Eternal Lands

Eternal Lands (EL) is a free, multiplayer, online role-playing game (MMORPG) created by Radu Privantu in 2002. A pre-alpha version was made public on February 13, 2003. The game client is written in C using OpenGL and SDL.

Eternal Lands differs from other role-playing games in that there are no character classes — a character is not tied to a profession or set of racial attributes. Every character can do everything the others can do. Background, attributes and profession can be developed during gameplay and changed anytime.

Gameplay
The setting is a medieval fantasy world. There are historic elements such as medieval architecture and weaponry along with fictional elements such as other humanoid races and magic. It is 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. Irillion is directed towards experienced players.

Character building
Players begin play by selecting the race, name and appearance of their character. Skills, abilities and alignments are automatically given initial values. There are six races available; Humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, orchans (half-orcs) and Draegoni (dragon-men). The last three races are pay-to-play races; a player must pay money to play a character of one of these races.

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 graphics card and an internet connection is needed to play Eternal Lands. The software download is free.

Eternal Lands 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), questing, socializing with other players, player killing, and improving skills by fighting, gathering resources and creating items. All skills increase the "overall" experience, rewarding a player with "pickpoints", with which he can further build his character.

Productive skills
The productive skills are called alchemy, crafting, engineering, manufacturing, potion making 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 you will not retain the item.

Harvesting
Harvesting is the skill in which you gather the resources, such as flowers, minerals and ores. These items can be used for creating items or be sold to NPC or other players. Harvesting some materials requires different tools. In a recent patch, Mini Events were introduced.

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

It is also possible to fight with the magic, ranging and summoning skills. Ranging experience is obtained by hitting opponent with an arrow or bolt shot with one of the five 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 that will disappear upon succeeding.

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 has been out for quite some time now but is still not very populated..

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. The content is released under a proprietary license.

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.

Spin-offs
Two games were 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 by the nickname 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.