Game itself is fine to an extent. Nothing revolutionary, standard fetch quest intensive MMORPG. The community though is mostly garbage. Some are nice, but more than once I’ve been forced to sit and read some real anti-women incel conversations. If I could get a refund, I would.

This is a passion project that tries fairly well at reviving the old-school MMO vibe. Unfortunately, it falls short in a few areas, namely game difficulty balance, intentional inconveniences, performance issues, and half-finished content.

The good:
The small development team is very passionate about this game and did their best to replicate the feeling older MMOs deliver. What is has in the game is fun for a while, but the bad things eventually overwhelmed me and I stopped playing around level 75.

Game difficulty balance:
Some game mechanics are not very well thought out, or were left in place after a balance patch before 1.0 and created problems in other areas. One of the first examples of this is the Raskshasa Mage in Ilmari Desert. It is supposed to be just a trash mob, but they are almost impossible to avoid when traveling through the zone. They are able to kill most players in 3-5 hits, which can happen easily if you pop over a hill on your mount and didn't see them in time. They are an outlier, and a result of certain damage types bypassing most mitigation. Instead of rebalancing them, the developers seem to have moved on to other things.

The game's damage mitigation system is a mess. They have a mix of flat damage mitigation and percent damage mitigation. Only the former is viable for end-game tanking. It could be rebalanced with a simple change, but they won't do it. This has resulted in two class combinations being viable tanks "out of the box" and the others needing 2-10 times more investment just to reach the same level of viability.

Intentional inconveniences:
The devs have said they want players to feel the scope of the world size and have to spend time traveling across it. That kind of game design works in games where players don't have many reasons to go back to previous zones, as player hubs shift based on player level. Project Gorgon is not like that. Players need to go to low level zones for training and item farming. A fast travel system is needed, but they have intentionally made the portals from Casino to other zones limited.

Training skills is automatic until level 50. After that, the game turns into a massive grind for money and eventually money and daily quest rewards. It wouldn't be so bad if the training contributed mostly to the player economy, but it is just a money-sink that drains players who are leveling and rewards those who finished the grind with riches.

There are daily quests for money which require a lot of time investment. One of these quests requires five of a certain item to spawn the boss. The item used to be sold by a vendor, but they removed it before 1.0 and never rebalanced the drop rate. Most players skip that quest because the time investment isn't worth it compared to farming something else for money.

These are just a few examples of things that add up to making the game feel less fun because the developers wanted players to feel the grind.

Performance issues:
The game is using Unity Engine, which is bad at dealing with a lot of entities on screen at a time. On top of that, many areas are unoptimized and cause major hitching on modern PCs. Zerg group content ends up being a 10FPS lag fest. They have a lot of technical debt piling up and don't seem to prioritize fixing the performance.

Half-finished content:
Many things in the game feel unifinished or not fully developed. Cooking is one of the skill lines a lot of players rely on to provide neeeded long-term buffs. Adjacent is Sushi Preparation, which stops at level 33 out of 90+ levels most other skills have. There are many more skills like this and other game systems feel unfinished.

Zones feel unfinished or barely have effort put into them. The areas up until about level 30-40 are done well. Ilmari Desert and beyond have enemies randomly scattered in areas, even ones that should be fighting each other but only sit there and wait to attack players instead. It feels very lazy, and hinders the movement of players trying to cross a zone to get to another area.

Conclusion:
The starting zones are great. The game has nostalgia. The build system starts off great and feels fun at first. The deeper you dive into it, the more the flaws are revealed.

If you love esoteric quests that take you through a lot of horizontal progression, this delivers it in spades.

A sample of what "progression" looked like when I was level 20:

I'm building a Bard & Animal Handling character. I play instruments to buff/heal my rat and attack/debuff the enemy. At level 20, I can unlock the ability to tame large cats. I did not learn this skill automatically, so I looked it up.

The unlock is two zones away from me, So I trek two zones, unlock the ability.

It cannot be used without a (consumable) string in my inventory. 1 string per cat that I tame, so I look up how to get string.

There's a vendor in god-knows-where, and I can probably buy it in a player-marketplace, but I can also craft string if I unlock & skill up Textile Creation, so I go look up textile creation. I need 20 cotton to get started. I can only find 3 cotton nodes on the map, so I research, and it turns out that the best way to get cotton is to PLANT COTTON. You plant 1 cotton and get 3-5 cotton return.

In order to plant cotton, I need fertilizer. I have made fertilizer before, but I never had a good amount of it because it requires "Strange Dirt," so I look it up and it drops off of undead & brain bugs. I know where brain bugs are, so I start killing them, but I get 0 dirt.

So I dig a bit more on the internet trying to figure out where to get strange dirt. Someone in reddit mentions farming undead is best, so I go get 25 strange dirt. Each dirt turns into 3 fertilizer, but it requires empty bottles, which I also need for water to water my cotton, so I sell all my overstock to buy empty bottles.

Now I'm juggling fertilizer and water between my bottles, and the water well is a 20s walk from the farm. No problem. My gardening skill is 19. Cotton requires 35, so I start growing beets and squash to skill up.

While I'm waiting on the gardening, I start playing my lute (this game's "rested" xp buff comes from listening to (or being part of) a performance. Lots of people who are gardening are also playing instruments.

===== Intermission =====================
I have to pause and talk about how cool this idea is. The performance song is a single track with like 30 different instruments/parts to it. If you start playing an instrument, you don't play a song. You pick one of the 30 parts and your character will start playing at exactly the same spot as the server, so you are guaranteed to harmonize with others. The garden performance will constantly get new people playing different instruments/different parts. There's drums, horns, lutes, harps, and flutes, that I know of. So I'm just playing my part in a constantly shifting tavern song. It's only one song, so it can get stale, but different people coming in at different parts keeps it pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool overall.
===== End Intermission =================

Ok, so I'm in the garden, playing music for my beets (pun intended), and that still leaves me with idle time while I'm waiting on the crops to grow.

Well I'm a bard, so one of the sub-skills I have to train is my vocabulary. Turns out you train that with a `/wordgame` command that you unlock by purchasing a one-time rule item from an npc. That npc is in this town, so I buy it and I start up /wordgame.

It's speed scrabble. It gives you a 7-9 character word and you make as many words out of it as you can in 30 seconds. The number of words you get dictates how much vocabulary xp you get.

So for 2 play sessions, I:
- Trekked across 2 regions
- Sacrificed a cat eye to an altar to the cat gods
- Scoured the hills for cotton
- Killed a bunch of brain bugs in a fruitless search for dirt
- Killed a bunch of skeletons in a fruitFULL search for dirt
- Played hours of a single tavern lute song with a rotating cast of performers.
- Grew over 200 beets and squash
- Grew over 500 cotton
- Played an ungodly amount of scrabble

And did not tame a single large cat.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that playing music for your crops gives them a chance to yield a bumper crop.

Naturally.