Project: Gorgon was no stranger to Kickstarter when it launched its campaign in 2015. That campaign was the last attempt for studio Elder Game to crowdfund the game after having tried before. That Kickstarter for an MMO being created primarily by two industry veterans, a husband and wife team with credits in games like Asheron’s Call and EverQuest II, was a success. The campaign ended in August 2015 with more than $74,000 in funding from a little over 1,300 backers, and development has been going strong since. How are things looking? How is the game progressing?
I interviewed three of the most well-respected MMO bloggers and Project: Gorgon backers to find out more.
Who did I interview?
- Syp, MMO blogger at Bio Break. He was the senior contributor editor at Massively and still writes for Massively Overpowered. He maintains two podcasts: MassivelyOP and Battle Bards. He can be found on Twitter @Sypster.
- Bhagpuss, the MMO blogger behind Inventory Full. Bhagpuss has been playing MMOs since before they were called that and will likely be playing them long after the genre name changes.
- Wilhelm, MMO blogger at The Ancient Gaming Noob, best known for his longstanding coverage of the MMO genre. You can find him on Twitter @wilhelm2451.
Syp, MMORPG Superfan #1
You’ve been writing about MMOs for a long time. What interested you enough about Project: Gorgon to back it on Kickstarter?
Project Gorgon is the first and, so far, only Kickstarter project that I’ve funded. The sole reason for this is that the game has been playable in its alpha state for a while now, and after getting my hands on it, I wanted to see it succeed. It wasn’t just a bunch of ideas floating out there; it was an actual, functioning, and pretty awesome game.
How do you view the game’s multiple attempts at getting a successful Kickstarter? Is it evidence the system is broken or an underdog story worth cheering for?
It shows that sometimes crowdfunding campaigns need to figure out a proper angle and build up word-of-mouth. Kickstarter campaigns can be done hastily, quietly, and quite wrong, so it’s not surprising that some games need multiple campaigns to find the right approach.
Did you have to contribute a lot to get what you wanted? Do you normally contribute to MMO Kickstarters?
I threw in enough ($35, I think) to get the game and support the project. It also should ensure continued play when the game is taken off the freebie market as it moves into Steam and beta.
Have you tried Project: Gorgon yet? Any initial thoughts? Anything of particular note you have written about the game on Bio Break or Massively?
I’ve written about it a few times on both sites and have nothing but glowing praise to say. It might look crude (and that should get better), but this is an MMO that is innovative, creative, and an explorer’s absolute dream.
I think the key here is that the game isn’t solely designed around combat as the main course — it’s simply one of many. Instead, the variety of skills and the willingness to explore unusual avenues actually puts the role-play feel back in this MMORPG. Get cursed by a boss and subsequently live out life as a pig? Learn flower arrangements? Level up your dying skill? Fight using psychology? Become a magician by seeking out and learning skills from a variety of sources? Solve puzzles? It’s all here and it gets bigger with each update. The developer has this approach where he’s thrown the accepted tropes and MMO rules out of the window and is instead focusing on fun, experimentation, and exploration.
Do you think Project: Gorgon will need to find a wider audience to survive? What feature(s) do you think will appeal to modern MMO fans?
I think it’ll do fine with a small audience and could become a sleeper hit, especially with more word-of-mouth and improved graphics. The dev team is downright tiny (two people) and there isn’t a lot of overhead requiring a massive audience and income.
Any other thoughts?
Even with Kickstarter funding and a lengthy development period so far, it’s still going to be quite some time before Project Gorgon launches, due to its smaller budget and minuscule team. Here’s hoping that the upcoming Steam early access release helps to boost its profile and draw in curious players. I’ll tell you, this is one of those games that seems to be winning fans over one at a time — and each of those turn into rabid evangelists for this game. That’s a great sign in my book.
Bhagpuss, MMORPG Superfan #2
I know you have been playing MMORPGs for a long time. What did Project: Gorgon promise you in its Kickstarter that convinced you to back it?
The game, when it launches, basically. I already knew I’d be buying Project: Gorgon when (or I should say if) it launched so when the third Kickstarter appeared I just selected the pledge point that most closely matched the expected price point.
I see Kickstarter mainly as a means of pre-ordering games I plan to buy if they launch. I do occasionally back something just to encourage the developers but those projects somehow never seem to fund.
Did it take a lot of money to get the backer rewards you wanted most?
Not at all. I think it was $20? Maybe $25. I can’t remember exactly so it can’t have been very much. Mostly, when I look at the increasingly bizarre backer rewards in the higher tiers, the hundreds, even thousands of dollars for personal castles, aristocratic titles and evenings out with the developers I just think what a strange world we live in. And as for the tiers where people pay large sums for the right to draft quests or name NPCs I think “isn’t that something you’re meant to get paid for doing – like a job?” Nope, just give me the game. I might pay a few dollars more for a bigger starting inventory or a mount – like $5 more – but that would be about the end of it.
Have you followed Project: Gorgon? How much have you played it?
Yes, I’d been playing it for quite a while before the third Kickstarter successfully funded. I first heard of it through Wilhelm’s “The Ancient Gaming Noob” blog and thought it looked interesting. Then I promptly forgot about it for a year before I randomly came across it and imagined I’d discovered it all on my own. Poor memory – must be my age!
I started playing it in what must have been fairly early open alpha and blogged about it a little. I liked it and thought it had great potential. I backed the first Kickstarter, which failed, but I missed the second completely – never even heard about it. I played the alpha on and off, with big gaps. I guess over the years it’s been available to play I must have put in 20-30 hours or so, in sporadic one or two hour sessions. Not a huge amount for an MMO but certainly long enough to know whether it’s a game I’d play when it goes live – which it definitely is.
I do think having a fully playable, open alpha helped enormously in deciding whether it was a project worth funding. You could see there was a proper MMO coming together right before your eyes.
How does it compare to other MMORPGs you have played?
It feels very familiar. The controls and the UI should all be very easy to get to grips with immediately for anyone who’s played WoW, EQ, DAOC or any number of traditional tab target MMOs. That’s a big positive in my book these days, when so many new MMOs opt for action combat and center screen targeting.
The setting is equally traditional, with the usual magic and melee, familiar monsters and quasi-medieval fantasy tropes we’ve all come to expect. There’s some sort of plot that again seems quite traditional, in that you have the generic “wake up not knowing who you are or how you got there” scenario in the tutorial, although it has a slightly more off-kilter feeling than that suggests…
That’s a hint as to where it differs from a truly traditional MMO, which isn’t so much in the mechanics or the tropes as in how they’re twisted, quite intentionally, to feel slightly off true. A large part of the game is positively surreal. You can play as a cow or a pig or a spider. If you don’t pay attention, you might find you have to play as some kind of animal even if you didn’t plan on doing anything of the kind. There are elves but they are filthy-minded and foul mouthed. It’s a skill-based MMO (RuneQuest as opposed to D&D) but many of the skills are quite peculiar. Mushrooms seem to play an unexpectedly large role. And there’s the all-pervasive humor, of course.
On balance I’d say P:G is a fairly traditional diku-MUD MMO with an unusually quirky, indie skin. I’d happily recommend it to anyone who was reasonably happy with the direction MMORPGs were headed in until around the end of Vanilla WoW. It seems to be carrying on down the same path.
What do you think will stop the game from being a success with other MMO fans?
The graphics. It does look elderly. It may be shallow but looks matter. A lot. That said, the graphics are by no means bad – they’re detailed and quirky and they work for the world Eric is building. Anyone who’s still willing to play older MMOs like EverQuest or Anarchy Online won’t have any issues with how P:G looks but I suspect the bar might be too high (or maybe that should be too low) for gamers who set their graphical benchmarks with GW2 or SWTOR, let alone Black Desert or The Division.
Also, you probably need to share Eric [Hemburg]’s sense of humor at least to some degree. It’s all over the game. If you don’t find his puns and surrealism amusing you might struggle.
Wilhelm, MMORPG Superfan #3
You are a high profile blogger in the MMORPG community. Other than being another MMO, what drew you to Project: Gorgon specifically? Were you hoping for something old school?
There was certainly some old school appeal to the game, as well as a bit of quirky charm that set it apart and made it clear that the devs weren’t going for another WoW clone but something smaller, yet deeper in scope.
Did you contribute a lot? Do you back a lot of MMORPGs on Kickstarter?
I went for the “$35 PIONEER – EARLY BIRD” package. That isn’t a lot, but that tier represented a reasonable value for the money invested. I am not big on handing out money for no return. I am willing to take a risk, but I want a reward for it as well.
I have backed a few of the early, high profile MMORPG Kickstarters such as Shroud of The Avatar, Camelot Unchained, and Pantheon: Something of the Something, which featured names from the early years of the genre looking to get back to something akin to their roots. I haven’t backed many since then.
But MMORPGs are not in a growth cycle right now, so there haven’t been many viable choices outside of those three, save for maybe Crowfall. There are always plenty of over optimistic attempts to build a kingdom on a shoestring, hope, and no practical experience, but why would I throw my money there?
A lot of MMO bloggers talk about wanting niche MMORPGs that cater to their specific interests. Crowdfunding MMOs has long seemed like the only means to make that happen. Do you think Project: Gorgon will be able to find a sustainable audience?
Well, I think a lot of bloggers like to talk about their ideal MMORPGs and how much fun they had in the good old days. I know I do.
The old days are gone though, and with them the market conditions that allowed things like day one EverQuest to be a huge success.. If you wanted an open world, many players, PvE fantasy, you didn’t have a lot of choices in 1999. Now we are so overrun with choices that studios have to give it away for free.
In that setting, you have to build for a smaller audience. I think that is very possible, especially with a small game like Project: Gorgon, with two main devs who contract out only for specific items.
What do you think of the team behind Project: Gorgon? Even for a kickstarted game, the development team seems small.
Eric Heimberg and Sandra Powers are both very experienced in the field and seem to know what they can do and what they need to contract out for. For a project that has a focused vision, I think that might be enough. You’re never going to get things like pet battles, battlegrounds, and arena PvP in the game, but presumably you aren’t showing up at Project: Gorgon looking for those things either.
Have you written a lot about the game? Have you had a chance to played it?
I have written a dozen articles about the game over the last four years, mostly surrounding the three Kickstarter campaigns that were run on its behalf. It took three tries to get funding. That isn’t a lot of posts. But after three campaigns, most of the MMORPG focused sites decided the game was for real and started covering it, so I don’t feel like I have to cover it lest it get forgotten or anything.
I have played the game for a few hours over the course of development so far. One of the high points of the game has been that, for each Kickstarter campaign, it has been available to try out. It wasn’t just a vision of some future project, but something that was actually in progress that you could try out.
That said, I have been trying to avoid spending too much time tinkering with the game. I don’t want to dig out all the features or go through all the changes that such projects require and feel like I’m done with it by the time it ships to a general audience. I want the fresh experience when it goes live.
You can follow all the Project: Gorgon coverage here on MMOGames by visiting the game’s dedicated profile page.
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