My group was first on Streikos to kill General Pask, first to unlock Fairy form, first to get a giant Razorslash Panther, first to hit 80. I made a guild. Two weeks of no-lifing and I still felt like I barely scratched the surface.

The Good

This game is an absolute time sink in the best way. The skill systems are intertwined so that leveling one thing opens doors in three others, and there's always another rabbit hole to fall into.

Animal forms, crafting trees that actually matter, favor grinds with NPCs that unlock real content. Even playing like it was my job, there was never enough time. For an indie MMO made by a husband and wife team, the depth here is genuinely impressive.

The Bad

Eight years of early access and it shows. Content gets sparse the higher you climb. Bugs that feel like they've been around since alpha.

Frame drops from 120fps to the low 20s in Serbule. CPU usage that'll have you checking your temps for a game that looks like it came out in 2006. The UI is rough. Inventory management is a part-time job. Environments can feel barren.

You learn to live with it because the core loop is that good, but after eight years, some of this really shouldn't still be here.

This community literally rallied $30k to keep the servers alive when the devs announced they were out of money in 2023. The players carried this game to launch. Remember that.

The Ugly

My name was "frierenbackshots." This is a game where the devs wrote sexual jokes into the NPC dialogue, where lore is dripping with innuendo, where mature humor is a selling point they've publicly said they plan to keep and expand on.

Today, my name and roughly 50 other players' names got forcibly changed with no warning and no explanation. Mine got turned into "kelchfork."

When people asked about it in chat, they got silenced. I went to the Discord and asked politely why. My message was deleted and I was banned. Then a mod messaged me in game telling me to "hush."

They changed my name to something I didn't choose, and now if I want it changed to something I actually want, I have to pay them. They break it, I pay to fix it.

You don't get to build your entire game on that energy and then punish players for matching it.

This community stuck around through failed Kickstarters, an IndieGoGo that didn't hit its goal, years of early access drought, a near-death in 2023, and this is how you treat the people who showed up on launch day? Silence them, ban them from your Discord for asking a question, and charge them to undo something they didn't ask for?

The game deserves better leadership than this. I wanted to recommend it. I really did.

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.

I talked about how a lot of the negative reviews on steam are about the mods power tripping in chat. I was then muted for 3 hours... Get rid of the reddit mods and the game will be better. It also runs like garbage in towns.