If hell is other people, heaven might just be Erenshor—assuming you like old-school MMOs in the style of EverQuest, anyway. It's very much that style of game, but in a simulated solo world where other 'players' are just computer-controlled NPCs called simplayers. You can even party up and form a guild with them, which will come in handy now that raids are live.
They arrived last Monday in the Planar March patch, and solo developer Brian of Burgee Media called it "the biggest day for Erenshor since its launch" in the Steam community release blog.
"When I promised raids I had no idea how the heck I was going to implement it. It sort of hung over my head like an intimidating shadow until I finally dove into it," he wrote. "With the help of the amazing community of testers, all of your feedback, and a few really late nights, it's here!"
There are four raid zones, as well as 21 new bosses to kill in exchange for fat loots. You can create raid teams in the guild menu and they'll automatically join when you start the instance—no stopping to wait for someone to pay the pizza guy or head back to a capital city so they can repair all their broken gear, I imagine.
As a lifelong MMO casual who struggles to make time for raid night, this sounds like a dream come true simply for the convenience factor. I do wonder how Erenshor will retain the difficulty and sense of scale you get in an online raid without making you wrangle several dozen real people's schedules and manually ensure they all know what their class does, but considering this is based on the pre-World of Warcraft world of MMOs, I'm sure there's plenty of glorious grinding and dying in store anyway.
It seems like Erenshor has found a hungry audience for its simulated world. You can buy it on Steam, where it sits at a "very positive" rating with 94% of user reviews recommending the game.
