Hey! I played another game! For nearly an hour! And really enjoyed it, too.
It had that true, old school MMORPG dopamine-drip grip, the one where you want
to keep moving from mob to mob just to see what they drop and to watch your
skills tick up.
It was Project:Gorgon, of course. The long-running project of Eric Heimburg and the now sadly-deceased Sandra Powers finally went Live yesterday. It's a game that hoovers up all the bits that worked in all those Golden Age classics and throws them altogether in a kind of MMORPG gumbo that somehow tastes really good. That's not just my opinion, it's what everyone was saying, albeit without the culinary metaphors, in General Chat, which for a change was mostly polite and amicable.
Everyone was going on (And on...) about the games they used to play, back in the day, and how much P:G felt like all of them. It reminded people of Vanilla WoW, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call (1 and 2), EverQuest (1 and 2), Anarchy Online... I imagine there were more but the chatter was so distracting I had to turn it off so I could concentrate on what I was doing.
What I was doing was mostly wandering around, opening the map, raising skills and killing mobs. I could have worked on some quests - I've played Project: Gorgon before (There are two dozen posts about it on the blog, the earliest dating back to 2013. ) and I had some pending - but I just wanted to relax. Questing involves too much thinking.
Slaughtering mobs doesn't. Neither does raising skills. That's one of the joys of P:G, at least in the early stages. There are a whole lot of skills and doing almost anything is likely to raise at least one of them. What good that does is another matter but it's always fun just to see the numbers go up.
Happily for me, I was also playing a character for whom the mobs in the meadows around Serbule, the starting city, posed little threat but still gave good xp. Well, until I made the mistake of attacking two Mantises, that is. Not the first time I've made that mistake, either.
Before any of that, though, I had to remake my character for looks. There are new character models and character creation options and they're a huge improvement. Here's what my character looked like before and after:
The whole game looks better although graphics have always been very weird in Project: Gorgon. As I believe you can still see from the 2013 post linked above, the game has never looked quite as visually impressive as it did in the pre-alpha demo, when the buildings, at least, were almost photo-realistic.
The current version is excellent all the same. Or at least it is once you get into the Settings and tweak the details. I thought the whole thing looked a bit ropy when I got in so I opened the controls to see what I was on and it turned out the game had defaulted to "Poor".
It says something about Eric's approach to marketing that there even is a setting called "Poor". Most designers would avoid using negative concepts like that, preferring to call the low graphics option something like "High Performance".
I was pretty sure that if my PC could happily run Baldur's Gate 3 on decent settings it could do a lot better than "Poor" for P:G but I was curious to see what the game itself would choose. There's an option to auto-adjust the quality level so I checked the box and was instantly upgraded to... Fair.
Seriously? You think that's the best I can manage? I toyed with the idea of banging it all the way up to Ultra or whatever and then bringing it down when I ran into problems but in the end I just wanted to get on with the killing so I left it on auto, which uses frame-rate to decide on the graphical fidelity.
And it has to be said, the game looked pretty good, although that might have been because of the other visual setting I toggled - Brighter World. I thoroughly recommend switching that on. It makes a huge difference. In the day it can be a bit garish so maybe just put the lights on when the sun goes down although if you like a super-saturated, almost psychedelic filter, you might want to keep it on all the time.
Once I'd sorted that out and also set a key for hiding the UI (Why that's not a standard preset in all games beats me...) I was off on my killing spree.
I killed a lot of Brain Bugs and various spiders. I killed some pigs and a wolf. A tiger attacked me so I killed that, too. Most of them dropped something and sometimes it was actual gear. That's so old school, getting your armor and weapons off the local wildlife.
I butchered all of them for the skill-ups and botched most of the butchering. Then I buried the results which increased my Compassion. What good a high Compassion skill does you, I have no idea but I'm sure a high one is better, somehow.
As I wandered about from mob to mob I noticed I was also getting skill-ups in Cartography. The map was slowly filling itself in as I went but not in those big chunks you usually see with Fog-of-War systems, just a thin line where I'd been traveling. It looks like it would take an awfully long time to uncover an entire map that way but I still much prefer it to, for example the Stars Reach method of finding and activating specific points, which turns into a very frustrating scavenger hunt after a while.
After about half an hour, I ended up at the graveyard, where several players were fighting with the undead. I sent a few skeletons back to their unquiet rest before making my terminal error of pulling a couple of lurking Mantises.
When I revived back in Serbule I thought I'd take that as a good moment to stop, so I did. You need something like that as an exit line in Project:Gorgon because, like all the games it echoes, there's no end to anything. You log in and do stuff until you don't want to any more and then, if you have the will-power, you stop. And if you don't you carry on until you're entire life falls apart and you rage-quit and spend the next two years bad-mouthing the game on every forum you can find. Or at least that was the traditional response, back when there were forums....
If anyone's looking for a good, old-fashioned MMORPG that also recognizes times have changed since the Golden Age, there's no need to look any further. Project:Gorgon does everything everyone keeps saying MMOPRPGs don't do any more. Apparently that's still not enough to get a thousand people online playing it at the same time but what more people are waiting for, I can't imagine.
If it's the closest thing to EverQuest in 1999 you're looking for, I'd still recommend Monsters & Memories but if you want something less specific and with potentially broader appeal, you probably can't do much better than give Project: Gorgon a few hundred hours of your valuable time.
Or a few thousand. It is an traditional MMORPG, after all.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment