Last night’s Project Gorgon patch brought cheers to the game’s Discord as what was represented as a bug-fixing patch also heavily revamped a skill that ought to be a staple for a fantasy MMO – swords – and altered group experience gains.
“We’ve increased the bonus XP you earn for being in a group up to 100% for each participating group member,” Elder Game says. “This means that if you’re in a group of players that kill a monster, the monster is now worth 100% of its total XP to every group member! This is an experiment. The intent is to remove barriers to grouping — now, it’s inarguably mathematically better to group up than to compete for kills. Are there major down sides to this? We dunno — guess we’ll find out!”
A quick skim through the notes shows a few other nice changes, including a level expansion for cooking and gardening, a “basic dance animation” for eagles, and multiple fixes for the bunny quests. (It’s starting to worry me that the weird notes make sense to me now.) For higher-end players, there’s an event scheduled for this weekend, dependent on timezone. You have to wear a mask or the NPCs will kick you out. I don’t make the rules.
Finally, if you’re interested in Elder Game’s story – and it’s become a fascination in the MMO genre lately, given that it’s led by a tiny husband-and-wife dev duo who cut their teeth on Asheron’s Call development and recently saw a huge outpouring of support thanks to concern for the future of the game and the health of one of the devs – then you might want to swing by MarleMMO’s YouTube channel, as he’s interviewed Jackencola, the game’s event coordinator. Jackencola is a fixture in the Gorgon Discord, but it’s fun to hear him talk about more higher-end content, the team’s financial future, and the playerbase at large.
“We cater to the older crowd, the crowd that lived back in the ‘golden age’ of MMOs – EverQuest, Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online, and [pre-WoW] games like that,” Jackencola says, admitting something that few other MMORPGs on the planet would do. “The older crowd tends to like slightly more grindy stuff because they can sit down and just play. […] For the modern gamer, I understand their frustrations when they try out Project Gorgon. They’re used to that ‘rush to the endgame and then enjoy the game,’ and [Gorgon] is ‘enjoy the journey.’ […] Because of the sandbox style, you can get to the ‘end’ and then you can reset, grab another pair of skills, and start at level one again on the same character.”
