Project Gorgon Returns To Kickstarter
Indie MMORPG Project Gorgon made its first attempt at Kickstarter way back in October, 2012. Since then, the husband and wife duo behind the game have continued working on the game despite lacking funding. Now, they have returned the game to Kickstarter with a modest goal of $20,000 and an estimated release date of December 2016. Despite still being in development, the game has been open to the public for quite some time in an alpha state and will remain open until the end of the Kickstarter when, if successful, they plan to close it off to everyone that did not back the game. Thanks to this, I was able to play a bit last night and can tell you a bit about the game.
Project Gorgon is a skill-based game, the kind where you have to use a skill to earn experience in it. Each skill has 50 levels that unlock more abilities of various types as you progress. Upon first entering the game, you are met with what seems like a limitless amount of these skills. You use something and then, suddenly, you've leveled a skill and it appears in your skills panel. There's a mycology skill that begins when you pick mushrooms. There are separate skills for butchering corpses for meat and skinning them for hides. There's an autopsy skill that then branches into different kinds of autopsy, such as dinosaur autopsy. In my time playing, I even saw one player that had the skill "lycanthropy."
Now, that's all well and good but, focused on sandbox gameplay, Project Gorgon has no clear direction. You wander the world, you meet NPCs, you learn their stories, do them a few favors, and, once favor levels are high enough, they might give you something in return. Of course, should you run out of favors to do for them, you can always just gift them something. This is the extent of the direction given and you are free to spend your time doing just about anything that's within your reach.
There are a few other neat features hidden within the game, such as a sixth sense of sorts to sense bosses, which the game will warn you of. Bosses are a bit different and, if they kill you, they curse you until you can go back and kill them. There's also the fact that shopkeepers actually keep the items you give them. The days of the poet and bard might return with the ability to write books and inscribe messages into items. Planned features include housing, player-created quests, and player-run storefronts.
Ultimately, Project Gorgon is aiming for the crowd that feels disenfranchised by today's games, instead hoping for something closer to the original Everquest or Asheron's Call. As of this point, the game starts out a bit staggering but it feels polished and like the team behind it knows what they're doing. Even for an indie MMO, $20,000 feels like a small goal and I wonder if it really will support development over the next year. I imagine the goal was tactically lowered from previous attempts but it is still quite a bit low. No matter, sitting at $4,626 out of $20,000 at the time of writing, less than 24 hours after launching, success seems a sure thing.
