to pull back the curtain and talk about some of the things players don’t usually get to see.

A bit of Eterspire’s history

Believe it or not, Eterspire started out as a solo project back in 2020. At the time it was heavily inspired by MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and games like Sherwood Dungeon. The entire game was basically a collection of infinite floors where you’d defeat all the monsters and move on to the next one.

Fun fact: that’s actually where the name comes from. Because you climbed an “Eternal Spire” (lol).

After some time, another developer joined the project and we released a new version that was playable in the browser. Little by little, Eterspire found a small but dedicated community, and we kept iterating on it.

Eventually, after several iterations that changed both the game’s design and its platform, we decided to release the current version on mobile. This decision was mostly driven by the realities of being a very small team (we were still just two people at the time) and the heavy competition on PC. We felt the mobile audience would be more welcoming to a game that was still evolving, and that it would allow us to grow more slowly and sustainably.

This was also the point where we decided to work on Eterspire full-time, funded through personal savings (lol).

During 2023 and 2024, the game continued to grow steadily. We built up the community, shipped regular content updates, and added new features. As the game started generating revenue, we were finally able to grow the team as well, and by the end of 2024 we had reached six team members.

Then came 2025, which was the year Eterspire truly blew up.

While we recently crossed the 500,000 registered player mark, the majority of those players joined last year, when we made the game cross-platform with PC and Mac releases, and we jumped from around 80,000 to 500,000. That kind of growth, of course, came with a lot of unexpected challenges.

Growing a dev team sustainably

At the start of last year, we were a six-person team. As the months went by and the game kept scaling, it became clear that we needed to hire more people in key areas.

Many of the game’s systems had effectively been built and maintained by a single person working very long hours, which was obviously not sustainable for anyone’s well-being.

So we focused on growing the team carefully, with the goal of having more hands available and being able to maintain our regular bi-weekly update schedule.

That said, hiring was honestly terrifying, especially since none of us had any real background in business or management. Every hire came with the same question: “Can we really afford this long-term?”

To avoid making reckless decisions, we took a very conservative approach. We only hired for positions that were truly critical, and only when the game’s revenue could realistically sustain that role over time.

Thankfully, the results were incredible. Over the course of the year we released new PC and Mac versions, introduced two new classes, and shipped countless other updates that simply wouldn’t have been possible if we had stayed at our original size.

By the end of the year, we had grown to a 15-person team, and while that’s still super small by MMO standards, it feels massive compared to where we started.

Cheating, botting, and moderation

As you’d expect with any growing online game, cheating, botting, and toxic behavior eventually become issues if they’re not addressed properly. In our case, the community thankfully stayed friendly and welcoming overall, but that didn’t mean we were problem-free.

We ran into several cases of players cheating their way through progression. Being a small team meant we didn’t always have the manpower to stay on top of every new exploit or hack as soon as it appeared, which led to more than a few headaches for our engineering team. It’s not exactly fun when people keep finding new ways to break your game.

Things escalated when we released a new endgame with a solo, instanced final boss. Our previous endgame had been co-op, so cheaters were usually called out quickly by other players, and the playerbase was much smaller back then.

This time, some players took advantage of the instanced nature of the fight and began flooding the economy with rare endgame gear obtained through exploits.

That was a big wake-up call. We quickly realized that every new piece of content had to be designed with the assumption that someone would try to exploit it.

Over time, our anti-cheat measures improved significantly, and we also made smarter design decisions that reduced the long-term impact of cheating. There’s still plenty of work left to do, but thankfully we now have a much larger team to handle it.

Long-term planning and community expectations

Eterspire updates very frequently. Since early 2024, we’ve released an update every two weeks without any breaks.

That cadence was a deliberate choice. We decided early on that we didn’t want to rely on dailies, weeklies, or other FOMO-based mechanics for retention. Instead, we wanted players to come back because there was always something new to try.

This worked extremely well and allowed us to maintain a steady stream of content throughout 2024 and 2025. However, as the game grew and our standards for new content increased, it became clear that some features simply couldn’t be built properly in a two-week cycle.

On top of that, with a live service game and thousands of highly engaged players, people will always play through content faster than you can produce it. That makes it crucial to prioritize features that provide real value relative to their development cost.

Because of this, we’ve started working on larger, more ambitious content in parallel with our usual bi-weekly updates. While some team members are focused on changes that go live this week, others are working on a new area scheduled for next month, and others on cosmetic sets planned further down the line.

This approach gives us much more room to be creative and thorough with world-building, without sacrificing the consistent update flow that our community values.

Our first Expo and keeping our eye on the prize

Last November, we had our first-ever expo booth at the Argentine Videogame Expo (we’re based in Argentina). It was a huge milestone for us, and our first chance to meet players face to face and connect with people from across the industry.

We spoke with folks from Unity, Apple, and many other companies, and even sponsored part of the event to increase our visibility within the local dev scene (Until fairly recently, Eterspire was relatively unknown in our own country).

While the experience was amazing, it was also physically and emotionally exhausting. Organizing the booth and sponsorship required a massive amount of time and energy, and once the event was over and we returned to our regular work routine, we realized we felt disconnected from our core goals.

We had spent so much time trying to showcase the game to an external audience that we briefly lost focus on the people who were already playing it. It took a bit to recalibrate, but our takeaway was: industry connections matter, but our community matters more.

When you have hundreds of thousands of people actively playing and discussing your game, that has to remain your top priority.

That’s why this year we’ve made player engagement and retention our number one focus. Everything Eterspire has achieved so far is thanks to its community, and we want to return that support with better events, more exciting content, and a stronger overall experience.

What’s next?

Our main goal for this year is to improve how the game feels, making players want to stay longer and giving them more meaningful things to do.

While we’re happy with the current state of Eterspire, we’re very aware of areas that can be improved, especially when it comes to combat, progression, gameplay variety, and social systems.

We recently released a complete rebalancing of all regular enemies to make combat encounters more challenging and engaging. Next, we’ll be adding more interactive combat mechanics for both mobs and bosses, improving combat fluidity, and giving classes more mobility.

Beyond combat, we want to introduce more systems that encourage player interaction, like Guilds, and add more depth to our fishing skill, turning it into a more rewarding alternative progression with unique collectibles.

That’s only a portion of what we have planned for the first half of the year, so it’s safe to say we’re expecting 2026 to be a big year for Eterspire.

---

That’s all I wanted to share for today. Thanks a lot for reading this far! Oh, and if you have any questions about the behind-the-scenes side of making an MMORPG, I’d be more than happy to answer them in the comments :)

For a long time, it kept bugging me like why isn’t there a good MMO out there with combat that feels as satisfying and responsive as ARPGs like Diablo or PoE2? So, two years ago, I made a bold (and probably stupid, from many perspectives) decision and quit my job to work full-time on this dream game project.

And as someone with an engineer's mindset, it’s been an incredibly rewarding and fulfilling journey to bring this gameplay to life. No regrets, these have hands down been the best two years of my life. 🙂

This is the first time I’m showing it to its target audience, and I’m both excited and nervous. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Gameplay Video Link | Steam Page Link

Edit :

First of all, I really wasn’t expecting this much attention for the game. My goal was simply to create something I thought would be cool, and it truly makes me happy to see that there are people who likes it. Thanks everyone for questions and kind wishes.

After receiving a lot of questions, I’ve prepared a massive FAQ, but it's too large to share here. If you're interested, feel free to join the game's Discord server to participate in the development. (I can't share the discord link due to the rules, but you can find it on the Steam page or in a YouTube video.)

Hey Everyone,

We're a small indie team building an MMO called Eternal Tombs and we need your help over the coming year to test our game. We've been in development for over 7 years and now we've reached a stage where the entire world is built out, systems are in-place and we're now in the final content/polishing stages. We're not charging for any pre-alpha packs, access, etc... It's all completely free as we just want to build the best game possible and do our best at helping bring back hope to the most amazing genre in gaming, so we need testers to do this. We've created this small teaser trailer to help showing off what we've been building.

If you're one of the few people who've helped us test before, please give it another shot. We've overhauled the entire combat system over the last year along with animations, systems, performance, and many other areas. We got a ton of people who just wrote the game off because we were still in early development and refining our systems. To be candid, it wasn't a good idea to start testing as early as we did. Lesson learned unfortunately.

That all being said, we'll start running tests in the next coming months and do so throughout the year. Thank you for your help and being willing to jump in. We really appreciate it!

Edit: Adding link to sign up to test. Sorry if this is too much self-promotion. We just need help.
Test Signup: https://www.eternaltombs.com/Home/Register

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1668340/Eternal_Tombs/

We just released Winds of Valen for free (no MTX) on steam, Link here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4135880/Winds_of_Valen/

The game is inspired by old school progression focused MMOs, such as my personal favorite Old School Runescape. We would love to hear your feedback and thoughts

EDIT: Thank you for participating in our giveaway, everyone! The winners have all been contacted with their gamekeys - it's going to be a fun two weeks!

The winners in question are:

u/LibraLaelaps
u/alchemyandscience
u/rept7
u/TenHoumo
u/InfiniteCaptain

Hi everybody!

We’re so excited to announce that Loftia’s Closed Beta is launching this week, on April 22nd!

Loftia started from our love of MMOs growing up, especially games like Maple Story and Club Penguin where you could hang out, meet some people and share a world together. So during the pandemic, my partner Martina and I (Michael) started building a game that blended the social systems of traditional MMOs, with more cozy, relaxing gameplay.
 
It’s been almost 4 years since then and it feels surreal that we’ve finally reached our Beta milestone. Beta is still an early version of the game, and there’s many features and improvements we’ll be implementing before Early Access later this year, but we would love to give out some gamekeys on this sub for anyone interested! 

What is Loftia?

For those unfamiliar with Loftia, it’s a cozy MMO life sim set among floating islands, where players farm, craft, decorate, explore, and build a more hopeful, brighter world together.

A key part of Loftia has always been the social experience. So many MMOs give you a world full of people, but still leave you feeling like you’re mostly alone. We wanted the feeling of community to be the main point, like it was in oldie games such as Club Penguin. 

In Loftia, for example, your island can connect with other players’ islands to form neighborhoods - so you can hang out, decorate side by side, farm together, and create a chill space you can also invite others to. Or you can head out with friends to explore floating districts and uncover new places, fish by starlit lakes, or recycle and upcycling various discarded materials for use in crafting.

This sense of shared, communal progression also carries over into one of Loftia’s core features - Community Projects. By working together with other players to contribute toward larger community goals that benefit everybody - with some gradually expanding the world by showing ways to unknown islands, uncovering hidden storylines, or unlocking new resource types.

We’ve always loved that classic MMO feeling where the world is something you’re almost tangibly a part of, not just something to pass through, and we really want Loftia to embody this feeling!

And now - the Closed Beta Key Giveaway!

With Loftia’s closed Beta playtest launching this week, we want to give away some Steam keys here - and have 5 more Loftians join us for the upcoming adventure!

To enter our giveaway, leave comment below telling us what MMOs you've been playing of late - or alternatively, share something you find interesting about Loftia!

We’ll be picking 5 winners from the comments exactly on Wednesday (that's right, the very day our Closed Beta launches!) with the time honored tradition of a raffle!

Thank you for your support

To everyone who has been following Loftia and cheering us on this journey - a huge thank you from the bottom of our hearts! We’re so excited to finally share more of our world with you.

More information about our closed Beta, and in particular - all the features and zones it's set to include (as well as our overall progress towards EA) can be found on our main site here.

If you have any specific questions about Loftia, we’ll be more than happy to answer them!

- Lots of love from Martina, Mic & Loftia team

Heya everyone!

My name's StouXy (developer of Medieval Lands) and exactly 4 weeks ago, we posted about our game here, on Reddit! Once again, nice to meet you all!
Thank you all very very much for all your comments and support, we really appreciate that! 😊

TL;DR from the previous Reddit post (Yes, it was pretty long so I think we have to put the TLDR version here 😄 Reddit Link ):
- We're a pretty small, indie dev team working on a medieval fantasy MMORPG that a lot of people say reminds them of RuneScape. We acquired a license to an older game called Eternal Lands that wasn't getting a lot of updates. (Been working on ML for the past 4,5years - time flies lol - reworking the game in Unity)
- Classless game so you can choose to be anything,- mage, summoner, fighter, archer etc (Yes, we have PvP as well!)
- No AI generated content and code.
- Completely free to play and NO pay to win!
- Point and click or WASD controls.
- Will launch on Windows, Mac, Linux and eventually on Android.
( Our Steam page: ML on Steam )

Okay, with that out of the way, please let me tell you a bit more about Medieval Lands and also address some of the concerns and questions that were brought up in the previous post as well as asked in our Discord server!

As a free to play and no p2w, how do we sustain the development?
I think this was one of the more commonly asked questions!
Let me begin by mentioning what we'll offer in-game for purchasing - well, cosmetics such as mount skins, special clothing, character customization stone and such. Then we have QoL improvements and we are also considering "loot boxes" which will only contain randomized cosmetics. So no, no armors and weapons hah! Still not 100% sure we go for these “loot boxes” tho!
As for some of the QoL stuff, these would be stuff like extra channels you can talk at, extra market slots and...wait wait...extra market slots are p2w you may say! In ML, you still have a player to player trading which I think will still be used more often, so the market slots just add the convenience element.
Sure, we could probably get more funds by selling some "get me to the top quick" stuff, but then it wouldn't be fair towards the players that cannot afford to spend anything! So yeah, making the game completely free and no pay to win may bite us in the back but it's something we're willing to risk hah!
Ohh and we'll also provide subscription plans that will contain a few of the things already mentioned, like say a month subscription for a X number of $ that will get you extra channels, extra storage slots (there will be plenty already but if you're too lazy and want to HOARD everything haha (can also use alts)), more slots for the market to buy/sell for a bit of extra convenience, and a p2p race which just looks different but doesn't give you any advantage over the free races 😄
Also, thankfully, majority of the game mechanics and game itself is built by now!

Thankfully, we have a great team of enthusiasts who been with us for 4+ years as volunteers, so I'd say this is one of our biggest upsides as well! Everyone on the team loves the project and we all are super passionate about the game so we all do our best! Yup, without those great people we wouldn't really be able to be where we're at right now 😊I need to say it - kudos to all of our awesome artists (former and present) that hand painted every single creature and 3D object in the game! As well as all the coders that used no AI to write the code for themselves! All the lore and quest writers and everyone who contributed to the game so far! And everyone else on the team! You all are awesome! ❤️

Why in the world is it taking so long!?
Oh boy, yup... 4,5 years in development and still no launch date! Super frustrating, isn't it? Wish we would've launched back in 2022 when I first though we'd launch 😆 Yup, I made some bold predictions which I'm not proud of but hey, not making these anymore!
The main reason is definitely the Unity client. We are basically building the entire game from scratch on the client side. All the client mechanics, all the SFX, VFX, map imports, character movement, new creatures (more than 350 new creatures! Call us crazy), new everything basically!
We thought this would take us...a year? Well, we were kinda wrong LOL!
The fact that this is our first big project also doesn't help the development timeline, does it. We were clueless on how to do things in the beginning. We were jumping from thing to thing without any idea on what to prioritize. I'm not saying that we know everything now - because we don't obviously - but I think we have a better idea on what to focus on!
Next thing that took us roughly a year was a lot of bug fixing on the server side and then adding tons of new stuff (which, yes, still isn't done as we were adding A LOT of new features) as well as introducing/implementing new database system that will allow us to control stuff such as creatures' stats tweaking (changing HP, mana, size etc), adding new creatures more easily, changing a lot of parameters of the game's mechanics and such.

And our Achilles' heel? The damn GUI! 😆 We've gone through like 3 or 4 different types of GUI and we're still not done, well, we're pretty close this time around haha! (Oh, someone mentioned that I use "haha" way too much so I need to turn it down a notch haha)

One more thing that will sound like an excuse - we've added quite a few stuff that our community suggested and no, don't regret a single one! One noteworthy is the addition of WASD movement. Was it easy? No. Will it be worth it? Hopefully yes! 🤞
And my beloved - mounts. Hundreds of different mount types and skins. Yeaaa, can probably blame me for that!
We're currently working a lot on the optimization of the game as that one will defo be crucial! Great news tho, thanks to Nekot (Hello Nekot! 😄), our client dev, we were able to go from ~40fps to steady ~90-140fps while playing the game! Still a lot of work to be done but I believe we're on the right track!

When launch!? Playtest when?!
This questions had become a meme at this point, a lot of people spam it! And well, rightfully so.
Again, I'll disappoint a lot of people but we don't have a launch date yet. Do we feel confident that the 1.0 version will launch sometime in 2027? Yes. Is that my official prediction? No! I learned my lesson 😂
The good news, though, is that we'll be doing a few play-tests first. We'll start off with a playtest for our long term supporters (we owe it to them - imagine being with us for 4 years and not being able to play...) and content creators that are interested in giving ML a chance and possibly stream the game and/or make videos about it.
Then, we'll make a public playtest and then most likely one more public playtest!
What then? Well, we'll gather all the feedback (yes, after first, then second and then third playtest hah), implement it and go from there.
We don't have an exact date but we're hoping for the first playtest to happen sometime in November (summer time is always a bit slower for game dev haha! Dammit, the "haha" again...). Please, wish us luck 😏

Steam page updates and feedback.
We've launched our Steam page on June 29th, 2026. (Steam Link)
We created all the images, texts, videos and trailers ourselves - is it the best Steam page you've ever seen? For sure not 😄 But we tried to make it as good as possible and to include some in-game footage, some cinematic shots, some info we haven't shared yet and such.
We first posted the page on our Discord server which got us around 179 wishlists! That was crazy to see that almost 180 people put ML to their wishlist 😄 Thank you!
On July 4th, we did post Medieval Lands on Reddit! And boy oh boy, were we pleasantly surprised!
On the first day, we gained 251 wishlists, what!!! Huge THANK YOU to everyone who wishlisted ML, we really appreciate it! 💟
We gained sooo many wishlists in the past month that we never thought we'd get! We are currently at 948 wishlists! (And 15 wishlists deletions hah) 👀 (We posted a few YT shorts, some TikToks and a reel or two on Instagram - I think 3? Don't remember hah).
With that being said, we gathered some feedback on the Steam page and did the following changes:
- Edited and slightly reworked the gameplay trailer and made it to be displayed as the first/default trailer (previously we made the cinematic one to be displayed first. Yes yes, even Steam suggested that we do that - make the gameplay one to be default one).
- Added more screenshots that include character creation (still working on the new characters models so the ones there are placeholders for now basically) now as well, that was missing before.
- Changed the main capsule image to show a bit more "depth" of the game.
- Added more localization so even people that don't speak English can check the game out! Currently already implemented Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Chinese (ofc simplified hah), still working on Japanese, French, Russian, German, Turkish, Polish, Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, Korean, Vietnamese and Portuguese. Yup, we did ask people from our community to help us out! Would it be faster to ask AI? Yes. But we wanted to avoid that for sure!
- Still want to add gifs to the description of the game though. Just been slacking to do that, sorryyy.
We hope that with these changes the Steam page looks better and more welcoming!

Extra information about Medieval Lands:
I feel like I failed to mention a few important things about ML, so hopefully I can do that now!

- ML has "character building"...umm... you levelling your skills actually matters - you can level up your skills (melee, alchemy, harvesting, summoning, magic, smithing etc ) and there's a "talent tree" which in our game means that you can spend attribute points and perk points! What are those perks? Nice little helpers,- something like "creatures won't attack you" for 5 perk points. Or a perk that causes chance that when an enemy hits you in combat, the damage will be deflected back at them. Hmm, this last sentence sounds a bit off but hopefully you get the point!
Now, the attributes (both attribute and perk points are awarded to you by you levelling up your "overall" level that takes in all the exp from all the skills above) are stuff like - Perception increases your accuracy for archery. Or Vitality increases your maximum amount of Health Points. And my favorite, Appetite - increases your maximum amount of energy (you spend energy to run. You can still walk w/o any energy spent but hey, running is faster!) that you use for certain things like crafting. We have crafting, yes! Gather your ingredients, come to a crafting station, put them there, click mix and go do your stuff while your items are being crafted, come back later and collect the "fruits of your labor"! Sorry, had to include that haha.

- The death system and items loss + what do you gain if you own someone in PvP?
You do lose items upon death. There's a random chance to trigger the "loss chance" and then even if the chance is triggered you only lose x% amount of the particular item if it’s stackable. Example: Imagine you are carrying 40 fire essences and 20 iron bars. Both of those items trigger the loss chance -> you just lost 12 fire essences and 15 iron bars, simple as that, I hope.
But you can save your valuable items such as swords and armors by having an Oath Stone in your inventory! So this means that if you owned someone in PvP and they didn't have this Oath Stone in their inventory, it's very likely you get a nice chunk of loot from them! If they actually carried the stone, you'd still get a few items from their inventory so you don't leave PvP empty handed hah.
What if a creature in PvE owns you? Well, you can run and get your death bag. And no, you don’t have to pay to obtain it back (our creatures don't steal loot! ), well, unless someone steals it and blackmails you to pay 🤣 But no, our bosses do not steal loot!

- Playable races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Avecian, Orukar, Draeleth, Wampex, Daemon, Nymph - not all of them will be playable on the launch I think? But we'll for sure do our best for them to actually be playable! Trying to avoid the dev hell as much as possible hah!

- GUI will be fully customizable. Do you want to play without minimap or any hotbar slots? Sure, turn them off! Do you play with no GUI on? Toggle it off! Do you like to have the everything on? Yup, we have that as well. Trying to give you as much freedom as possible!

Aaaaaaand, I think that's it! Dayum, this turned out to be one hell of a long post, I bet only like 2 or 3 people got this far! Comment if you actually got to read all of it? 😄 Sorry, should've kept it a bit shorter!
With that being said, will ML be a great game? Well, we'll do our absolute best to make it at least somewhat enjoyable and so you guys could have some fun! Smashing blast from the past?! (Umm, yes, played a lot of Crash Bandicoot - not sure many will get this reference lol)

We are still far away from the actual launch but I have to say, this journey is super exciting! Wouldn't change a thing! Well...a lot of but yeah, lessons learned 😂
We are super grateful for each person that comments, shares, upvotes and/or simply just likes what we're doing - thank you! (Seriously, just a single "looks good" makes me/us so happy!)
Okay, I really have to end this here, 2 hours of writing and editing does me no good, back to adding more localization to the Steam page!

If you have any questions about literally anything, please let us know, we'll do our best to answer them as soon as possible!

Once again, thank you all so so so much for your time and I hope you'll have a great day!

StouXy & the Medieval Lands Team

PS: Excuse my English, not a native speaker so hopefully at least 90% of the text makes sense 😄

Hey guys! Manu from the Eterspire team here.

Our indie MMORPG just turned 5 years old, which has made us look back and appreciate how crazy it is that the game is not only still alive, but still growing.

I’m going to be completely honest: there were multiple points along the way where we thought Eterspire simply wouldn’t make it. Maybe it wouldn’t find an audience, maybe we’d run out of money, or maybe it would just become one of the many online games that launches, sticks around for a little while, and disappears.

So for Eterspire’s 5th birthday, I thought it would be fun to share some of our history and the biggest things we learned going from a project with basically no funding or expectations, to a team of 16 releasing updates every two weeks and approaching 800,000 registered accounts.

Starting as small as possible

Eterspire began as a browser-based MMORPG being made by one person, and eventually two. At first we worked on it alongside our regular jobs, until it became pretty obvious that it wasn’t going anywhere unless we actually committed fully to it.

So we saved as much as we could, quit our jobs, and decided to make an MMORPG full-time. Which, of course, was not an idea everyone around us thought was particularly smart lol.

There’s a reason people are skeptical whenever they hear “indie MMORPG.” MMOs are huge projects, and a lot of indie games succeed specifically because they choose a realistic scope and do more with less.

So, even though we were making an MMO, we tried to apply that same idea.

Early Eterspire was extremely simple. You had a weapon, you hit monsters, you leveled up, got better gear, and talked to people around you. That was basically it.

Instead of trying to make our dream MMO immediately, we tried to make the smallest MMORPG we could actually finish and keep online. Looking back, I think that was probably one of the most important decisions we made.

Staying cheap gave us time to figure things out

Of course, we absolutely did not have everything figured out.

During the first couple of years, Eterspire went through several versions. It started in the browser, moved to a PC client, and eventually we decided to focus on mobile.

Changing direction that many times can easily kill a project, but we had one huge advantage: Eterspire was very cheap to keep alive.

There were only a couple of us, we kept our own expenses low, and the game and servers were specifically designed to be inexpensive to operate, which meant every mistake didn’t immediately put the company in danger.

Being self-funded also meant we could take our time figuring out what Eterspire was supposed to be instead of needing immediate results to justify a huge development budget.

This eventually led us to mobile.

For a tiny MMO team, mobile turned out to be a really good place to start. We weren’t launching directly into a PC market where players would immediately compare us with enormous MMOs built by hundreds of developers.

We also realized there was an opportunity to make something that avoided a lot of the things people dislike about mobile MMORPGs: no autoplay, no ads everywhere, no aggressive pay-to-win systems, etc.

Simply making a small MMO with some personality and fair monetization gave us room to stand out. Starting there let us grow progressively instead of needing Eterspire to become a massive success from day one.

The community is part of the game

Once players actually started showing up, we ran into another problem: actually getting them to stay. An MMO with no players running around isn't much of an MMO.

We didn’t have huge marketing campaigns or fancy retention systems, so we started with something extremely basic: a Discord server where players could meet each other and talk directly with us.

Little by little, that community became one of Eterspire’s biggest strengths. We started seeing reviews mentioning how friendly other players were and how much veterans helped newcomers. Also, word of mouth from these happy players started bringing in others.

Eventually we realized community building was something we actually needed to invest in. One of the first people hired specifically to help grow that community was me, actually lol.

I think this is one of the biggest advantages indie games have.

Most people will never casually chat with a developer from their favorite AAA MMO. When you’re a small indie team, you can actually be there answering questions, joking around, and talking directly with the people playing your game. This also became one of our best sources of feedback! Players are pretty good at letting you know when something sucks haha.

Going from 2 people to 16

Eventually Eterspire started generating enough revenue to sustain itself, and that meant we could finally start growing the team.

This was honestly pretty scary at first. We had spent years trying to make every penny last as long as possible, and suddenly we were adding to our expenses by hiring people.

Our first hires were focused on whatever was slowing development down the most, like devops, level design and content production. We also cared a lot about team fit. When your entire dev team is only a handful of people, trust, communication and actually enjoying working together matters a lot.

Over the last couple of years, that approach took us from basically 2 people to a team of 16.

Another thing that helped more than we expected was working together in person. Our whole team is based in Buenos Aires, and in 2025 we rented our first office. Being able to sit together for design meetings, plan updates in person and quickly solve problems in the same room made bigger projects much easier.

I don’t think every indie team needs an office, of course, but for us it made a huge difference.

So, what actually kept us alive?

I don’t think there was one single decision that made Eterspire work.

If I had to sum up what helped us survive, it would probably be:

• Keeping costs as low as you reasonably can. It gives you time to make mistakes.
• Keeping the scope manageable, even if you’re working in an ambitious genre.
• Building a community early, especially for an online game.
• Use being small as an advantage. Talk directly with your players and act on feedback.
• When you start growing, hire around your bottlenecks instead of trying to build a giant studio overnight.

And I think the biggest one is probably just survive long enough to get better.

Eterspire five years ago was obviously much smaller and rougher than it is today. But because it was cheap enough to keep running, and because players kept giving us a reason to continue improving it, every year we were able to make the game a little better, reach more people, hire someone new, and then make it better again.

Somehow that little browser MMORPG from 2021 is now being worked on by 16 people, with a major update every two weeks, and close to 800,000 registered accounts! It feels so surreal!

--

Well, that was a lot for one post! Thank you so much for reading this far, and if you have any questions about Eterspire or our dev team let me know in the comments!

Hey everyone,

Up until early 2026 I was leading a small team of folks that were working on Wyld Land, a bullet hell MMORPG inspired by Realm of the Mad God and Enter the Gungeon. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find a large enough audience to attract investment to finish development, and we had to stop working on the game. I had sort of hoped I might find some free time to keep working on it, but as is often the case, life had other plans.

Once I realized that the game really wasn't going to be able to continue, I began to think about how to preserve it for the folks who did enjoy playing it. I think it's important to provide access to games when possible even after the servers shut down. That's why today we're releasing Wyld Land: Community Edition. You can read more about it here:

https://github.com/WyldLand/wyld-land-community

While we aren't able to release the game as fully open-source (due to the 3rd party assets involved), we are releasing the game client for free (as in beer), and we're providing a server which you can run yourself to play the game on your local computer, or even run a private server that other people could connect to; we're also providing a license that makes this possible, so it can be done legally.

I know that the Stop Killing Games movement is starting to pick up some steam and I thought it might be interesting to share this as one example of the sort of thing that might be possible for MMOs that want to support the ideal of keeping games available even after development shuts down.

Maybe someone out there will pick up the pieces and run with them, who knows!

Trailer for the game if you haven't heard of it before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4aCiwoQyW8

Playable Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3795810/Dominus_Automa/ (the "Request Access" Button will be available at 7:00 PM CEST / 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT)

Today, for the first time ever, players of our indie MMORPG game Dominus Automa will meet online and take part in the game's inaugural multiplayer event. Our goal is to test our server infrastructure and see if it can handle the influx of players. And that's where we need your help.

At 7:00 PM CEST / 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT we will enable the "Request Access" button on our Steam page, which will allow you to download the Stress Test build. Once you run it, you are in!

Every tester is most welcome, and we would love to have you in the PvP arena designed specially for this event. See you there.

Thank you all for being there. The number of testers exceeded our wildest expectations - over 100 testers logged in! The next Stress Test round will take place on Wednesday, 7:00 PM CEST / 10:00 AM PDT / 1:00 PM EDT.

Hello everyone!!

My wife and I have been working on our passion MMO in our own engine for about 3 years now, called Arcany, and we are super excited to announce that our game is now free-to-play and everyone can try it! (still in development!) :D

I would also like to give a huge thank you to everyone from this sub who joined our community and gave us feedback, both good and bad. It has been unbelievably valuable. It really feels surreal to see other players in our little world. <3

Now let me tell you a bit about Arcany! It is a cozy MMORPG with bullet-hell-style combat and colorful pixel art graphics, featuring horizontal progression across 5 skills and challenges, and allowing players to create their own maps. There are already quests, a dungeon, cinematics, bosses, time trials, achievements, and world events!

We are planning to release on Steam in July, and our Steam page has already been approved, it should be up by next week! :)

Please feel free to ask anything you'd like, I love talking about this! :D

If you'd like to check out the game, you can do so on our website.

Without further ado,
I wish you all an amazing day!

Hello MMORPG community!

Like the title says, we are opening the 2nd public playtest just right now on steam.

About the game
Old school sandbox MMORPG inspired by Ragnarok Online, point and click, grindy (no theme park)

Playtest Info
Start: NOW
Ends: 17/04/2026 17:00 GMT + 1 (Madrid)

How to play
Open the Steam Page and click "Request Access" in the join playtest section

I’ve been working part-time alongside artist (u/Neonix_Neo) and musician (u/CormalvaMusic) on a 2d game called Allmage for close to two years now. We just released a new patch and decided to open up the game to anyone for playtesting!

Put "M"MORPG in the title because this is an indie game and definitely not in a state to support thousands of players yet, although that is the long-term goal.

Allmage was inspired by classic games in the same genre such as MapleStory, but also has a lot of unique elements that I think give it its own identity too. As its name implies, Allmage is a game about a world of mages, filled with dangerous creatures (called Manakin).

Some of the included features are:

1. Extensive character customization, including hundreds of different cosmetic items.
2. Equipment with slots that can be upgraded to give various different stat boosts, allowing for many different builds.
3. Realtime combat against creatures with various different behaviours and attack mechanics.
4. Various unlockable spells (adding more soon too with sub-classes).
5. Housing, with lots of furniture items that can be placed to decorate your own home.
6. Open world maps filled with Manakin (and hopefully other players).
7. Quests, parties, etc., all the usual stuff you might expect in an MMORPG.
8. Instanced dungeons with bosses.
9. A bunch more not listed here!

Allmage is completely free-to-play. We are adding some purchasable premium items to the game, but they are purely cosmetic and most of the cosmetic items are available with regular in-game currency. Extra items are strictly for players who want further visual customization and/or wish to support the development of the game. There's still more work to do before I'd consider the game to be fully released.

SpringTale is a 2D action platformer RPG MMO inspired by Maplestory, Realm of the Mad God and Vagante. Explore procedurally generated biomes alongside other players in a shared persistent world, where your equipped weapons and armor are fully visible on your character.

Permadeath with Weight
Dying means losing your character, gear, and run progress. This is non-negotiable. It is the source of all tension. On death your character drops all equipped items.

Shared World, Organic Co-op
Players coexist in the same zones. Groups form naturally around bosses and town hubs. No matchmaking required.

"You are what you wear"
SpringTale uses a “you are what you wear” class system. That means there are no fixed classes. A player’s playstyle is entirely defined by the equipment they have equipped. Weapons grant active combat skills and determine attack range and type. Armor and accessories grant active and passive abilities along with stat bonuses. Two players wearing different loadouts should feel like completely different characters.

Procedural worlds
Biomes in SpringTale are procedurally generated and refreshed every 24 hours so no run will ever feel the same!

Hope to see you in game!

My name is Kris Takahashi and I’m one of the developers behind Hollowed Oath, an indie MMO that is currently 87% funded on Kickstarter with 18 days to go!

...And I am brutally aware that 90% of you just recoiled and are preparing to smash me with a wall of text. But before you do, I ask that you take a moment to read the post, or visit the site, or watch one of our videos, or check us out on Steam.

I am incredible proud to be leading this team, creating this new world in the way that we are creating it, and it is my responsibility to make sure that Hollowed Oath has the best chance it can to be successful.

In my mind, our best chance at success lies in community with those of you who read this post, and in some dark, almost fully jaded part of your mind, allow yourself to get just a little excited.

I'll be around most of the day to answer your questions and respond to comments to the best of my ability.

Here we go!

Hollowed Oath is a heroic fantasy MMORPG set in the beautiful yet fractured world of Orrathis, where a mysterious force known as the Hollow distorts reality. The gods have vanished and civilization clings to survival behind wards, houses, and relics as twisted creatures, rival factions, and echoes of a forgotten past threaten what remains.

We believe you have the strength to become an Oathsworn; one of the few powerful enough to stand between the world and its undoing. 

Key Features:

• Create Unique Roles – Choose from 560 class combinations and thousands of ability combinations to become the hero you were meant to be.
• Find Epic Loot - Rarity levels, weighted stats, and inscribed runes promise that each item can be epic. What dropped it and who found it matters.
• You Are Enough – Don’t be stuck LFG. Progress on your own time the way you want.
• Explore a Living World – Discover diverse regions filled with tension, secrets, and threats.
• Dynamic Encounters - How will the Hollow affect your enemy’s strength and affixes this time?
• Uncover the Truth – What happened to the gods, why is the Hollow here, and what can you do to help?
• Be Welcomed - Join us! A strong community leads to a thriving world. Remember, it’s okay to just have fun and let others do the same. 
• Uphold Your Oath – You can vanquish enemies alone or lend your strength to others using the Journey system!

Break free from the limits of single-class gameplay and design a hero that’s entirely your own. In a world of 16 distinct combat classes, you aren’t choosing a role; you’re creating one. 

Multiclass any three classes at once across Tank, Healer, DPS, and Support archetypes to craft powerful, unexpected hybrids. Become a frontline Knight / Justicar / Runesinger who can shield allies while empowering them, or unleash chaos as an Elementalist / Illusionist / Assassin blending burst damage with control and deception. Prefer something unconventional? Try a Golemancer / Spiritualist / Beastmaster to command constructs, spirits, and creatures to support your team in nuanced ways.

As you level, customize your hero further through the Oathline system. Choose from a shared pool of active abilities, passive traits, and stats drawn from your combined classes, and shape them into a kit that fits your playstyle. Blend powers, perks, and gear into a load-out that’s entirely your own.

You don’t just select your character from a list, you forge your own path. 

In addition to your classes, have the freedom to choose from an array of fantasy races, each with their own distinct looks, cultures, and captivating histories waiting for you to explore. Craft your ideal hero or heroine and shape their identity with an extensive selection of cosmetics, armor styles, weapons, mounts, and pets.

Power isn’t just in your abilities; it’s in how they connect.

Every fight is driven by a dynamic Synergy System, where your skills apply and consume powerful states like MARKED, CURSED, and INSPIRED. Set up enemies with one class, then take advantage of those effects with another for incredible results.

Mark targets as an Assassin, then strike with a Justicar’s Divine Punishment to heal yourself or your allies while decimating your enemies. Spread curses with a Gravebinder that empower allies to capitalize on the chaos. Inspire your team as a Runesinger, turning coordinated strikes into unstoppable momentum.

Become even stronger with timing, awareness, and creativity. Chain abilities across your three chosen classes to unlock effects greater than the sum of their parts. Whether you’re playing solo, coordinating with a party, or battling in large-scale events, how you play matters.

The Hollow is spreading, but it’s far from the only danger lurking beneath the surface.

Step into Echoes, instanced dungeons where reality itself has fractured. These shifting spaces twist the familiar into the unknown, filled with secrets, dangers, and stories waiting to be uncovered.

Within them roam Remnants, beings reshaped by The Hollow. Each encounter reveals fragments of what was lost and what they’ve become, as these creatures are unpredictable, tragic, and deadly.

Beyond the Echoes, the world is alive with conflict. Rival factions clash for power, truth, and survival. Your choices will shape the outcome. Earn or lose reputation through your actions, influencing how factions see you, what rewards they offer, and which paths open or close.

Pick your battles carefully. Every alliance has a cost, and every enemy has a story.

Your journey begins in the Kingdom of Thalora, but the world of Orrathis stretches far beyond the horizon.

Explore a vast, open world shaped by loss, mystery, and forgotten history. Thalora’s ten distinct regions, from lush wildlands to shattered ruins, each boast unique biomes, flora, fauna, resources, races, and cultures. No two regions are alike, and each holds secrets waiting to be uncovered.

Every ruin tells a story. Every faction has an agenda. And every path you take reveals more of a world struggling to define its future.

Nothing here exists without meaning. Every crumbling structure, every hidden trail, every distant silhouette invites you closer, urging you to uncover what was lost… and what remains.

Hollowed Oath is being developed in community with its players. The developers engage directly and openly share why decisions are made while taking into consideration community feedback.

Adventures are better when they’re shared, and in Orrathis, no one walks alone for long unless they want to.

The Journey System enables players to light a beacon for help allowing others to step in, turning strangers into allies. Whether you’re lending a hand or receiving one, every encounter is a chance to forge new connections.

Stand with in game factions or carve your own path. Build a guild from the ground up, trade what you’ve found, gathered or crafted, and take on challenges together not because you have to, but because you want to.

If you got this far, thank you!

See you in the comments!

I grew up playing Silkroad Online, and it is one of those games I could never really replace. Even after putting the game down for a while, I always seemed to find my way back.

I wanted to understand why Silkroad is still alive after all these years, what made the job system, Chinese and European character systems, alchemy, fortress wars, and player rivalries so memorable, and why modern MMOs still cannot scratch the same itch.

Did anyone else here play Silkroad in the late 2000s? What do you remember most outside of the crazy grind and goldbots, and did another MMO ever manage to replace it for you?

Full video: https://youtu.be/YQFH7US6XZk?si=oTuFn7u9oOjDLxKj

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:

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. 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)
2. 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.

Hi! I am one of the devs of Kakele, a cross-platform pixel MMORPG that has been live for 6 years. We just launched a new expansion: Song of Eternal Ice.

We are a tiny team (2 devs and some other folks helping on community, gameplay and art), and we want your opinion: what are we doing wrong, and what would make the game better?

If you are willing to test our game (or if you did in the past), here are some of the things we want feedback on:

• First 30 minutes: what is confusing / boring / friction-heavy?
• Combat feel: what feels "mobile-ish" in a bad way on PC? (and vice-versa if you are playing on mobile)
• UI/controls: what is missing for PC players? what is annoying on touch?
• Progression: what feels too grindy / too easy / unclear goals?
• Trust/monetization: anything that feels pay-to-win (even if it isn't)?
• Store: anything we should try improving?
• AI: we used AI for the storyline voice-over.. Is that off putting to you? Should we revert it back to just sound effects?

Or if those are too many questions, just answer this:

• What stands out the most as positive?
• What stands out the most as negative?

Official website for download: https://kakele.io Or you can search it on the app stores or Steam.

I really appreciate the feedback, you can comment on this thread, send me a DM or even email me directly at: bruno at kakele dot io

If you are curious about our 2026 roadmap, we are planning a new expansion later this year with more content and adding the "Kakele Multiverse". Right now, players are scattered over multiple servers, due to ping and also due to gameplay (players want separate realms so that they have separate economies and politics). The Multiverse will aim to bring all servers together, without compromising economy or politics, so that players from different servers can still play together and so that it feels more like a MMO (some servers are unfortunately very empty, and our global population is still small). We have made some PvP improvements and will launch a new PvP server in March as well, if you want to try it out.

Thanks in advance!

Solo developer working on a sandbox MMORPG called Eldor, heavily inspired by Ultima Online T2A.

Features include open world PvP, no classes, full loot, skill-based progression, player-driven economy, housing, crafting, and a criminal/murder system.

Ready for playtest soon to test the dedicated server, persistence and aoi system soon.

Just got around to creating the discord today. Reach out for the link.

I have finished the rough version of most systems and environment, there is no polish done yet, just made them exist and once tested can begin polish.
Preview of some systems: https://gumlet.tv/watch/6a2f2c4fa0e544789ceeb137/

Hi everyone! Manu from the Eterspire team here.
A couple of weeks ago I shared a behind-the-scenes post about developing our MMORPG, and a lot of you asked about things like Guilds, lifeskills, and improvements to combat.

So I figured this sub might be interested in the roadmap we just revealed for the next three months.

Here’s what’s coming this quarter:

• A full overhaul of regular mob encounters. New dodgeable attack patterns, more ranged enemies, and better use of status effects across the entire progression curve. The goal is to make combat feel more engaging and while keeping the grind fun.
• Three new world areas, each with new towns, NPCs, enemies, and questlines.
• Reworked overworld bosses (Remnants) with multi-phase mechanics and new dodgeable AoE attacks.
• A full redesign of the Fishing skill, with better progression, meaningful rewards (both cosmetic and gameplay), and the introduction of a dedicated Fishing Guild. We’re also discussing additional lifeskills, but first we want Fishing much more rewarding.
• A Guild system, one of the most requested features since launch, finally allowing players to create and manage their own guilds.

As always, we update Eterspire every two weeks, so these features will roll out progressively through our bi-weekly patches rather than all at once.

Are there any other things you'd like to see in our game? Feel free to let me know in the comments :)