project gorgon Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Goodbye Arakaali

February 20, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I took today off because I had some non-medical business to deal with… and all of my time has been spent dealing with medical nonsense. As a result, I slept in far later than normal, to the point where all of the cats seemed to think I was fundamentally broken. I had some wild dreams, and while they were not all connected, they all shared the general theme of ripping holes in reality. Take what you will of that. Sadly, yesterday was the end of the Phrecia 2.0 event in Path of Exile, and I have to say goodbye to my beloved Minions Servant of Arakaali character. I had so much fun with this build that I honestly might forgo my traditional Righteous Fire starter for some sort of minions character. Either that, or honestly, I had enough fun with my Golem Ice Trap Elementalist that I might try that instead as my starter. There is a teaser that might be hinting that some of the Phrecia classes are going core, and if that is the case… I may literally build the same damned character I played in Phrecia 2.0.

Yesterday, we got our official teaser trailer that revealed the name of the league, and I have to say… so far, nothing we have gotten as teasers has given us any real idea what the league is going to be like. Normally, by this point, we would have gotten at least a few quality of life improvement teasers, but no… all obtuse nonsense. My personal guess is that we are going to be presented with an NPC in maps that allows us to make one of two choices, which will change the way the rest of the map plays out. I am expecting this to be something akin to influence altars that present us with two choices, and each time we make it, we gain some terrible affix on our map… since GGG seems to like to kick us directly in the crotch as often as possible. The one thing I really hope about this upcoming league is that they have figured out a way to make T16.5 and T17 maps less complete ass. Other than that, I would really love to see Abyss from POE 2 come to POE 1, because it is so much more enjoyable than the de facto chase the green orb on your mini map version that we have now.

Other than that, I spent a bit of time in Dune Awakening, and I am working my way up to mining cobalt. I got my welcome back carepackage and it included way more resources than I expected, so as soon as I have the research points for it I will be learning how to make a Dune Buggy. As a result, I went ahead and added a proper garage to my base in the Vermillius Gap. I need to go back down south and farm the shit out of all of the missing intel that I left on the table as a result. I trained some points in Trooper to give me the shigawire claw, which feels like it is honestly required at this point. The nice thing about it is that it allows me to zoom in to the top floor of NPC bases so I can often times get in and out with intel before anyone even notices I am there. The defensive form thing was nice, but really bum rushing them with the knee and then stabbing them through their shield is my go to for dealing with the melee berserker types.

Building the garage has allowed me to expand out the top floor, and now I have so much room for activities. I kind of dig this weird three-story base thing that I have gone on, where the garage is at the lowest level, then the bottom floor has water tanks, blood recycler, and power plants, and then finally at the top floor you have most of the crafting machines and general storage. I also love the location of my base because there is Iron, Copper, Granite, Metal, and plenty of Water to harvest all within a few feet of my front door. Additionally, there are nearby Kirab bases that I honestly just need to get better at killing regularly for other materials. Sure, the welcome back package gave me stupid amounts of rare materials, but I don’t really want to lean on that if I can help it.

Other than Dune Awakening, I have also been playing some more Enshrouded. I am working towards various objectives in my most recent world, because I would like to ultimately see what all of the progression looks like at this point. I am running around on my highest geared character, but it has some minor problems… like all of the legendary gear I am using existed prior to rune sockets going into the game. So I have a great sword, for example, but one that I cannot socket a rune into. It will probably be a while before I find another equivalent weapon because I farmed all of them from the endgame chests to get the gear set that I am wearing now. Right now, I am mostly going through the process of unlocking all of the NPCs so I can finish building out my base properly.

Speaking of bases… I gave Ace shit for their minimalistic design, so I only find it fair to share my maximalistic nonsense. This is as far as I have gotten in my attempt to build all the way down to the shroud from the starter area. Making this even less realistic is the fact that I am carving out floors as I go down by tunneling out the rock from the mountainside with the place and remove trick. As I expand the footprint of my base, I will continue burrowing downwards, and at the same time expanding upwards into the vertical maximum height as well. At some point, I need to actually do something realistic with my design, where it is something more than just a series of empty floors. Right now I have a highly dysfunctional base, but I am not terribly far progressed, so it does not really matter that much.

I am also still occasionally piddling around in No Man’s Sky, and am working on unlocking the ability to process toxic waste. I happened upon a processing facility on the second planet and got the quest to upgrade my multi-tool to be able to handle it. This distracted me from the normal flow of the missions, and now I am largely roaming around the frosty surface of the planet, scanning everything that I can for credits. This morning, I ventured off towards some salvage… only to realize that, apparently, it is underground somewhere, and I could not see any obvious caves to explore. I’ve always enjoyed the super chill nature of this game, especially playing on super casual mode, where I am not constantly battling for my own survival. I like the concept of survival games, but hate the constant feeling that I am making zero progress, so when given the choice, I dial down the survival aspect so I can just enjoy the exploration.

The last monkey wrench to throw into the gears… is that I reinstalled Project Gorgon and decided to give it a look to see how it has progressed. I remember next to nothing about this game, but I do remember it reminding me quite a bit of Vanguard. Largely, I think this part was the fact that there are so many random trades that you can do. I inexplicably enjoy the fact that I can get points for burying my corpses. I played a bit last night… overpulled a half dozen spiders onto me… died and then returned to the spawn point. I think I am going to have to sort out my gear and abilities before I do something like that again. I did laugh heartily as I was attacked by an exploding sheep. I had been getting the itch to play something EverQuest adjacent, and maybe Gorgon will scratch that itch.

Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I need to pick up the house, gather my tax information, and deal with a few other things. Next week, we get our proper preview of the upcoming Path of Exile league, and I am looking forward to it.

Wandering Aimlessly

April 10, 2018 by Belghast

Right now I find myself struggling a bit to gain purchase in most of my MMO options right now. World of Warcraft I am back and active in because of the Wednesday night Mythical Nonsense thing we are doing. I was logging in every night to try and eek out the last bits of experience needed to unlock the Void Elves and Lightforged Draenei but even then… I have faltered considerably. I really do not enjoy Argus, so logging in every night and grinding every single quest available just seems grossly unpalatable. Final Fantasy XIV failed to catch my attention with Eureka, and I lost momentum catching up on the main story quest patched in with the latest expansion. Destiny 2 is sitting there largely untouched because when I log in… there is really nothing that I want to be doing which is ultimately where that game falls short of the original.. there are no long running breadcrumbs for me to follow when I spin out and lose purpose. Monster Hunter World is always easy to get back into… but there are nights that I just don’t want to spend my evening upstairs and the fact that my PS4 is there limits my play time.

In the end I keep coming back to Project Gorgon and its weirdly charming neostalgic experience. On the podcast Tam talked about the game feeling like the way we remember playing Everquest. While this might sound confusing at first… this is exactly what this game feels like. We have incorrect rose tinted feelings about how Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot for that matter felt to play. If you go back today you end up with a cludgy mess of a game that feels ancient and quite honestly not that enjoyable. However our in our memories the Everquest experience is still vibrant because we have edited out the rough spots and filled in the way those actions made us feel in place of the hard facts of just how limited that game actually was. Project Gorgon remembers those things that were lacking in Everquest and has supplied the spackle and paint needed to make those memories feel true and vibrant.

Sure I am doing the same kill ten rats quests I have been doing my entire MMO gaming career, but the fact that I seem to have a relatively limitless quest log… and the fact that I can complete the quests by killing ANY ten rats… not just the ones five feet away from the quest giver makes the experience feel more open ended. If I have a quest to kill wolves… Sickly Wolves, Mangy Wolves, Supporting Wolves, just plain wolves… specific named character wolves… all count towards a quest that says “kill wolves”. This means you can do the quests while roaming around the world and exploring… rather than feeling tethered to a specific location to be able to clear out your log. There are quests I picked up on my first day that I just managed to finish two weeks later because I had not actually encountered the thing I was needing to find yet. I dig the long tail that this cycle has and the fact that it feels like you are “questing” for something more than just completing a task list.

I am sure some of this is just my inherent lack of familiarity with the world or the fact that the maps don’t really have locations marked on them, or my habit of running the opposite direction I need to go. Whatever the case the specific combination of broad objectives and happy accidents along the way lead to a very immersive experience in spite of the fact that you spend a good deal of time running along and encountering nothing at all. The only real complaint I have so far is the fact that most of the gear that I use looks like complete nonsense… like right now it feels like I am wearing thermal long-johns… but they were unfortunately the best item I had and finally got rid of that horrible yellow bandage appearance.

At this point I have managed to hook two more people on this game, in part because I knew it would be down their alley. For the most part I am limiting myself to just Sword and Psychology… but I am contemplating trying out a few other secondary skills. I spent the 2000 councils aka gold to learn beast taming so it might be interesting to try a pet secondary for awhile. Similarly I now have the ability to learn fire magic, so that might also be interesting to shim in over top of Psychology. The one thing that I am finding weird… and cannot quite reconcile is that our hotbars have six abilities on them… but right now I have seven in both psychology and swords. I cannot however seem to be able to replace the spells from my bar… so how exactly do we use that last one? I might try dragging it to the optional bar and see if it becomes usable that way. Among all of the other games that I have access to at this very moment… this one feels the most comfortable and suited to whatever I am needing at this very moment. I’ve not really streamed much because nothing I am doing right now seems interesting enough for someone to watch. Grinding factions in WoW is boring as hell… and I am afraid me wandering around aimlessly in Gorgon will also be boring to watch.

Unintentional Spiderman

April 3, 2018 by Belghast

I had every intent of doing some World of Warcraft faction farming last night, but I ultimately did not really follow up on those plans. When I got home we wound up running a couple of errands and going out to eat, and by the time we made it home I largely planted myself on the sofa and roamed around Project Gorgon some more. Yesterday I looked like I was wearing some urine soaked bandages… and today I am essentially the stuff of nightmare as some sort of living web creature. The armor designs in this game are “interesting” but I have seen some completely reasonable options that give me hope that maybe just maybe I won’t look like an experiment for the entire time playing.

A couple of things have transpired since last playing. Firstly I realized that psychology is a combat skill, and apparently pairs extremely nicely with swords… also freeing up my second hand for a shield while using it instead of needing to hold a bow. I kept getting gear with both swords and psychology on it… and never could figure out how to level it. I thought that it would involve talking to people since everything in this game seems to have a skill but after a trip to the wiki I realized that I needed to be assigning it to my secondary attack. After doing so… I started questioning the parentage of my enemies and applying damaging taunts that seem to debuff them making the sword hits a little easier.

The other thing that transpired is that I took a trip back to the starter island after figuring out which sequence of prompts would get me to that location. This allowed me to do the hangout I missed… get my louse comb and finally remove the lice debuff that I picked up by fighting a mangy wolf somewhere along the lines. This also allowed me to venture down into the starter dungeon, defeat the monster that the game gives you tons of warning about… and find a back way out of the dungeon because apparently previously I didn’t go down anywhere near deep enough. It turns out there are two ways off the starter island… one of which is through a series of spider infested tunnels that ultimately leads to a place called Serbule Hills.

Of course this zone connects directly with Serbule proper which allowed me to get back to town and do some turn ins… all without needing to take the return trip from the island. The only problem with this concept is that the route does not go the other way quite so easily because there is a wall in the dungeon that requires someone from the Anagoge Island side to open it. However while sitting there inside the dungeon the door was opening constantly so in practice you should be able to use this route to get back to the island if you ever need to. As far as Serbule Hills… I personally found it way greener pastures than Serbule proper with a seemingly higher mob density and way more interesting camps to hunt.

I was introduced to the games version of the Froglok… the Ranalon. They are a race of fish creatures that don’t necessarily want open war… but absolutely have no interest in peace as they attempt to displace all of the other races. They have these one eyed flying manta ray looking creatures called the Scray that they treat like guard dogs, and I now have quests to kill plenty of both. Over in Serbule Hills I was also able to finish a bunch of quests that I picked up in Serbule Keep but struggled to find the appropriate spawns for like Deer and Tigers that actually drop eyeballs. I see in my near future a bunch of time exploring this zone which is honestly a short jaunt away from the Keep and my normal hunting grounds.

Project Gorgon

April 2, 2018 by Belghast

I am not entirely sure why, but this weekend I decided to buy into Project Gorgon on Steam. Now in theory I could have been playing it for free all of this time given that based on the titles I have… I played both in Pre-Alpha and Alpha. I remember picking up the game in the past and finding it undeniably charming… but also very raw and unpolished… which was not something I was looking for at that time. However with several games either out or on the horizon that seem to be vying for the “Everquest Nostalgia” demographic… I thought I should probably give it another shot. Knowing how shoestring of a budget the game has been lead me to just go ahead and purchase it on Steam even though in theory I could have still logged in via my original account that I linked to while setting the game up.

Part of the charm of this game is that it plops you into the game with no real warning or advisement about what you should be doing. This can be a bit maddening if you are not in the right mindset, but in doing so the “newbie island” helps to set your focus on how this game works. There are clues and directions out there… but you need to spend time pouring over quest text and scribbling down notes as you go. Which is handy because they do in fact give you an in game notepad to do so with. One of the sequences on the island involves going around and scribbling down coordinates that you will ultimately need later on, and not writing down the correct coordinates could have dire consequences.

I am extremely late to the game, because I know that some of my friends have been playing for ages. However I still felt like I needed to talk a bit about it this morning to try and explain why it is so damned charming. Compared to modern MMORPGs this is going to feel extremely spartan but I believe that is in large part the point. This is a game where everything has an equivalent skill that can be raised, including death… and a game where you have no classes or true levels to speak of. You go out into the world and do things, and those things ultimately give you skills… which you then blend together into something resembling your own personal “class”.

For example everyone can have a primary and a secondary combat skill. I’ve chosen sword for my primary and bow for my secondary allowing me to play a EQ ranger sort of flavored character starting combat off with ranged attacks and finishing it up close and person with sword slashes. I could have gone with other options which would have had their own leveling system and their own sets of attacks. I’ve not actually encountered anything that would come across as traditional magic in the game, but I am certain it is in there… just has to be discovered and unlocked like everything else seems to be.

I am currently in a mode where I am just not sure what is useful and what is not. It seems like everything that drops can in theory have a use… but I may not be able to discover it yet because I lack the skill to do anything with it. I spent a large amount of time yesterday learning how to cook and garden so that I could ultimately create some hashbrowns… to gain favor with an NPC to be able to do something else. Similarly there are half a dozen combat quests that I am slowly chipping away at as I go out into the world and take down mobs. There is a significant amount of learning the lay of the land going on… which of course has its own skill associated with it called Cartography… that increases as you clear the fog from various areas of the map.

Like I said literally everything seems to have a skill associated with it that can be raised and that will ultimately unlock abilities if you get them high enough. Combat right now can be extremely challenging because there is no formal “con” system like Everquest or DAoC had to guide you. In theory you need to fight something… before you can really determine if you are strong enough to be able to hunt them regularly. Since Death is its own skill… dying over and over to something eventually makes you heartier and raises your maximum health and in theory doesn’t seem to have much in the way of negative effects. There is some sort of a hardcore mode that acts more like Everquest or a similar game… but that is not a thing I will ever be enabling. What makes it even more entertaining is that you gain “Bonus Death Experience” for dying in new and interesting ways… turning it into a bit of a mini-game to see if you can figure out new ways that you can shed the mortal coil.

Anyone who played Everquest during the Shadows of Luclin expansion will recognize this scene… with lots of vendors lined up in an area that looks very reminiscent of The Nexus. The positive here is that each of these stalls is an NPC that can be rented by the players allowing for a much better shopping experience than players having to AFK all day to sell their wares. One of the things you are going to need to get used to in playing Project Gorgon… is that it is a much slower paced game hearkening back to an era where there was plenty of time to throw out chat messages in between attacks in combat. As a result from what I hear there is an amazing community that has grown up in the game and based on the forums at least… I would say they are more than willing to help new players get started.

There are certain aspects of the game that really lend to this… for example it uses an EQ item drop system allowing players to just throw something on the ground that anyone else can pick up. As a result there are often tons of viable items just laying around in town that high progressed players have discarded because they are not actually worth trying to sell. One of the concepts that is hard to get used to is the fact that vendors have a limited amount of gold on them, and each of them will only buy certain items. There is one vendor in town that will buy pretty much anything… but you are going to run her out of gold very quickly and have to wait seven days real world time for her funds to regenerate. This means that you need to get to know which vendors are the best options for buying which items… either that or just drop it on the ground for someone else to use.

Another really interesting system in the game is that you can “Hang out” with certain NPCs while offline, allowing you to do some measure of progression while not logged into the game. You can only have one of these activities selected at a time and as far as I can tell you don’t need to be anywhere near the actual NPC when you log out to make it happen. For example in the first image of this post there is a little note at the bottom the screen saying that I finished hunting Myconids with Mushroom Jack, which was a 4 hour long Hangout I chose before logging out for the evening. Generally speaking you need to get to a certain faction level before these start opening up with NPCs, but doing so gives you an interesting way to push up their favor and also potentially gain items.

It took me awhile to figure this out, and in my sluggishness at arriving at this conclusion… it lead me to miss out in a very important item on the newbie island that I am deeply wishing I had. In fact I am starting a second character just to try and get said item… and in theory will swap it over via the extremely expensive shared account storage. The only problem I see with the game right now is that since I seem to be able to eventually learn how to do everything… I question the need for alts. At some point during my play through I decided to drop unarmed combat as my secondary attack and pick up a bow… and even though it was grossly behind in skill I seemed to be able to catch it up quickly. If you have the time and money… you seem to be able to do every possible tradeskill… so I question what the hook is for running up additional characters?

Over the course of the weekend I played eight hours of the game, and in doing so have become hooked. While doing this Tam was apparently playing Shroud of the Avatar, which I myself booted up last night to see how the two compared. They are both vying for that 90s era early MMO nostalgia… and quite honestly Project Gorgon scratches the right itches for me personally. Shroud was extremely well funded and had a relatively large development crew to create… but comes off as this extremely janky product. Project Gorgon however has at its core a husband and wife development team, and a composer… and a relatively low funded kickstarter…. and comes off as this completely charming and competent version of that Everquest era game that ultimately FEELS better to play.

Sure it needs more work, for example the game consumes a ton of system resources… far more than it should for the level of graphical fidelity. However client optimization will come in time, and based on the little note you see before logging in the team realizes that is a problem. However what is there is extremely sticky, and extremely impressive for such a small development team. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the game because each time I play I figure out something new. Hell there are entire areas of the first major zone that I have not explored… and with it likely NPCs that I have not talked to or encountered. Ultimately this game is not going to be for everyone… but if you ever wanted to see what playing Everquest felt like back during the early days Project Gorgon is a great starting place.