Thursday, August 8, 2019

#Blaugust2019 Day 8 -- Project Gorgon Making the Old New Again

Ever since I first heard about Project Gorgon, I was fascinated by it. It would have been four years ago when their kickstarter was in full swing back in August 2015.

That happens to me . . . I get fascinated with something but never buy into it, you know?  I'm not one to bite for Kickstarters unless I personally know the person. Speaking of personally knowing the person, Eric Heimburg and Sandra Powers (the muscle behind building this game) seem like people I'd like to know. Husband and wife team that worked on Asheron's Call together . . . and engineers?! Awesome. In my mind, they would be fun people to get to know.

I mean . . . watching Eric talk back in 2015 about making flashy loot effects drop from loot pigs was friggen' adorable.


So for this Blaugust I thought I'd actually download the game and give it a run. There's a Demo version on Steam that allows you to play until your skills are level 15. There are certain features that are locked off from demo players like you can't trade with other players who have set up a bazaar stall . . . yup, you heard me right . . . just like in EQ you have lines of players selling stuff. it's really kinda strange and wonderful to think this is a "new" game.


Oh btw, yes . . . my character has a tail.  I'm a Raksasha. The game only has 3 character races from what I can tell (at least in the demo), and I'm a purple'y hued Raksasha named Mistermeowsiepaws.


It's a face only an old Everquest player could love to be honest.

The game starts you off on an island with minimal directions and a goal . . . to get off the island. It warns you that swimming will result in a shark attack, so don't do that. I didn't do that.

I kind of loved this noobie island. It was full of wolves, skeletons, and rats. I even tamed one of the rats by tempting him with cheese. That's genius and I'm a sucker for pets . . . even if it is an ugly rat.


I also picked a lot of mushrooms. It was the one ground spawn that seemed incredibly plentiful, and while I picked it, I leveled up in Mycology.


The best thing though was I found a quest to get me off the island by using teleporters. My friends, I was used to modern MMOs holding my hand and I just "believed" that as I touched these four teleporters, and they gave me their number, that the game would just remember it and I'd complete the quest to basically find the telephone number for the island. Nope. Instead I was asked to type in the code, and then the game did the most magical thing . . . it opened up a notepad and basically told me in not so many words, "yo, we have this cool feature called notepad inside our game for you to write stuff down like this."


Hilarious. Do you know in Everquest how many times I would have killed for a notepad in game?

As for community events, you know what they've got? Open mic poetry on Saturday afternoons. I kid you not. *hand slams down on desk* Now THAT'S something I've got to see!


So there you have it . . . a new game with a shiny old skin and a bit of kooky charm.

My next goal in Project Gorgon?  To make it to the giant hand without being killed by giant praying mantis.


Happy Dueling!

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