Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Project Gorgon Player Interview: Gettin' Gabby with Yaffy!

I've got a pretty fun read today from a VIP (that's "Very Important Player") in Project Gorgon. This particular player has been around since the days of Project Gorgon's Alpha and is extremely helpful to the new players of Project Gorgon over on the officially unofficial Discord.

Read on for the Q&A!

Sneaking a Screenshot with Yaffy in Serbule.
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Q: Hi Yaffy! Players from Project Gorgon will recognize you from being a mod on the Player Run Discord and also from your years of participation on the Project Gorgon forums, but for those who may not have heard from you, can you introduce yourself and talk about how you became so involved in the P:G community?


A: Hi, I’m Yaffy! I’m a bit of an older player, but nowhere near as veteran as some of the older members of the Project Gorgon community. I stumbled into this game back in Alpha when it was recommended to me by someone else.

I didn’t start the game being interested in the community, but as you play PG you end up getting pulled into the community one way or another! It’s hard to explain, but one moment I was just some random player and then suddenly I had a lot of people asking me to join their group! I guess a big contributor to it was that I really like to help out other players and I really liked trying to figure out how the game worked on a mechanical level, so soon enough a lot of people were asking me for advice on the game.

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Q: What characters do you play and although it's a bit like asking which child is your favorite, which of your characters is your favorite?

A: Obviously my favorite character to play as is Yaffy! But I still enjoy playing on my alts, Yaf, Yaffster and Yaffy Taffy. If you couldn’t guess, I’m very good at names.

I focus mostly on my main, Yaffy, but my alts are very important to me as well. Playing on them lets me see the game from angles I missed on my main. For example, I’ve purposefully avoided permanent character altering choices on my main character, so my alts are there so I can try out things like Druid.

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Q: Project Gorgon is filled with fun ways to explore and experience the game, what's your favorite pastime in game?

A: My favorite pastime in Project Gorgon is theory crafting builds. I love to think of specific challenges and purposes and trying to create a build around it, or taking two skills and trying to work out the best build I can think of from it. This comes in handy too because a lot of players like to ask me for advice on how to build their characters, and I’m always more than happy to help.

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Q: Is there a build you've never tried, but would like to give it a shot?

A: This is a bit of a hard question because over my time of playing there are a lot of builds I would have loved to try out, but major skill changes overtime mean I’ll never get the chance to try it again.

If I could play ANY build at any point in time, it would have to be low-armor Werewolf/Unarmed. It was a build a friend of mine and I made a long time ago which took advantage of low armor mechanics on unarmed to potentially hit for 25 thousand damage in a single hit! I never tried it because I refused to make my main a werewolf and he never got around to it, so we’ll never see how good the build might have turned out. Nobody else ever came up with the idea either it seems so it’ll forever be lost in time now.

In current Project Gorgon I’ve been thinking about making a Sword/Shield build. Sounds boring right? But the thing is that usually I play tanking sets, and tanking in Project Gorgon is in a really really tough spot right now, and I think that Sword/Shield has the potential to be the best tank available right now along with very good solo capabilities IF it’s built properly. Nothing is really stopping me from making it right now but I’m personally biding my time to see if anything happens with the game first before I make the commitment.

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Q: Seeing this community grow and change through the years, would you say there is a constant with people who tend to gravitate to this game?

A: One pattern I’ve picked up very quickly is that most of the people who play Project Gorgon and stick around are older folks. It wouldn’t surprise me if the average age of the current playerbase was around 30-40! This isn’t a bad thing though, because it means most of the community is generally very chill and mature, which is probably a big reason why a lot of people like the community.

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Q: What's one feature and one bug that you'd like to see added to and fixed in Project Gorgon in 2020?

A: Now this is a very VERY hard question, because as someone who takes the game’s mechanics very seriously and has played for a long time, there’s a lot of things I would like to see changed or added, and in very specific ways.

If we want to keep things to “Features”, I think the biggest feature I want to see added would be armor smithing, so we can create our own armor sets. However, I specifically want to see armor smithing with meaningful mitigation options for players. One of my biggest gripes about Project Gorgon is how hard it is to build defense against certain attacks because the options simply don’t exist, which makes tanking (My favorite role) incredibly limited (Aka. Play Shield or die). The developers have teased “Tanking armor sets” a while back, so I want to see armor smithing as a solution to this problem which has plagued the game for a while.

As for a bug I’d like to see fixed? One of the most terrifying bugs in the game exists with the “Easy drop” option, which lets you drag items out of your bag onto the screen to drop them quickly. This feature is really handy, especially for someone like me who usually tries to manage inventory quickly. However, if you try to drop items repeatedly like this too quickly, sometimes it will drop the first item in your inventory instead of the thing you actually wanted to drop (Even if said first item isn’t actually visible). Combine this with the fact that sorting your inventory puts equipment in the first slots and you can see how awful this bug can be. I’ve lost some good gear because the bug made me drop it and I didn’t notice until it was too late.

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Q: What's the best piece of advice you can give new players to Project Gorgon?

A: Take your time and take it easy! It’s as simple as that. Some people who start PG might be too used to other MMORPGs, because it feels like they’re trying to get things done as fast as possible and are too worried about “Missing” things or “Losing progress”. Project Gorgon is not a game you need to rush and is a lot more fun when you just do whatever you feel like doing. You’re always making progress in PG one way or another, even if you decide to swap skill sets twenty times. Just keep playing the same character and you’ll get somewhere eventually.

Oh, also make sure to use the auto-run button. Trust me, it’s a life saver. Bind that thing to middle mouse or something because I can’t imagine life without it.

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Q: What do you feel is the most over looked skill in Project Gorgon and why should people check it out? (Please say it's gender studies)

A: One skill that I think doesn’t receive enough love is Sigil Scripting. I don’t know why, but it’s probably one of the least used skills despite being something you can pick up quite early. When I was leveling it was such an amazing skill, letting me solo enemies I normally couldn’t or farming significantly faster and easily paying for itself. Its applications might be a bit specific for efficient use but when it shines it’s great. For a quick summary, fire sigil is the best and lets you farm mobs really fast (1st floor Kur Tower is an excellent spot to use it), healing sigil is good for soloing tough elites/enemies, acid can be good if you place it where enemies can’t reach it (Ex. On top of Rahu houses) and lightning is worthless so don’t use it.

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Q: What other games have you enjoyed playing in the past?

A: I have a bit of a history with fighting games, but in terms of games similar to Project Gorgon I generally love sandboxy games. One of my favorite games is Elona, which looks like an incredibly bizarre and niche Roguelike game at first, but once you get into it you’ll find there’s a game with tons of incredibly well designed mechanics and ideas behind it. One of the reasons why I’ve been interested in PG is because it shares some of those ideas (Through pure coincidence I’m sure).

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Q: If you were to guess, how much different do you think Project Gorgon will look when it finally launches out of beta?

A: I’m honestly not sure! It’s hard to say because the game goes through such serious changes all the time, and I’m sure we’ll be getting many more by the time it’s out of beta. I can only hope that said changes are done well. I think that to an outsider or casual player, the full release will probably look pretty similar to the beta, just with prettier graphics (Assuming the devs hire an art team) and some obvious additions like mounts, but how the game plays as a whole could be changed radically just with a few decisions from the developers and I don’t think I can confidently answer how.

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Q: Anything else you'd like to mention to fans of Project Gorgon?

A: Have fun, join the Discord and never trust a werewolf.

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Thanks so much to Yaffy for taking the time to answer a few questions for the readers of The Friendly Necromancer today! It was my pleasure to interview this very helpful player of Project Gorgon.

Happy Dueling!

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