Project: Gorgon

Was playing the game before and after Steam launch. It has an old school MMO feel, and there is a lot of soul in the game. The graphics are crap outright and there is some serious optimization issues in some fringe cases. Community is incredibly cult-like and will hound you for criticisms. They will witch hunt players over simply playing the game a certain way. A short example is a player was farming a specific low level mob to get a drop. He did so for about an hour. Many players in the world chat claimed he was a bot, so I went and checked. It very clearly wasn't a bot but a guy just playing the game. When I confirmed this people lost their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ minds and demanded I hand his name over so they could all go report him. When I told people to go do it themselves they got even more upset. Long story short. Community blows. Yes. Not all of them. But the vocal majority that is present drives people off. On my specific server there was a furry-only guild and the guild leader, Luck, ended up being one of the most if not -the most- obnoxious people on there. Constantly starting arguments with people, interjecting themselves into conversations, frequently giving back handed remarks or comments. I get these kinds of people exist in every game but the crux of the issue with Project: Gorgon and most of what I said has lead up to this. One of the devs threw a tantrum on one of the servers and banned players over simple questions and chat disputes. Think of the a-typical moderator of a forum or Discord and that's how this dev was acting. Community wanted him gone. What did the game owner / lead dev do? Removed him from moderation to get an 'easier job'. Wow! It's almost like he was a huge piece of ♥♥♥♥ and he got rewarded for it. The bigger issue is this guy has been around forever and his attitude has sucked ass since the early days. Devs leading by example to foster a community that only servers to massage the ego and choices that the devs make when it comes to moderation. The moderation in this game is so heavily biased and skewed you're better off not saying anything. So what about gameplay? The gameplay is actually engaging. The issue is by the time you reach level 70 or so in skills, the game becomes an obnoxious grind to the point you are spamming literally hundreds if not thousands of items just to get a single level. The worst part is everything is RNG based. Even the systems meant to let you craft and alter gear. Intentionally designed to siphon your time away as much as possible in a game about trying out different build variations. Honestly. I'd prefer if this game was single player and have options to alter rates and other things. Cause I like the game. But the balance is whack, the moderation isn't good, and the endgame is the most monotonous grind I've ever had to do.

Okay game, a little grindy with currency but that's expected of these old-style games. Community in game is friendly and helpful. Just recommend not making the discord your life lest you end up like the other angry reviewers here. In fact, good rule of thumb to stay out of the discord of any game you enjoy playing.

Project Gorgon is a work of love that takes MMOs in a direction they might have followed, had their focus been on fun and the players living in the world rather than pushing them along a fixed path towards an endgame. It has a presence and an attitude that calls back to Everquest, Asheron's Call and similar games, while converting the grind inherent in MMOs into constant dopamine hits. Just about anything you can do, from gathering resources to fighting to riding around to making food and consuming it, to dying (!), is a skill. This means that pretty much no action in the game, no resource, is wasted. It also means that as you level, you will constantly be spending time in lower level areas to gather resources and store and retrieve items, or run dungeons, keeping the areas fresh and busy. The game encourages interaction, with PUGS in dungeons (which have multi-player quests), as well as in daily quests for groups, and higher level content. However, a culture has evolved in the game in which sharing and kindness to other players is commonplace. It's a great place for neurodivergent players, but there is adult content in the jokes and dialog that NPCs have. PG perhaps. There are many different types of gameplay, starting with weapons skills - the usual bow, sword, fire/ice magic, unarmed, etc. These have varying costs and requirements to advance them, but in general, you gain XP and new skills through *using* the skill, and for some skill types, "research", which requires found or purchased components. You'll combine two of these skills to use actively at any given time, since you have two skill bars. This means that your character will at any given time be described as "Fire/Druid", or "Psychology/Archer", or "Necromancer/Weather Witch" and so forth. You can level up as many skills are you like on one character but only use two at a time, with some general skills being able to be place on a side bar. So if you know Fire Magic, you can always have a small fireball available, even if you are running a sword and shield combo at any given moment. But there's more than just weapon-based skills! You can play as animals and other body kinds. Cows, rabbits, butterflies, spiders, foxes, deer (via druids or a curse mechanic), lycanthropes, vampires, faeries, and then there are "travel forms". Just as humans and elves can ride horses to travel, animals can enter a fast travel model too. (Spiders get roller skates to avoid creeping people out lol). Each of the animal forms can use various skills, generally the ones that don't require hands, of which there are many, and have their own gear. You can swim and catch fish with your hands, diving underwater. You can learn to fly in various forms and ways. If you are a Druid, you have special threats to Nature to respond to every few days with the other Druids. If you're a Vampire, you have to avoid sunlight and you have other special requirements, but you can turn into a fairly horrific giant bat too! There are many, many mechanics that differentiate different roles and types. The game is incredibly deep and varied. You can play as you like - solo, with friends, or join a Guild. It will keep you busy in ways that go well beyond fetch quests and unrepeatable quest lines designed to move you along and keep you "progressing" through a game. This is a world you live in. You don't have to optimize (in fact, that's rather hard to do), nor can you be "left behind" your friends (or be twinked by them in the usual way, there are mechanics that let you play with them but prevent OP situations for the most part). It's a healthy game, not a stressful one. Come on in, the water is fine!

Project Gorgon was a fun game with a lot of content, and as my playtime reflects, I genuinely wanted nothing more than to see it succeed. Unfortunately, the devs were overly ambitious and opened too many servers. Instead of addressing what many players in the community have been asking for, server merges, devs such as Jackencola, along with a handful of overly blind supporters, dismiss, attack, or harass anyone who raises the issue. The reality is that the servers feel empty, and nothing meaningful is being done to address it. During peak hours, the most populated server sees maybe 180 players, while the lower-population servers barely reach 100. As I'm writing this, Arisetsu, arguably the game's most popular server has only 55 players online. I cannot recommend the game to new players in its current state, as the experience will be very poor due to the lack of group content being run. The developers desperately need to address the core problem of spreading the community across too many servers. The game risks continued decline because many new players, like myself will be leaving as we came to this game expecting the advertised MMORPG, but now we are finding Project Gorgon creeping closer and closer to a single player experience. On top of that, the Devs continue to allow gamebreaking exploits that ruin the economy, with little to no punishment for the offenders. See the dice game exploit in Statehelm. It's disappointing to watch a game that found early release success undermine itself through poor decisions and an unwillingness to address its most obvious problem.

This game has a bad issue with developers thinking their MMO has a healthy population of 200 players. This is not a healthy MMO population yet they keep adding servers thinking the game will grow when they have a toxic dev team. I really like the game a lot but they need to stop lying to themselves and try to actually fix the issues rather than ignore the problems.

TL;DR: Permanent punishment exploring. So, I made a new character after not having touched the game for a couple years and not remembering much of anything about it, went exploring and ended up getting a PERMANENT debuff called "Hellfire". There are few ways to get rid of it and as a new player it relies entirely on begging others for a potion that can remove it or somehow finding a random NPC in an extremely high lvl area where there are no directions to. This debuff does not expire on death and it cannot be removed with skills, it will still be on my character 10 years from now because I am not spending the hours and many deaths it would take to find this NPC, nor am I begging strangers for a presumably expensive potion to fix a problem that shouldn't exist. It is one of the worst design decisions I've ever seen or heard of to punish people for exploring and this game doesn't just give you a little slap on the wrist, it fkin breaks both your legs and abandons you in a desert with no food or water.

This game is something different and special. And I say that as a gamer who has gamed a heckin' lot, in many varied games. This one is technically a MMO, but it has no real PVP. But where it shines is the sheer crazy number of options you have for your character. You change your "spec" by simply changing the items you have equipped. You can engage in such profession pass-times as the usually expected "foraging" or "cooking" or "blacksmithing" but the devs humor shines through in options like "gender studies" and "dying" and "glassblowing." You advance your relationship with NPCs by doing offline "hangouts" that you setup before you logout. The community is friendly and funny! It's probably true that if you are not able to invest 10-20 hours a week into the game that you will feel like you are not making much progress. But if you want an all-engrossing game that will keep you busy, charmed, and entertained for thousands of hours, this is the one. Join server Dreva! We need fresh meat!! Tell 'em Purrrfecta sent ya.

Game is a complex sandbox with literally everything you do being a skill. no classes.....just do something...get better at it. silly and quirky at times, but adds to its charm. graphics are dated...but surprisingly...adds to the charm. If you are on the fence...try it anyway. free demo...nothing to lose. demo character xfers over to main if you buy the game. so literally nothing to lose!

Unfortunately this is not a recommend for me. The gameplay is incredibly rough for what it is. It plays like an MMO's beta for the most part. Everything from art, to writing, to animation to overall playability is ultimately just... mid. They make it seem like the world is so expansive and there's so much to do and so many cool things to discover and see and experience... but they never really give you a reason to give a damn about doing any of it. The game REALLY is hoping to hook you on its systems and the novelty of gaining experience in dying and gaining levels in it to carry you through what I consider to be easily one of the biggest gaming slogs I have ever encountered in my time of video gaming. Genuinely, It's ridiculous. You get experience turning on and off lamps in town. You get experience smelling flowers. You get experience looking at art. Normally you would think "Awesome, finally a game that gives a point to some of that stuff!" Except it's not general experience. Each of those correlates to their own skill The lights? Civil Service. Flowers? Nature appreciation Art? Art appreciation (duh) This would be awesome if things like civil service, nature appreciation, and art appreciation had like 5 levels. No. At best they have 50. So it's not just you getting value out of every little mundane thing you do. It's "Well shoot, level 50 in Nature appreciation gives me +1 to my druid skill, so to actually max out my druid skill I'm going to have to 'appreciate' well over a thousand flowers." You can grow flowers though, so it shouldn't take long right? Only growing flowers is tied to your growing skill, and you can only plant three at a time. World of Warcraft at least had the decency to respect your time a little bit. You took blacksmithing, you took mining, you collected mats as you quested in the zones and everything if done at a reasonable pace happens organically as you level up. Not here. You'll be in a level 70 zone and find some random skill that has you going back to the first zone for not the first time to begin a new grind to level up something from zone to zone to zone as you slowly catch up to where you're at because of course something important is locked 75% of the way deep into the levels of this random "licking walls effectively" skill. That is the problem. They didn't just make a really cool expansive skill system, they made a gigantic bogged down absolute mess and slog with thousands of different items, and pointless fluff skills literally designed to take up your time. It would be fine if it took up your time doing fun, interactive tasks, but what is fun about clicking 200 times to sniff 100 flowers because you made this skill mandatory to master a combat class? Apparently because you can turn into a pig too, that makes all the crappy stuff worth the slog. All of the above is made absolutely exponentially worse by two of the most egregious systems in an MMO when it comes to respecting players time. EXTREMELY LIMITED ITEM SPACE. 1000's of items and you gotta do a three quest chain for a random NPC to unlock 10 slots of storage in that SINGLE ZONE? AND YOU HAVE TO DO THAT IN EVERY ZONE? Yeah, ♥♥♥♥ you too. Abhorrent travel mechanics, mat based teleportation which is just annoying. It's literally just a cumbersome system to -be- a cumbersome system. Nothing about it really adds anything, other than additional time to whatever it is you want to do. The community is nice if you're all in on the game with them. The moment you start talking about any of the above as if it's not the second coming of the greatest game of all time, well, I hope you like getting all your information from wikis (not like you wouldn't have to live on a wiki to play this game as it is.) Anyway, it's honestly at the late stage of MMO's really. Their big release and new content is genuinely just more of the same stuff. They've got their dedicated player base and nothing is going to ever change or, in my opinion, improve. That's what you're paying 25-40(if you sub) for: A gigantic, messy, disorganized sea of content that can take you forever to get through it even if most of that time is just figuring out the poorly explained mechanics. You're also paying to try and fit into an incredibly tight knit community that's all in on the game, for better or worse. Not for me after all this time, but I gave it as good of a shot as I could.