One complaints that Project Gorgon testers have expressed during the alpha is that inventory and storage is both limiting and cluttered. The small dev team is well aware of this, which is why it has laid down a few quality of life improvements in this field prior to the upcoming UI revamp.
June 9th’s patch allowed for some measure of linked storage within a zone and a new search command that will span all of a player’s secret holdings. The update also linked a few features to guild levels, including storage and population size. Other changes include adjustments to the food system, a couple of new events, a guild quit command, and actual phases of the moon in the night sky.
Project Gorgon has a rather larger revamp of South Serbule coming up in a few weeks.
This was a total unknown game to me until very recently, but I tried it out and found it strangely addictive. Thankfully Project Gorgon does not feature the kind of action combat system that’s become so prevalent in most of the current(ly launching) MMORPGs because that’s what is killing those games and the genre as a whole for me.
I haven’t really spent many hours in Gorgon yet, but it appears that there’s very little direction to the game by design and while the freeform play allows for enough self-definable goals, it doesn’t provide enough variety. Maybe that’s unfair of me to say without knowing it well enough, but I get the impression that a lot of the game past the first twenty or so hours will be a huge grind-fest.
What it comes down to for me is this: the current graphics are really bad. I was given to understand while reading on the game’s subreddit that a graphics revamp was planned before the official release, but knowing that this is apparently a one or two person development, we’re probably looking at something mediocre at best. Right now it kind of reminds me of ArchLord, the first game of that name, which was developed in 2004 and even then was a graphical disappointment.
I am not an advocate of putting graphics quality above all else, but they do and should be part of the whole. That’s why I believe that Project Gorgon will be a decent success due to its small but loyal fan-base, but it won’t be able to attract many other interested players. With a set price of $39.99 for a Steam key, talk of non-free expansions and a (voluntary) VIP subscription, the game wants to play in the AA/AAA games ballpark where it won’t be able to compete. Until I heard about the price structure, I was thinking this would either be a free-to-play game (after all, it is free now during the alpha) or it would feature the buy-to-play pricing of an indie game ($20 or $25 would be the upper limit to still count as indie, in my opinion) without even going into the VIP subscription mess.
What do you guys think? Am I thinking too much about graphics and pricing, neither of which is competitive to the competition from established studios or publishers in this genre? This won’t be the only challenge the game will have to overcome. There is a reason after all why grind-heavy titles never made it big in the West, as attractive and long-lived as they might be in Asia. I still remember my first and only MMORPG I played before WoW came along, it was called Laghaim in Asia and BiosFear in Europe and it was an endless grind that is still alive in Korea today. Back then it was based upon a subscription model because free-to-play didn’t really exist yet, but that and the extreme grind resulted in very low player numbers in the hundreds. I fear that is what Project Gorgon is going to look like as well, unless it becomes a lot more accessible to those people that would be willing to try it out, if only it didn’t have to compete with an AA or AAA game.
The new lighting looks good. The first island is still ugly as sin, but it looks better at being ugly as sin. Love this game so much.
P: Gorgon is just wacky good fun, even if I don’t find the old hotbar combat system matching my personal ideals.
I will support them, mostly likely, when they have another funding option. I do so like when there’s innovation beyond just “Oh, hey, we made it look prettier, and changed tuning *usually with the ‘more toward the cash shop’ caveat*” and instead offers interesting ideas.
Besides, people running around as cattle and wolves and spiders with special abilities which are all permanent unless they change that through effort is just cool, most games put very hard limits on such things, and usually timers!
Gorgon has always reminded me of a more polished version of Prairie Games Minions of Mirth, interesting to see the finished product
Gorgon has come a long way since that first login in the cave way back when.
I’m still waiting for their Steam release build before playing again but I’m actually starting to get a little hyped for this game. It’s just too unique to pass up.
Gotta love their dedication, imagination, and willingness to go their own way. I’d say I’m rooting for this one to succeed more than others because of that but my track record on saying things like that is bad, so I don’t want to jinx them. Readers of MOP know the last two games i was really rooting for. :(
So, as they used to say in show business, break a leg or how bout our own version, crash a server! :)
PG plays off of my first mmo love Asheron’s Call. I miss the concept of a world exploration game where you log in for the simple fun of heading out for adventures instead of instances.
When Andrew mentioned in a stream that a “dream” of his would be to add npc factions with RvR integration into CU some day, my nerdgasm threshold was tripped. My dream fantasy mmorpg has always been about player vs player vs environment mixed seamlessly together. It is a reflection of real world exploration when Earth of the great unknown … which I am sure is the root inspiration of all classic fantasy genres.
Not that PG will integrate pvp to that extent, I’m sure you’ll agree that SWG at least attempted that concept. I’d love to see CU head that direction, at least to the degree that preserves it’s RvR roots and focus, more so than Daoc did even.
So what would be the MMO equivalent of saying Macbeth in a theater? :p
Yep!