The game has been in pre-alpha for quite some time. I wrote about it back before Christmas but, as Wilhelm reminded me in the comments, he'd written about it over a year before that.
In the last nine months I've played a number of sessions and I've really enjoyed myself. The world is gorgeous to look at and the game itself runs pretty smoothly and satisfyingly for something in such an early stage of development.
There's already a lot of content and more is being added all the time. Just reading the patch notes gives a very clear idea of the kind of game this is setting out to become. There have been a slew of nostalgic, old-school projects on Kickstarter over the last couple of years but this is the pick of them for my money.
Yes, I have backed it. Unlike many Kickstarter pipe-dreams and big-company pre-releases, you can get your hands on a working build right now, for free, and you can play as long as you need to make up your mind.
It's rough, as you'd expect at this stage, but it's dripping with promise. Whether it will make its target this time round I can't predict. I hope so. If it doesn't, I hope development will continue anyway as it did last time. They say it will.
Anyway, don't take my word for it. Go and try it. As Lead Developer Eric Heimburg says in his Kickstarter pitch, when he goes amusingly off-piste on the perils of backing indie MMOs:
"...never back any indie MMO project unless you can see actual gameplay firsthand. It's just too risky!"
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I was in as the first person to pledge... which doesn't exactly seem like a promising start as I took my time getting around to logging and and pledging. We shall see.
ReplyDeleteI've had too many pre-planned posts this week. I'll have to work on a post of my own about this round of funding.
I'd be amazed if they fund. There just doesn't seem to be the level of interest or awareness around Project Gorgon that some of the other retro-mmos have had. Not entirely sure why that is but clearly the absence of a Big Name From The Past That People Have Vaguely Heard Of and the decision to forgo ludicrous, overblown claims about what they are going to do one day in favor of actually doing something solid that we can all see right now hasn't worked in their favor.
DeleteThey say they are quite close to completion anyway - after four years you'd hope so - and they are going to finish the game no matter what. I think the worry would be that, if they can't attract enough people to fund the Kickstarter, how would they attract enough subscribers post-launch to stay in profit? You'd like to think that if they make a good enough game that will solve itself but we all know it doesn't work like that...