Eternal Lands

Eternal Lands (also known as EL among players) is a free to play multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) initially created by Radu Privantu in 2002. Pre-alpha version was launched for public on February 13, 2003.

The game client has been written in C using OpenGL and SDL.

Eternal Lands' outstanding difference from other role-playing games is that there are no castes, that is, your character is not tied to a certain profession or certain racial attributes. Every character can basically do everything the others can do. Background, attributes and profession can be developed during gameplay and changed or amended anytime.

Gameplay
The setting is a medieval fantasy world, with both historic elements such as medieval architecture and weaponry as well as fictional elements such as other humanoid races, and magic. It is currently made of up two main continents: Seridia and Irilion in the world of Draia. Seridia is the first continent, and the place in which new players spawn. It consists of 14 main maps, 7 storages, 2 main PK maps, and the only spot to find the Wraith.

Character building
Players begin play by selecting the race, name and appearance of their character. Skills, abilities and alignments are automatically given their initial values. There are six races available; Humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, orchans (half-orcs) and Draegoni (dragon-men).

The latter three races are pay-to-play races; in order to play a character which is one of these races, you have to donate money to the game.

Eternal Lands does not have fixed character classes, and it is possible for any player to improve any of the 12 skills in game.

System requirements
A computer with a 3D-accelerated hi graphics card and an internet connection is needed to play Eternal Lands. The software download itself is free.

Eternal Lands currently supports the Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X operating systems and the X86, X86_64, IA64 and PowerPC architectures.

In-game activities
In-game activities include exploring the 39 different outside maps (plus numerous insides and caves), fighting, improving skills, creating items, questing, worshiping gods, socializing with the other players, and player killing.

Productive skills
The productive skills of Eternal Lands are called alchemy, crafting, engineering, manufacturing, potion, summoning and tailoring. The items can be created by inserting certain materials into the manufacturing window and attempting to mix them. If you fail mixing, you might lose the materials. Success chance is defined by your skill level and the item's level. If you succeed, the item appears into your inventory and you receive experience.

It is also possible to mix in certain schools in which you will receive extra experience but not the item. You lose the materials though.

All skills do increase Overall experience with which obtaining pickpoints is possible, so leveling is possible without ever doing combat.

Harvesting
Harvesting is the skill in which you gather the resources, such as flowers, minerals or ore. These items can be used as materials for creating items of be sold directly to NPC. Harvesting some materials requires different tools.

Combat
Fighting is broken into attack and defense skills, which you can improve by fighting monsters or players. For every successful hit landed on opponent you will be receiving attack experience and by dodging a hit defense experience. Amount of experience will be determined by the level differences between you and the opponent.

It is also possible to fight with magic, ranging and summoning skills. Ranging experience is obtained by hitting opponent with an arrow or bolt shot with one of game's 8 different bows or crossbows. Summoning experience is obtained by successfully summoning a creature and magic experience by casting spells. Both summons and spells require certain materials.

Player killing
On the main Eternal Lands server, there are only a few select areas where players can attack one another, so that players don't have to engage in player versus player combat if they don't want to. However, there is also a pay-to-play PK server which allows for players to fight each other nearly anywhere. It is not very populated due to the fact that it recently came out, but is growing every day.

Game Monitors
The game Monitors are the demigods of this game. They wander through the game correcting the lesser mortals in what can only be described as an openly condescending and patronizing manner. The Monitors only function appears to be monitoring the chat channels in the game. And in this they are proven to be inconsistent and arbitrary. While testing the game I was in a chat channel and received a chat channel correction from one of their monitors. While discussing the chat rule violation with the monitor another player (player suck up) added his two cents then another and another jumped on the bandwagon. The monitor thanked the other players for their contributions in correcting me and then proceeded to beat me up some more over the violation of chat rules. No, I did not use vulgar or profane language in my chat posting. My sin was not talking about the correct subject matter in that particular chat channel using an approved format. The correct phrasing of a particular thought appears to change from monitor to monitor although all of them are condescending and patronizing enough to make you want to pull your hair out. When I pointed out that others were not being censored for violating the same chat rule that I was accused of violating, I learned from the Monitor that they were aware of that and it was ok for those others to violate the chat rules and that I should just ignore it. I reported this behavior using the games e-mail for Monitor problems, but remarkably I never heard back from them. Shouldn’t the Monitor be fair and impartial and not allow a verbal beat down of players? And, shouldn’t the Monitor enforce the chat rules in a fair and impartial manner across the board?

The Monitors also hold contests from time to time where the winner is supposed to be someone either randomly picked or the first to find a certain person or thing. This did not turn out to be the case however. I personally entered into each contest until, talking to other players in the game; I learned that the winners were pre-chosen. As I did not see any benefit for the Monitors in this I kept entering and watching. Sure enough on one occasion I observed a player find the required Monitor first, well second actually. I found the Monitor first but did not approach them. The person approached and tried to collect their prize. Later the prize winner was announced and it was not the person standing right in front of the monitor. It appeared that the other players making fun of me were correct. The contests have predetermined winners.

Development
The game client is open source and may be developed by anyone. However, the license does require modified clients to be approved by administrators before it is possible to connect the main servers. For testing purposes, there is a test server.

Critical reaction
About.com awarded 4 out of 5 stars, praising the game's graphics (considering that it's a free game) and realistic crafting and food systems, but found it hard to get the audio working.

Other reviews indicate that the graphics lack quality and the game is slow paced, thus sometimes earning it low review scores. It does, however, consistently maintain worship as a mature and friendly community.

Overall the game is very slow paced taking a couple years to develop a medium level character. The general player community is mostly composed of ordinary people who are sometime helpful and at other times disdainful. The more prestigious a guild they belong to the less helpful they are. Even when you say hi to a member of an older established guild you stand a good chance they will simply ignore you. They are all that, etc. I even had one member of an established guild tell me to spend a couple years learning the game before I talked to her again. On the other hand, almost without exception the new people playing the game were very helpful. Of course they are new and unaware of the game politics. I was fortunate enough to find a few players who were old hands at the game and willing to teach a noob (new person) the ropes. I quickly found that among the established members there is a general current of discontent with the new leadership policies and game play changes. Other than that I found the game to be pretty mediocre in most respects filled with hours of tedious harvesting and other repetitive tasks. I found the graphics surprisingly good for a free game. My biggest gripe about the game would be the Game Monitors. If you enjoy being forced into sucking up to the Monitors and being talked to as if you were a babbling moron, then quite possibly this is the game for you. I would give this game 1 star out of 5. I would not willingly subject myself to the type of treatment I received in this game. Since I was only testing it for game play and character development I was pleased to leave anyway. For serious Role Playing fans, I wouldn’t bother with this game. There are many better ones out there and more being developed every day.

Spin-offs
There are several games derived from Eternal Lands:

Landes Eternelles is a French port currently in development. Although it is architecturally identical to Eternal Lands and shares some of the graphics and other gameplay mechanisms, it has a different role-play approach with different races, geography, storylines, religion and quests. Landes Eternelles is currently in open Beta stage.

Other-Life is a project that attempts to create a more challenging variant of Eternal Lands. It was started by Steven Wilcoxon (known with a nick Learner), a server developer of Eternal Lands, and is based on that game's server and client code. The game is not open for testing yet.