I was having fun, until I didn't. I started playing this game a few weeks back with the demo and was having a blast. I purchased the full game soon after leaving the starting island. I wish I could leave a neutral review, but that score isn't here, so a negative better reflects how I feel about the game at this point. Maybe some of my complaints are invalid or change with later zones, but they are complaints I have, at this time, at this point in the game. I should also note, while I do have near 80 hours in the game, it took a bit before I found a skill combo that really clicked for me. I checked out a lot of them, and they were fun, but Bard/Shield felt good, and fit the class fantasy that I was looking for. So even at 78 hours, there is a LOT of game ahead. Now on to why I just can't give this a thumbs up.

I was having fun in game, I was, until I started to realize it's one big hamster wheel, which I am ok with, that's old school mmo design, but then the wheel hits one of many walls put up to keep the player on a linear path.

I needed to get my performance in stringed up to 5 to be a Bard. No biggie, I bought a lute from a vendor and boom, got to 5 in no time. I was enjoying hanging around at the poetry jam or fire and just playing my lute, I got to 10 easy. Hey, there are other instruments, let me check them out, and I was slapped in the face with a nope. I needed a harp at level 10, but the harp is a rare drop from a boss that I can't even get at right now. Maybe the vendor has one, nope. Players have one, 60,000 councils, well, I guess I am done with strings for now. There are other instruments, but again, not super easy to get unless you are rich.

I am enjoying cooking, it's a bit of a pain, but I am getting it leveled. I get up to Eltibule and nice, I can learn to make cheese. I need stomachs to be able to make the cloth and make cheese. Wait, do I have any stomachs, I have been leveling my autopsy, butchering and skinning since the island. Nope, no stomachs yet. Turns out, it's an uncommon drop at best, but if you have a organ knife, the odds go up. Lets see, let me buy an organ knife. Turns out, I need Toolcrafting to make and organ knife, and to get toolcrafting, I have to level blacksmithing or carpentry to 20. Here we go again, I have to find a player to buy from at hopefully a decent price. Player interaction is important, but damn, more crafting walls to keep me from advancing, More grinding. I love the skills available, but so many have to be leveled that really don't make sense. This comes from someone that loves crafting in mmorpgs.

Like I said, it took me a bit to figure out what skill combo I wanted, so I ended up doing a good portion of the favors for NPCs in Serbule, and Serbule Hills before I got locked in on my build. I didn't have a lot of favors to get xp from, so I had to do some grinding, that's fine, but with the game being popular right now, it became a tad difficult. I figured I would go up to Eltibule, even if I were a bit under leveled. I wanted to save most of the favors so I could get xp from them when I needed it in a few levels. There were more mobs in the area, so I figured I would grind them a bit, They are higher, but I am able to get them down in time. I am killing mobs, coming close to death many times, (which isn't a bad thing in this game) until I realized I wasn't getting much xp at all. As it turns out, you can't fight mobs more than 5 above your level without severe penalty. Yet another wall in this game.

I go back to the earlier zones. I finally get my skill in Mycology (mushroom skill and language, yup you read that right) up to where I could enter the mushroom cave and work on a few things that I hadn't done. The mobs are my level, I have favors to do, great. I finally find some mobs I am looking for. I am battling it out, a higher level comes by and one shots it, stealing my kill and items. WTF? There were quite a few over leveled players grinding out mobs in here, which is fine, but most had little to no courtesy and took whatever mobs they wanted, regardless if you were trying to kill them. Yes, I eventually was able to do what I needed to do, and I did meet another, higher level player that was helpful, but damn it was a chore.

All I have heard is what a great community that this game has, but I don't know, I have to disagree on Dreva at the moment, Sure, there are tons of cool people, but there is a high percentage of me first bad apples as well. It has to be an influx coming from the other failed mmo and WOW players that were waiting for Midnight maybe.

A few nights ago, I logged on and just sat there in Serbule staring at the screen. What am I doing? This game has done everything possible to take as much fun out of it that it can for me. I logged out and haven't played for a bit, I just can't. For anyone still reading, I am sorry that this didn't come off as a review. It is more of me stating reasons why I can't give the game a thumbs up right now. There are plenty of good things about this game I didn't touch on, but there are some more bad things that I didn't go into either. I don't hate the game, and I WILL be back into it, I just have to give it a break. While I can't recommend it personally right now, if you like the grind, and want to spend hours upon hours chasing the carrot on a stick, then I'm sure you will love this game, Hell I loved it once, maybe I will again.

I can't recommend this because the past week my experience in dungeons has been parties constantly fighting over kills and your party not being able to progress because you're required to kill bosses and obtain items that are loot locked.

If they change it so dungeon bosses can be looted by everything like world bosses that would fix this whole issue. You can't rely on a community of players to form lines or take turns, that just isn't going to happen it isn't 1996 anymore.

Wasted hours each night just to play the game a little bit.

I really liked Project: Gorgon until I decided to log in today and dig into working on my character. Instead of fun exploring and figuring out how to kill things in some (very basic) dungeons I had my kills continuously stolen by better geared/higher level players capable of one-shotting the mobs that would take me 45 seconds to kill.

I've played MMOs for almost 30 years at this point. So I've experienced systems where experience goes to the player that does the most damage to a mob as is the case here. However, such a system inherently needs some kind mechanism to discourage kill stealing, otherwise it fundamentally encourages bad behavior on the part of some members of the community. As far as I can tell, there's nothing in place to prevent that behavior, and it means that new players have a terrible experience while they get to watch others kill mobs in one hit.

What frustrates me the most is that this is a solved problem, and there are any number of workable solutions to prevent the exact kind of waste-of-time feeling I was left with today. This is poor game design and it's a poor understanding of how humans act within the context of a gaming community. There will always be someone who is happy to make their life easier at the expense of other players, and the devs have set up a system that not only fails to prevent that, but fundamentally encourages it.