Hello I just bought the game after playing the demo and leveling a handful of skills to 10+. I felt compelled to write a forum post about it and maybe offer a tiny bit of feedback if that sorta thing is ok. My skills aren't very high, my main combat skills are close to 20 so I can't really come from a place of heavy experience in the game and offer anything truly constructive, a lot of what I have to say is solely on a first impression basis only. The tutorial island is fun and I think it does a great job of showcasing the novelty and humor of the game, I also think it helps players understand how the game doesn't hold your hand when it comes to exploring. I absolutely loved the part when you get too far in the tutorial dungeon and all the warning signs pop up on the screen, it completely subverted my expectations in a delightfully strange way and I hope that sort of approach stays in the game. When I read a book I love having my expectations subverted, so that sort of thing is refreshing to see in a game as long as it doesn't negatively impact the experience, I have to say it really perked my interests going forward.
My real first impression was when I got out of the tutorial and started diving deeper into the game, I think I first said to myself something along the lines of "I hope they don't can this game because there is something special brewing here". That train of thought lead me to buying the game soon after, I wanted to support the development because I really, really liked what I saw. A "good" mmorpg has a certain immersive quality to it that I think many modern mmorpgs fail to capture, and it is definitely in that initial novel stage that captures that feeling. Not sure if this is the correct correlation but a good mmorpg should feel like the first time you played an mmorpg, it should be a new and fantastical experience and I believe project gorgon is 100% on the right track on nailing that feeling. I do think that nowadays this is totally a niche game which is perfectly fine, there is a demand for it. I think there is a demand for that experience that subverts expectations when so many mmorpgs cater to the lowest common denominator. Even vanilla WoW was like this, I played the beta and many years after the launch, vanilla wow subverted expectations in really great ways and was a wonderfully immerse experience (until they got greedy).
On a more technical note I love the skill system, its fantastic. There is room for improvement but I do understand the game is in development and things change. If I had to add a suggestion I feel like sometimes they can be somewhat bland in a few places and perhaps adding more flavor abilities could help, stuff that helps the roleplaying potential of drawing people into choosing a skill they want to stick with. I know its a skill system but having more obvious archetypal defining abilities probably wouldn't hurt either, that is just my opinion though so take that for what it is like I said, I'm new so I could be wrong there. I immediately feel like proper crowd control is lacking, often times I come across enemies and I know I can't go anywhere near them because I would get swamped and this will tie into one of my bigger complaints later on. I think the itemization is wonderful, actual RNG loot is very cool to see in an mmorpg and something I miss from the days of Asheron's Call, you could go buck wild here in so many ways even with flavor type mods. The NPCs and favor system is such a good idea from this site, I'd love to see it expanded further and deeper maybe give more complicated reasons to have a favorable standing with an npc, loving the dialogue as well. I'd love to see more quirky, bizarre stuff I find it really suits this game, I dig the balance of medieval fantasy and the just plain weird. This is the first video game that has made me laugh out loud at the word oiink, I may be a dumb and silly person though
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I don't really have any big problems with the game so I will just say a couple of the blatantly obvious ones I have noticed. Traveling is a slog fest to me, maybe it gets easier? I don't know, but I find traveling to be a chore and I seem to have to go back and forth a lot so that makes it even worse, num-lock key is super clutch to me. I know there is teleportation but frankly haven't figured it out yet, you can blame that one on me. I think the game could benefit from various transportation systems not just teleportation, morrowind is a good example they had silt striders, teleportation, boats, bind points etc and it never took away from the feeling of vastness because it more or less just cut down on the time it takes to get from A to B, now taking out A to B entirely would be a horrible idea but I think there are inventive and immersive ways to solve the problem. Another problem I see which ties into the crowd control issue above is that people seem to just be doing their own things, perhaps there isn't much incentive to interact with other people and explore dungeons or maybe I'm just a noob but it seems like no one really groups up in this game to do content. I'd really love to explore the low level dungeons and I really want to but I don't think anyone could really care or needs to do them. The only other blatantly obvious thing is that I think there needs to be more world building, more content, more flavor etc but obviously that comes with time and the game is in development, to be honest I don't even really expect that much haha there is already so much content here but much of it revolves around the skills and not much more.
I don't really have much else to say, so far I'm loving the game and I hope you guys keep doing what your doing!!
