Tag Archives: Arisetsu

Friday Bullet Points All About Project: Gorgon

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The game hasn’t been in its 1.0 version for much more than a week and things keep happening, with updates large and small landing almost every day, so it feels like I need to take a breath and catch up.

Project: Gorgon – It Lives!

I do want to say that Potshot and I are still playing the game and that it has a charm and appeal beyond my expectations, somehow managing to tap into both nostalgia and newness in my brain at the same time.  It one of those “this is not what I asked for, but is apparently what I wanted” situations.

Anyway, I am going to take a moment to catch up on things.  Part of that was figuring out where to even find the updates.  The game puts them up in the login screen, which is great, but I like some place out of game to review them at my leisure.  While they also appear over on Steam, I am favoring the official wiki as my source.

First up, the game seems to be popping since the 1.0 release last week.

I have long maintained a strong opinion that games get one launch date, and that is the day they go into early access.  This has been previously born out for me in the number of titles that never leave early access, shutting down or just lingering there forever, and the few that leave that state and are mostly considered done by the devs.  So having something like a 10x bump in player peaks is not something I would expect.

Project: Gorgon would like a word about that.

Project: Gorgon release peak

The game went from an early access release peak of 677 concurrent players back in April 2018 and, but last year has settled into a routine of 200-300 players online at peak daily.

And then it had its 1.0 release and went up to 1,000.  And then the weekend hit and the news got out and it exceeded 2,200 players, with the all time peak so far hitting around 21:00 UTC on Sunday.

As I pointed out in my first post where I was just going to peek in and see how things were going, it was kind of crazy crowded on day one.  The 1.0 milestone not only attracted new players, but there was also a whole new area for game veterans.

I am not sure that entirely disproves my theory.  I suspect the day that Star Citizen goes to 1.0, which I suspect it never will, there won’t be a big change in players.  Certainly not a 10x increase in players.  PG feels more like a special case, the exception that proves the rule in some odd way.

[Also, I wrote this on Wednesday because I was traveling yesterday and the peak concurrent number for the game is now 2,472 set early this morning UTC… and we’re not even to the weekend yet!  What will Sunday bring?]

As part of the 1.0 launch there was the promise of a new server, a fresh start for new players and the ability to build a new community.  Among other things, this required the creation of a server selection option as part of the login process.  You could go with the original Arisetsu server, or, once it went live, the new Dreva server.

Choose your server

As part of this, in order to allow new players to get established, there was initially a plan to force every character on an account created before Dec. 1, 2025 to play as a pig.  The people who had been around but hadn’t played that much complained about being excluded from the new server or forced to play as a pig.

That led, briefly, to an ability to reset your account date by deleting and recreating your account.  You would lose anything you had already, but wouldn’t be a pig.

That was changed to any account with more than 40 hours of play time facing the pig treatment on the new server.

Then it was dropped altogether as perhaps not the most workable idea.  I went and played on the original server where I had signed in early enough that I had the “Pre-Alpha Survivor” title from making an account back during the early days of the game.

So I did not experience the pig thing.  However, since a pig is a playable beast form in PG, I am not even sure if this was a deterrent or a challenge frankly.

And the whole pig idea got dropped as the crowd rushed in

Two servers… were not enough.  The announcement was already out on Sunday that a third server was on the way.

Whoa! That’s a lot of players! Hardware Incoming

We really appreciate the turn out of new players! This is great! But not great for server performance. Each server is designed to have up to 1000 concurrent players on it, and the new Dreva server is climbing up to the 1500-player mark. There is a lot of server lag in the newbie areas, especially Serbule. We see where some more hardware will help this problem so we’re in the process of getting that in place for Dreva. It also seems like we’d better get a third server up and running or poor Dreva will just get more overcrowded. So the third server will go online later this week.

I can confirm, even on the Arisetsu things were getting a little strange when there were a lot of people on the starter island or in the Serbule zone.  On Sunday around when the all time peak was hitting I was seeing mobs that would die, but wouldn’t, and some strange loot issues in a game that already has a strange loot mechanic.  So a new server is on the way.

The team was doing things to help mitigate the problems, including a new area that is the next bullet point, but even with that the new server was going to happen.

When the hardware for the third server is available, we’re still planning to launch it ASAP. This one will be named Strekios, after the god of Self-Improvement.

We’ll see when it happens, but Strekios is coming.  Also, there will be a hardware upgrade for Dreva as part of this, so maybe they can keep the count to three servers.

Addendum: Strekios is live, three servers running!  There is a channel on the official Discord for the server as well.  Now to see how this trio of servers plays out.

Meanwhile, I was hanging out on the original server which was also seeing its own swell of new players, such that the Serbule zone was frequently a bit crowded.  There is a pretty fine line between just enough people that you run into others when you need them, like when you stumble onto a named spawn… or somebody struggling with that named spawn… and you can help them out and a situation where you just need to find a couple of deer for a task and they have been hunted to extinction for the moment.

Anyway, they patched in a redone area for new players, complete with a some quests to keep you busy and plenty of mobs to slay.

Desert Dreams: I spent the day creating a new adventure area for levels 1-15, called “Desert Dream”. It reuses the Ilmari Desert map and reimagines it as a dream realm. It’s nothing too fancy, but I hope newbies enjoy it. The main goal of this area is to help spread out newbies — our main server bottleneck is having too many players in the same zone. We may or may not keep this area as a long-term part of the game; we’ll see how it goes

So it is through the golden portal at the gates of Serbule and into the desert.

The golden portal calls to you

There is a place where I can work on my reptile and amphibian pathology.

  • Thoughts on This

Not really a news bullet point, just a summing up.

I am pretty happy to see how well PG has been doing in this first week or so.

It does make me a bit nervous when there is a huge spike in users and a rush to get more servers online.  How many times have we seen that peter out and leave a game with under under utilized hardware and empty zones?

I take heart in the fact that, until this past week, the game had been chugging along just fine with daily user peaks at a tenth of what they have been recently.  That, as I understand it, has yielded a strong community and active zones.

But now I have a desert to explore.

On the sands of adventure

We will have to leave tomorrow’s problems until tomorrow.

Addendum:  So this got thrown into the mix as well.

In addition to the above announcement, we are taking further congestion control measures by decreasing the afk timeout to 5 minutes, which was previously 15 minutes, on all servers.

Don’t idle too long!