Adrullan Online (Formerly Evercraft)

EnigmaFactory said:

You’re still forcing a contradiction that isn’t there.

In Adrullan the mechanically meaningful identity choices are Race and Class. Those are gameplay categories. They affect the kind of character you are in the world and how you play. The rest of character creation is visual presentation.

In classic MMOs, including EverQuest, sex/gender selection was not mechanically meaningful. It was presentation. So no, we did not remove some foundational gameplay pillar. We renamed a visual selector to Body Type because it better reflects what that choice is doing in our character creator and gives us more flexibility in presentation without constraining how players see their character.

You are still completely free to define and project your character however you want. Nothing about that has been taken away. Labeling a visual option “Body Type” does not somehow erase your ability to read your own character as male, female, or anything else. It simply means we are not pretending that a cosmetic selector is some deep mechanical axis when it never was.

And on the broader point: Adrullan is not a remake, and it was never meant to be one. That is exactly why the name changed from EverCraft. The old name created the kind of misconception you are demonstrating now: that we were trying to recreate EverQuest one-to-one, or that every legacy convention had to be preserved untouched. That was never the goal.

Our philosophy is to identify the core tenets of classic MMORPGs that actually mattered to the experience: meaningful class identity, world immersion, social interdependence, RPG progression, racial fantasy, danger, discovery, community - and build an original game around those strengths.

This is not about “pandering to modern sensibilities.” It is about understanding the difference between mechanically important choices and visual customization flexibility, and building an original MMORPG accordingly.

I for one am incredibly excited that we finally are living in a time where projects are emerging that explore the entire spectrum of fidelity to this niche. We respect and stand on the shoulders of giants, but do not revere the old ways as immutable. We are on the side of innovating. We've seen the mistakes mainstream efforts have made towards mass appeal that erode the core, and we hope to navigate around them in a way that keeps the tenets we feel are important, but we will not be locked into an specific previous example. We have an advantage in our decisions are driven by what we think is fun and interesting and not shareholder value.

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Old Man Potter said:

You claim that sex is ‘merely presentation’ while race is a ‘mechanically meaningful identity.’ This is a blatant category error. In any rigorous system, ‘Body Type’ describes morphology: weight, frame, and musculature, not the fundamental biological reality of sexual dimorphism that defines our species. By collapsing the two into a single, sanitized label, you aren’t just ‘simplifying a UI’; you are attempting a linguistic liquidation of the human form to satisfy the current, mid-wit consensus of the HR-industrial complex.

You say you aren’t pandering, yet you’ve adopted the exact risk-averse, sterilized lexicon used by the very multinational corporations whose design philosophy you claim to oppose. Calling it ‘Body Type’ is a clear tell; it’s a compliance signal to a specific cultural class that finds the binary nature of reality ‘problematic.’ If it were truly ‘just visual,’ you wouldn’t need to obfuscate the term ‘sex’ at all. You are importing a temporary, trend-chasing fad into the code of your world, sacrificing the structural integrity of your setting for the sake of being ‘inclusive’ to a deracinated consumer that values comfort over the harsh, defining friction of reality.

Furthermore, you are being dishonest about the lineage of the genre. EverQuest and D&D didn’t arrive at the male/female binary by accident; it was the ontological foundation of the worlds they built. In those games, the engine, the scripting, and the player-made macros all recognize the binary. To claim it isn’t ‘mechanically meaningful’ is to ignore the actual architecture of the games you claim to be inspired by. You are trying to stand on the shoulders of giants while simultaneously dismantling the foundation they built upon.
This leads to a fundamental void in your world-building: If sex is reduced to a disposable skin, how do the humanoids and animals in Adrullan actually reproduce? If you have abandoned the binary, you have abandoned the mechanism of life, lineage, and population replacement. You are building a stage set populated by mannequins with no internal logic, not a living world.

Do not mistake cultural compliance for innovation. True innovation in this genre requires solving genuine problems of simulation, social complexity, or world-state depth, not simply adopting the industry-standard ‘inclusion’ checklist used by every major corporate studio on the market. You aren’t breaking new ground or pioneering a new way to build a world; you are merely mimicking the current institutional consensus. If your version of ‘innovation’ is to flatten the foundational binary of the species to satisfy the aesthetic preferences of a modern, rootless audience, then you aren’t a visionary, you are just another developer following the herd to avoid the social friction that comes with building a world based on objective reality.

If your game world cannot answer the most basic question of its own existence: ‘where do the inhabitants come from?’ then the ‘immersion’ you promise is nothing more than a shallow, surface-level veneer. You aren’t building a world; you are building a bureaucratic sandbox. You have traded the weight and gravity of a real world for a sterile, corporate-compliant aesthetic. In two years, when the ‘Body Type’ fad has evaporated, your game will look like a museum piece of 2020s corporate-sanitized design. If you want to build an enduring world worth inhabiting, you have to be willing to embrace the reality of its inhabitants, not just the sanitized, risk-averse buzzwords of the current year.

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