State of the Game?

[VerbalKint]

Hello folks,

I'm taking a peek here after having tried this game awhile back (a couple years ago???). Being a former AC1 player, I'm excited about where this game is going. I'd like to start playing again, but wanted to check into how things are progressing from the players' perspectives.

I stopped playing during my first foray because I found the systems around quest & inventory management too cumbersome and they detracted from the fun in the game. On-the-whole, things felt too clunky for me to enjoy.

How are people feeling about the game these days?
Am I likely to run up against the same frustrations?

TIA for any feedback!

[Exovi]

I stopped playing during my first foray because I found the systems around quest & inventory management too cumbersome and they detracted from the fun in the game. On-the-whole, things felt too clunky for me to enjoy.

Doing a little bit of grinding and buying 2 pieces of equipment with +22 inventory slots and a +6 belt(from other players) is an absolute must, it seems that almost every drop has a use, and I find I can go from 50 free inventory slots to overburdened in a session. Once I acquired those the game became much more manageable for me as a packrat. Advice that has helped me as well - if the inventory is cluttering up, use it! Take a session to sell/process it all and sell the small quantities left.




How are people feeling about the game these days?
Am I likely to run up against the same frustrations?

I play a few hours a week with a busy work schedule, and I do enjoy it. Similarly, I started way back with the Kickstarter and have been impressed with the direction of the game. I take it pretty slow, and bounce around between tasks often - grind a zone for some levels, realize I have a ton of materials and go on a crafting spree to use it all, decide I need some cash and enter a gardening binge, run low on teleportation amethysts and decide to knock out 300 surveys and not have to worry about it for a long time, find a use for all the slabs/gems I gathered........ realize I haven't actually done any combat in about two weeks while playing in the Casino.

Personally, with my style of play if I set a very specific goal like maxing my combat skills (currently ~50s Ice/Necro) I'd likely get frustrated with the grind/slow leveling/training costs. But having so much available to me in a sandbox, combined with my limited free hours, has worked very well. I play a fair amount of Dofus and League, popping on P:G to knock out a few things for the day and work towards several goals, and it has been very satisfying.

If I were starting from scratch I would recommend picking two versatile combat skills (Unarmed/Psych is an amazing tanky solo build, and Sword/{Psych or Priest or Mental} is extremely reliable with excellent dungeoneering + access to many vulnerabilities), raise a few trade skills to mid levels to have income and food/buffs available, do Pennoc's quest as often as possible for easy access to Level 20~30 gear, and work through Serbule/Eltibule favor quests. Save/Buy every Tuft of Fur you find to immediately cash in on a full set of level 40 gear in Kur (barter), and by then you'll have a solid position in P:G to branch out as needed.

[Yaffy]

I have my problems with the game, but overall I still find it fun. To be honest I am a bit worried for some aspects of the game's future because of some recent design choices, but even if some parts of the game aren't perfect at the end of the day it'll always be a great time waster where it's easy to grind away and work at making progress. To be fair most of my worries are only really relevant at "End game" anyways so they don't really affect most people.

While you'll still be assaulted with tons of items, it is quite a bit easier to manage items now. Inventory space is still cramped (Like Exovi said, gaining inventory space is still very valuable so equipment that gives you it is very useful) but it's easier to organize items and figure out what you need. One of the biggest features they added is that you can examine items for more info, which tells you what the item is used for, where to buy it and where you have it stored away. This makes it much easier to find items you have in storage and figure out the value of the item. You'll still need to throw stuff away, but it's a lot easier to figure out what you need to throw out. Also there's more storage space options overall, but you'll still need to progress through the game a bit first before they open up to you.

The quest system as far as I can remember is the same as it's always been however. If you didn't like how it worked back then, you might not like it now either. There are more quests and ways to get quests, but there haven't been any big quest reworks or anything like that.
What don't you like specifically about the quests? Maybe the community can give a better answer if we can hear what you didn't like about how quests worked.

[alleryn]

I stopped playing during my first foray because I found the systems around quest & inventory management too cumbersome and they detracted from the fun in the game. On-the-whole, things felt too clunky for me to enjoy.

I never found the player interface to quests or inventory particularly difficult to navigate. I'm not sure if you are specifically talking about the GUI or not, but there have been some substantial improvements in that regard, perhaps most notably in the "More info" in the right click context menu for each item, which now displays every recipe you can perform with and every npc you can favorably gift that item to.

Quests are not very hand-holdy and can sometimes be a bit too vague in what you are supposed to accomplish (or rather how you are supposed to accomplish it -- i don't have a concrete example but sometimes (and not others) i get the feeling that a quest could tell you where to find a certain mob or farm a certain item without it being too spoonfeedy). Nevertheless i always found it pretty manageable to complete most quests i wanted to complete, even if more difficult quests did create somewhat of a long list of quests to look through when looking for one that is appropriately hard. Quests are now sorted by region which is quite nice (i can't fully recall but i think that is a somewhat recent feature).

Inventory management in terms of storage is still unique to PG. Storage is local and spread out, so learning the ins and outs of what to keep and where to keep it can be frustrating at times, but this is matched, if one can push through, by the satisfaction of setting up a nice storage base where one can store most (if not all) that one desires in a reasonably accessible way. In this sense, for me, storage is the most painful and at the same time one of the most pleasurable aspects of Project Gorgon.

Anyways, thanks for checking back in and I hope you find your stay enjoyable and as frustration-free as possible :)

[Sheawanna]

Very Well Said Yaffy