EverQuest Revived (EQR) is a remaster of the definitive massively-multiplayer roleplayer game EverQuest, originally released in 1999. Currently being developed individually by Justin Kader, EQR is an effort to carefully interpret the original game design and art direction to reconstruct the artistic vision with modern enhancements, honoring its legacy while realizing what may have been its full creative potential. A core objective is to reintroduce this classic to a new generation after 25 years. Today’s young players – Gen Z and Alpha – are rediscovering nostalgia but demand spectacle: worlds so immersive they command attention. Modern hits succeed when the player doesn’t feel like they’re at the top looking down, but from within looking out. To earn their focus, a game world must offer an escape vivid enough

to transcend the everyday.

EQR adopts original artistic assets from the game, often in a minimally-altered format, and immerses them in a vibrant, dynamic, and stunningly photorealistic game world built on state-of-the-art, high-fidelity technology offered in Unreal Engine 5. Through the deliberate juxtaposition of legacy assets within hyperreal environments, the remaster achieves a dreamlike, uncanny vividness.

Cutting-edge implementations such as ray-traced lighting and reflections, volumetric fog, subsurface scattering, and high-poly meshes run seamlessly even on decade-old graphics cards thanks to optimization technologies like Lumen global illumination, Nanite, and virtual shadow maps. Dynamic weather and atmospheric effects, day/night cycle, emissive particle effects, postprocess visual effects, high-resolution landscape heightmaps, and procedurally generated environments work together to deliver a living breathing world that is sometimes dazzling and bright, other times times gritty and gloomy, but never forced or overdesigned.

While many of the gameplay mechanics of the original EverQuest serve as enduring templates for present-day RPGs, some of those that were most responsible for emergent gameplay experiences have been overlooked. Forming adventure groups and bartering strictly through chat allowed players to utilize and hone their empathy and communication skills; rigid character class definitions and abilities emphasized teamwork and creative problem solving; lingering consequences for death (corpse runs) and deeds (faction, reputation) naturally delivered a sense of immersion and inherent danger. EQR seeks to reintroduce emergent, organic gaming experiences to new generations by restoring many of these core gameplay mechanics.

One of the more exciting explorations for the EQR project is the introduction of modern generative AI NPCs, or AI Agents (AAs). Thanks to a growing number of open source plugins that bridge Unreal Engine with LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI), several experiments of AI functionality have already been conducted successfully in EQR. These have included player-AA dialogue and even AA-to-AA dialogue (using both text and voice simulation), and autonomous waypoint navigation, e.g., for guiding players to requested locations. Additional exciting and novel AI implementations are in active development.

Historically, the full development of an MMO in Unreal Engine has been hampered by the lack of dedicated netcode which can support large volumes of player/character data, authentication, security, synchronization, interactions, etc. However, EQR is being developed with a streamlined and unprecedented networking backend that features cloud-hosted cluster infrastructure, postgreSQL database management, auto-scalable server fleets, and shards/zones/realms that can allow up to several hundred players to populate a single environment simultaneously without incurring significant latency and desynchronization. This technology has already been successfully demonstrated in the latest version of EQR.

EQR is a faithful yet visionary remaster of 1999 MMORPG classic EverQuest, reimagined through cutting-edge Unreal Engine 5 technology. Developed by Justin Kader, this project honors the original’s artistry while elevating its world with photorealistic lighting, dynamic environments, and meticulously optimized performance, even with older hardware. By preserving legacy assets within a hyperreal world, EQR achieves a mesmerizing, dreamlike immersion.

Beyond visuals, EQR revives EverQuest’s emergent soul: chat-based bartering, rigid class roles, and high-stakes consequences foster teamwork and organic storytelling. Pioneering AI-driven NPCs open a new dimension of interaction and immersion, leveraging LLM-powered dialogue and autonomous navigation. Meanwhile, cloud-based netcode infrastructure supports hundreds of players per zone with minimal latency, solving historical MMO scalability challenges for Unreal Engine.

Built for nostalgic veterans and a new generation alike, EQR bridges 25 years of innovation with the timeless magic of EverQuest’s most daring design philosophies.

I integrated OpenAI's API into Unreal Engine to enable natural, intuitive, and sometimes downright uncanny conversation between the player and NPCs, via text input as well as voice input. NPCs output their response via text and "voice", by taking advantage of AWS Polly AI Voice Generator.