Before I start planning hundreds of monsters, items, skills, and locations, I need to establish what players will actually do when they log into Eldren. The core experience should support both quick visits and longer play sessions while giving players meaningful ways to develop their characters over months or even years.
The current plan is for Eldren to be a persistent browser-based fantasy MMO. Its design combines long-term, time-based progression with sandbox character development, a player-driven economy, and the excitement of finding rare equipment. The details will change as the project develops, but these ideas provide a foundation for deciding what belongs in the game. The two biggest influences are Torn, a long-running text-based browser game, and Ultima Online, one of the earliest sandbox MMORPGs. You can read more about them on the About Eldren page.
Respecting the Player’s Time
Eldren should work whether someone has five minutes available or wants to play for an hour.
During a short visit, a player might:
- train a skill
- spend some Stamina or Mana
- manage consumable cooldowns
- check the market or craft an item
- see what other players have been doing
Even a brief session should allow the player to make progress or prepare for a future activity.
A longer session could involve exploring the dungeon, fighting enemies, gathering resources, completing crafting projects, trading with other players, or participating in PvP. These activities should offer more direct interaction without making short sessions feel pointless.
Stamina, Mana, and cooldowns will help regulate how frequently certain actions can be performed. The purpose of these systems is not simply to stop people from playing. They should create decisions about how and when resources are used. A player might spend everything immediately on combat, save resources for a planned dungeon expedition, or use them on gathering and crafting instead.
The challenge will be making these systems feel like useful choices instead of a list of chores that players must complete every day.
A City Built Around the Dungeon
The main setting of Eldren is a fantasy city built around an enormous dungeon. The dungeon has shaped the city’s economy, culture, and reason for existing. Adventurers enter it in search of wealth and power, while merchants, craftspeople, healers, and other residents make their living from the activity surrounding it.
The dungeon will become increasingly dangerous as players travel deeper. Greater risks should lead to better resources, unusual enemies, and a higher chance of finding rare equipment. This gives combat-focused players a clear long-term challenge and creates a source of valuable materials for the larger economy.
However, the dungeon should not be the only meaningful part of the game. It is the center of the setting, but players should be able to build worthwhile characters without spending all of their time fighting. Someone might become known as a skilled blacksmith, an effective merchant, a supplier of potions, or a gatherer who specializes in locating valuable resources.
Dungeon adventuring will probably offer the greatest combination of risk and reward, but peaceful careers should still feel like legitimate ways to play. I explore the dungeon itself in more detail in Beneath the City: Designing Eldren’s Dungeon.
Progression Without Rigid Classes
Eldren will not lock characters into traditional classes. Instead of choosing to permanently become a warrior, mage, or rogue, players will develop individual skills.
A character might combine swordsmanship with healing magic, use archery while gathering herbs, or focus almost entirely on crafting and trade. Players should be able to experiment and create combinations that fit their preferred style.
That freedom does not mean every character should easily master everything. Time, Stamina, Mana, money, materials, and other limited resources will encourage specialization. Becoming highly skilled in one area should require a meaningful investment, which will make different character builds and professions valuable.
The goal is to let players define their characters through their decisions rather than through a class selected at the beginning of the game.
Eldren design goal
The planned combat skills, schools of magic, and the limits that encourage specialization are covered in Skills, Magic, and Combat in Eldren.
Loot, Crafting, and the Economy
Equipment and materials will have different levels of quality. Two swords made from similar materials may not be identical, especially if they were created by craftspeople with different skills or techniques.
Rare and legendary equipment should feel genuinely unusual. If too many supposedly legendary items enter the game, they stop being legendary. The most valuable items should have stories attached to them, whether they were discovered deep in the dungeon, created by a well-known player, or traded several times through the economy.
Crafting should contribute useful equipment rather than existing as a side activity that is immediately replaced by monster drops. Dungeon loot, gathered materials, crafting skills, and player trade should support one another.
Non-player merchants can provide basic supplies and a dependable way to buy or sell common goods. However, the best opportunities should usually come from interacting with other players. A healthy player economy can create relationships between adventurers, gatherers, craftspeople, and merchants even when those players are pursuing different goals.
Competition and Cooperation
Although it should be possible to make progress alone, Eldren is intended to be an online world. Trading, guilds, group activities, competition, and PvP should give players reasons to care about the people around them.
Open PvP can create memorable risks, but it must be designed carefully. Losing a fight should matter without making one defeat erase months of progress. The game will need rules that discourage harassment and prevent established players from making the world unplayable for newer characters.
Cooperative systems will be equally important. Players should benefit from finding reliable trading partners, hiring skilled craftspeople, sharing information, forming groups, and working toward larger goals.
Building the First Version
Eldren will begin primarily as a text-and-interface-driven game with pixel-art flavor. That approach fits a browser game and allows development to focus on interconnected systems before attempting large amounts of animation or graphical content.
The first version does not need to simulate the entire world. It needs a small but functional version of the main experience:
- character progression
- resource management (Stamina, Mana, and cooldowns)
- a city to move around in
- dungeon exploration and combat
- items and equipment
- some form of economy
The order in which these pieces are expected to arrive is laid out on the Eldren development roadmap.
Maps, additional artwork, environmental details, and simple animation can be added as the systems become more established. Starting with a focused version should make it easier to test whether the central loop is actually enjoyable.
Moving Forward
The core experience of Eldren is meant to be flexible. Players should be able to check in briefly, settle in for a longer adventure, specialize in a profession, experiment with different skills, or participate in the social and economic life of the city.
There are still many systems to define, and some of these ideas will probably change during development. For now, this plan gives the project a direction: create a persistent fantasy world in which different types of progress feel meaningful and players can gradually build characters with their own abilities, careers, possessions, and histories.