Project: Gorgon – First Impressions

I wasn’t going to go hard on Project: Gorgon; I just wanted to go in for a peek.  And then I played it for a dozen hours over the first weekend… so there was clearly something there for me.

Project: Gorgon – It Lives!

So how does it feel so far?

Graphics

I am going to start with the game’s graphics, a topic I was initially going to bypass because it feels like a cheap shot to ding such a small indie project for something one could argue was superficial.  If the gameplay is good, people will adapt to the graphics.  I mean, Minecraft is still hella popular.

And then, when we were on together for a while on Saturday, Potshot said I should go check my graphics settings which, it turns out, were set by default to “poor” quality.

The graphics are poor on purpose

So I changed the setting to “good” and… things looked much better honestly.  I was hesitant to set it any higher than that because the fans on my graphics card were spun up and running hard.

But upping the graphical quality had the opposite effect.  On moving to “good” the fans spun down and everything was nice and quiet.  This left me with the mental image of my video card working hard to dumb down the game’s graphics to match my settings.

That isn’t the way things work, but it is odd that my PC seemed less audibly taxed after I made the change.  Also, the game looked much better.

Enjoying the handscape… erm, landscape

Sure, it isn’t going to win any awards or turn any heads away from the graphical fidelity of the latest AAA console title, but it is 100% fine.  Anybody turning their nose up at the game over the graphics isn’t in the right place for a small indie title.

Making Numbers Go Up

Kill things, make numbers go up.  Or just do things.  Or just freaking walk around and look at things.  Numbers will go up and make you feel good.

I am a simple man and if a game will just let me make the numbers go up in a semi-reliable fashion I am often content.

As hinted at in my previous post but perhaps not explained very well, is that PG has a skills based character progression system.

There is nothing revolutionary in that.  A lot of games have gone that route.  EVE Online has skills based progression.  Hell, now that I think about it, Palia has skill based progression.

And PG has gone the classic route where doing a thing related to a skill earns you xp towards that skill that makes that skill go up.  So I go kill things with my sword and my skill at swords goes up.  And so does my endurance.  If I pull with my bow, get in a couple of shots, then finish off with my sword, both of those go up.

The first few levels are always the easy ones, but that gets you sucked in.  And I like it.  It has been a long while since I’ve been in a solid, skill focused numbers game.

So Many Numbers to Make Go Up

The thing is, PG has a lot of skills.  I have been half paying attention to updates about the game, which often include a statement about some skill or another being added to the game.  But if you go over to the wiki there is a list of skills on the front page that adds up to something like 130 available.

Sure, they are not all combat skills.  They aren’t even all crafting skills.  But if you can figure out where to start off with a skill… which is a whole aspect to the game itself… then you can work on improving it.

So I have learned and improved myself in interpretive dance, so that I now know all the basic dance steps.  That meant finding the NPC that could teach the skill than dancing where somebody was playing music.

I also picked up a lute and got the starting skill for that.  I leveled that up enough to enable me to learn to be a bard… because bards are totally a thing.  And that all happened because I was at the Serbule Hills inn to learn about surveying and then picked up interpretive dance as a skill.

Travel

My first big adventure was a learning about travel.  On the long list of skills is teleportation, which is expertise in using the teleport pads scattered around the world.  Currently all I can do is recall to the pad set as my home… and I cannot even do that at the moment as my last amethyst was used up.  Have to go find some more somewhere.  Something else to do.

The world is discreet, rectilinear zones, connected by portals.  It isn’t a seamless world, but oh well. But zones are fine.  Also, making a seamless world comes with a cost and it looks like that time was well spent elsewhere.

The zones seem to be about the right size in that they feel big when you’re running around on foot, but it still doesn’t take you very long to get across.  So running isn’t a huge chore.

Even still, you see wild horses roaming the zones and you can interact with them.  Petting them gets you on the path to taming them and it isn’t too long before you’re there.

Potshot becomes that guy on the horse

You do have to learn some gardening along the way and there is the whole choosing a horse from those available.  But eventually I figured it was better to have any horse to start than to spend a lot of time wandering about trying to find the best one ever.

Death as you Like It

As mentioned in that post about my first big adventure, I have ended up dying quite a bit.  The game, it keeps track of that for you, which I do like.

Causes of death…

I am not sure of the distinction between “exposure to freezing temperatures” and “frozen to death,” but I am pretty sure they all happened out in Gazluk.

Also, dying is a skill… nice to have something I am good at available… and you get bonus xp for dying in new ways.

Insane cultist! Add it to the list!

The effects of death are very light.  You just end up at a nearby respawn point otherwise ready to go.  They were so light in fact that I started to wonder if that might change once I ventured further afield.  Was this just a newbie benefit.

But then I found the Hardcore Board in Serbule Keep, which lays out your various death options.

Choose your style of death

I am always a fan of the idea “why be normal?”  but for now I think I will stick with that as it makes me a little less skeptical of taking on something new.

Overall

This has all been a somewhat scattered attempt to pull together some minor insights over the last two weeks or so.

Overall, as I may have mentioned previously, it is an oddly synergistic mixture of old school and more modern learning around the genre.

I mean, you start out on the beach without a much guidance.  The game does prompt you for this or that… it scolded me for sitting down after a fight to speed health revive, saying that things don’t work that way here… but I was able to wander around pretty aimlessly otherwise.

There are few things as old school as using a skill to increase its level… I was doing that back in TorilMUD in 1993… and the lack of hand holding quest chains taking you on a guided tour provided by NPCs with punctuation marks hovering above them makes it feel more like early EverQuest than anything created post-WoW.

But there are quests (and a quest log that isn’t limited to so few quests that you have to keep deleting them) and NPCs to gain favor with and skills to learn and places to explore.

Still running around Serbule for things…

Its features come together in a strangely compelling mix that has kept me bouncing around for nearly two weeks now without really having anything like a goal outside of exploring what things do and how I learn this, that, or the other skill.

We’ll see what happens when Potshot and I decide to go somewhere or accomplish some larger task.  Probably a few more entries on the list of ways I have died.