Project Gorgon on Steam

The day arrived earlier this week as Project: Gorgon, long in an alpha that you could play for free, finally moved to Steam.  It is early access, to be sure, but it has arrived.

A New Logo for Steam

For a very small project that took three tries to get a Kickstarter funded, this is a pretty big deal.

Yes, I expected it would get there sooner.  I’m pretty sure Eric Heimberg expected it to get there much sooner as well.  After all, the post-Kickstarter plan was to get to Steam some time in October.

October of 2015.

Welcome to the problem with Kickstarting a beast as complicated as an MMORPG.

At least the promise was only to get onto Steam.  Other ventures in which I have a minor stake, Shroud of the Avatar, Camelot Unchained, and Star Citizen, have all blown past their promised ship dates.  Shroud of the Avatar might hit something that looks like a finished project by the end of this year, but Star Citizen continues to recede from the horizon while Camelot Unchained is shooting for a beta at some point this summer.

So the two people pretty much baking an MMO on their own project looks pretty good by comparison.  Sure, it still doesn’t have a Wikipedia page yet (Project Gorgon there references an US Navy missile program) but there it is on Steam at least.

Of course, there are something like 35 games arriving on Steam every single day, threatening to bury us all in a bottomless pit of derivative crap that should never see the light of day, so getting there isn’t exactly the leap over the high bar it was once upon a time.  But, woo hoo, go indie dreamers all the same I guess.  (Just don’t quit your day jobs.)

I am in a mood to bitch, aren’t I?  Well, I shall complain no more… or not as much… for this should be a happy thing, something to celebrate.  You can actually find Project: Gorgon on Steam and read all about it.   And, honestly, it sounds better than I remember.  The bullet points are all good.

• Each non-player (NPC) you meet has their own goals and interest, and reward players that choose to be their friend.
• You can drop items on the ground, and other players can pick them up. What’s so great about that? Imagine laying down a trail of literal (virtual) breadcrumbs to guide your friends (or lure your enemies) into the woods.
• Shopkeepers keep inventory, so you can buy items that other players have sold to them. Want to help out new players? Sell your cast-off items to the shopkeeper in the new player zone and watch the new players go to town.
• If you are on fire, you can jump into a lake to put it out. This type of mechanic can have a subtle effect on your strategies, especially when you are fighting a fire mage!
• You can inscribe messages onto items, write books, and even leave notes for other players. Make your name as an in-game poet, or pronounce your greatness to the world!

Some of that sounds like classic MUD stuff that has gone missing in the more modern revisions of the genre.  Likewise this batch sounds interesting.

• Battle Chemistry: Create huge explosions, inject yourself with mysterious mutagens or program a pet golem!
• Unarmed Combat: Grapple and control enemies using a situational-aware combo system that varies based on where you are and what day it is.
• Animal Handling: Tame animals and train them to become ferocious fighters. Then breed your best and sell their offspring to other players.
• Necromancy: Seek out corpses and graveyards to raise an undead army. No graveyard around? Well, there are always the corpses of your friends.
• Cow: Got turned into a cow by that boss? That sucks. But learn some kicks and how to stampede, and you’ll be right back out there kicking grass in no time!
• That’s just a few! There’s also Sword Fighting, Combat Psychology, Staff Fighting, Sigil Scripting, Mentalism, and more.

In addition, there is a reasonable list of goals to achieve before the game moves from Early Access to Live, like fleshing out the content, which currently runs up to level 70, to level 100.

All in all I am impressed.  And if you act now, you can buy it on Steam for 25% off the normal $40 price.  Or if you are like me and paid back in 2015, there is a Steam key waiting in your in your email.  I got mine.

Project: Gorgon moving to Steam has long been my stated trigger point to start playing, and I am going to get right on that… once I am done with Rift Prime.

Okay, I’ll probably get Project: Gorgon loaded up on Steam and take a peek but, in my dotage, I have become mostly single threaded when it comes to fantasy MMORPGs.  I kind of just want to play one at a time, enjoy myself as the world washes over me, then change up when I am starting to tire.  And for the moment that world is Telara.

At Loose Ends on the Fantasy Front

I seem to have fallen off the fantasy MMORPG wagon once again.  This seems to happen every so often.

I stopped playing WoW a couple months after the Legion expansion hit.  My Winter foray into EverQuest II kept my interest for about a month, which seems to about par for the course.  I poked my nose into Lord of the Rings Online long enough to buy the level 95 Blessing of the Valar upgrade.

Two blessings, depending on your need

That got me a pile of stuff and whisked me off into a different place where I met up with Eowyn.

Yeah, about you and Strider… he’s not that into you

However I soon lost interest there.  Well, “lost interest” might imply I logged in again after that, and I did not.  Of course, I might have been influenced by wanting to start out on something only to be hamstrung by the legendary weapon system.  I had to choose a weapon, which I then received.  But you cannot just use the weapon yet.  You have to find the special NPC to identify it and then choose a bonus and then something else.  I forget.  I am sure, as with every aspect of every MMO, that legendary weapons are somebody’s favorite part of LOTRO.  But it ain’t mine. I just wanted to grab it and run not worry about reforging.

So that fell apart.  I might go back, but the fact that I haven’t felt any need to do so for a couple weeks is pretty telling.

At some point in the last few weeks… erm, months… I also made a RuneScape account, played for a couple of hours, then never went back.

The fantasy MMORPG thing just isn’t holding me at the moment.  But the habit of at least the last decade and a half… or more if you count the TorilMUD, in which case we start to reach back past 20 years… makes something inside of me think something is missing if I am not playing one.

So my eye wanders down the list of possible other choices.  Do I try out The Elder Scrolls Online, which just added in housing and seems to be doing well enough to be secure?  Do I give GuildWars 2 another try?  Is there something still in Rift that I might enjoy?  Is it time to start digging into Project: Gorgon yet?  What titles on my 2017 MMO Outlook post are even live yet?

But should I bother.

EVE Online doesn’t fill that niche for me certainly.  But I continue to play Minecraft, which does much to fill the world and building and housing drive I might have.  And right now Pokemon Sun seems to have a lock on the RPG… or maybe just the collecting and achievement… aspect.

And there is also something I will call “virtual world weariness” in me that feels the essential sameness of all of these games so that they blur together into a gray, uninteresting mass.  It might be time for a longer break from such games.

Project: Gorgon Returns to Crowdfunding

In August of 2015 Project: Gorgon, on its third run at a Kickstarter, succeeded and raised nearly $75K to fund development of the game.

Since then a lot of changes have come to the game.  However, they are back for another crowdfunding campaign.  This time the game is going the Indiegogo route.

Three reasons were given for the new funding effort.

• Allow people interested in the game to support it using PayPal, as they only support credit cards on the game’s site.
• Cover expenses like server costs and third party development during this non-revenue time frame.
• Cover the costs of some planned and “wish list” features

The target amount of the campaign, like the previous Kickstarter, is $20,000.  As of today they are closing in on the $4,000 mark.

Indiegogo campaign

As noted in past posts, with Indiegogo you can do a “flexible goal” campaign, wherein you get all the funds pledged, even if the campaign does not reach its goal.

The campaign itself runs through the end of the month, and as part of that they have created a new trailer for the game.

While I have poked my nose in on the game from time to time, I am personally waiting for it to hit the “ready for Steam” stage before I spend any serious time with it.

If you missed the links embedded in the post above, you can find the Indiegogo campaign page here.