Project Gorgon got a lot of attention at the tail end of last year, owing to the fact that its husband-and-wife dev team – the latter of whom has been battling cancer – told their small fanbase that the game was running out of money and would need to switch to part-time development and maintenance mode. In response, gamers rallied around the indie MMO, with over $20,000 in donations alone, on top of all the folks subbing and buying game packages.
At the time, Eric “Citan” Heimburg and Sandra “Srand” Powers said the money would keep full-time development going for a while as the devs decided how best to spend it to enhance the game. Since then, the team pumped out a surprisingly large update in February, with a complete overhaul of the game’s map and info and travel integrations, as well as a skill literally aimed at rewarding the most hardcore players.
So how’s it going now? Well, yesterday Citan told players that the next update is on the way sooner rather than later.
“So update coming middle of next week — that’s my expectation at least,” his Discord message says. “It has some new noncombat skills, a bit of combat-skill revision, some significant combat-mechanics tweaks, some art revisions, an extremely highly-requested feature, a new max-level dungeon map (the finale of Errruka’s Cave dungeon), and a new semi-quest-like mechanic that I’m trying testing out. So it should feel substantial, but not, like, earth-shatteringly huge. A lot of what we’ve done in this update is prep for the next few updates. But I think that’ll be telegraphed well enough… we’ll see.” Note, he said next few updates, which is a great sign. He also discusses adding varied challenges to dungeons and monster buffs against groups.
“[T]he patch notes for this one are a nightmare,” he says. “We’ll no doubt have to do a quick fix patch after this update — just the sheer number of changes are going to have unexpected consequences. After this update we’ll probably spend two weeks just updating the update.”
But the conversation does veer into gloom a little bit, as Citan discusses what he expects the endgame level cap will eventually be “assuming the game lives long enough.” Here’s the key quote, which isn’t all that different from what the team said last year – except that the doom date keeps pushing further into the future, fortunately:
“To manage expectations – we aren’t in any danger of shutting down. But it’s possible that we run out of money to create new content. That would happen some time early next year, at this point. But that point has already moved forward from where we were. I’m cautiously optimistic about the future, but it will depend on what we can accomplish over the rest of this year.”
Here’s hoping the devs have conjured up new ways to coax money from the very willing playerbase. Just this week, the team lowered the price of the game and added a DLC for more character slots, but there are so many more things people are willing to pay for to keep the best indie MMORPG of 2023 (and 2019 and 2018, for that matter) alive.
