There are a little less than a billion video games seeking funding on Kickstarter that will never be finished. Still, this model has become the norm for all sorts of crowd-funded projects that have given a little boost to an indie market that was beginning to stale. For those gamers who miss the hardcore MMOs of the early 2000s or late 1990s, Project: Gorgon may be right for you.
The developers, a couple that has done work on Asheron's Call, EverQuest II, and Asheron's Call 2, are currently in alpha for an MMO they have been developing for the past three years. Eric Heimberg has been programming MMOs for over a decade as was Senior and Lead Engineer on Asheron's Call 2 and the early versions of Star Trek Online. Sandra Powers was a developer at Turbine who worked as a Lead Engineer and Producer for Asheron's Call 1 as well as EverQuest II as a Live Producer. For the past 6 years, they have done contract work as they worked to build their dream project, Project: Gorgon. In their words:
"Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) for PC & Mac with a quirky, original feel. It freely mixes ideas from older MMOs, newer MMOs, and a whole bunch of new ideas never before seen in any MMO.
It's designed for players who want to explore a deep world with complex game systems and a tight-knit community that is friendly enough to actually chat while they group. Think Asheron’s Call crossed with EverQuest crossed with the emergent gameplay of NetHack."
Some of the concepts for this MMO are quite amazing given the closed system of forced instancing and iLVL gear in World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic. For example, items characters drop from their inventory can be picked up by others. Or, more amazingly, items sold to vendors will be available for purchase by other players.
Perhaps one of the most unique ideas I have seen in this game is the concept of "Words of Power." These words of power can be discovered through a variety of crafting measures. At any given time, the devs claim that there will be around 10,000 active words that can be discovered. Once a player discovers a word, a page will appear in their inventory that they can use to mutter the word. Once muttered, it goes inert and loses its power. The things that can happen through these items is somewhat staggering. In the video below, you will see the narrator use a word that immediately causes him to gain a level, but die immediately.
From one of the developer diaries on words of power:
There will be many levels and types of words, their effects becoming ever more arcane and bizarre. Nestled in among the thousands of words will be ones that bend the rules of the game: for instance, there’s a word that can kill everyone in a 20-meter radius, even though this isn’t a PvP game, and there’s otherwise no way to kill players. (So if you want to kill somebody really badly there’s a way to do it. However, it will cost you an exorbitant fee, it works only once, and your victims are likely to thank you afterward because it gives Dying XP from a cause of death they probably can’t achieve otherwise).
Since they’re just words, they can be traded in-game or out… as long as you really trust somebody. Or they can be shouted out in chat: “Somebody say ‘foafulpetzel’, something great will happen!” Words of power are a social device, and not an entirely positive one. I think it’s important for a game to have some sources of player drama like this, as long as the drama is entirely opt-in. But I dunno, we’ll see. Really, this is one of the design philosophies of this MMO: I’m intentionally doing things that are unusual, and combining them together in a complex world where it’s not really possible to predict how things will play out in the end. If it ends up being broken, I’ll just have to roll with it.
If there is something missing in MMOs right now, it is a trend for erasing complexity in favor of quick and easy. A difficult, complex MMO is definitely something that needs to be revisited. There are 16 days to go in Project: Gorgon's funding drive on Kickstarter. Because the game is already in a playable state and because the developers want funding in order to purchase better art and better models to use in their game, this particular Kickstarter seems like a solid investment.
You can read more about Project: Gorgon on their Kickstarter Page.
