Project: Gorgon – First Impressions

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I wasn’t going to go hard on Project: Gorgon; I just wanted to go in for a peek. And then I played it for a dozen hours over the first weekend… so there was clearly something there for me.

Project: Gorgon – It Lives!

So how does it feel so far?

Graphics

I am going to start with the game’s graphics, a topic I was initially going to bypass because it feels like a cheap shot to ding such a small indie project for something one could argue was superficial. If the gameplay is good, people will adapt to the graphics. I mean, Minecraft is still hella popular.

And then, when we were on together for a while on Saturday, Potshot said I should go check my graphics settings which, it turns out, were set by default to “poor” quality.

The graphics are poor on purpose

So I changed the setting to “good” and… things looked much better honestly. I was hesitant to set it any higher than that because the fans on my graphics card were spun up and running hard.

But upping the graphical quality had the opposite effect. On moving to “good” the fans spun down and everything was nice and quiet. This left me with the mental image of my video card working hard to dumb down the game’s graphics to match my settings.

That isn’t the way things work, but it is odd that my PC seemed less audibly taxed after I made the change. Also, the game looked much better.

Enjoying the handscape… erm, landscape

Sure, it isn’t going to win any awards or turn any heads away from the graphical fidelity of the latest AAA console title, but it is 100% fine. Anybody turning their nose up at the game over the graphics isn’t in the right place for a small indie title.

Making Numbers Go Up

Kill things, make numbers go up. Or just do things. Or just freaking walk around and look at things. Numbers will go up and make you feel good.

I am a simple man and if a game will just let me make the numbers go up in a semi-reliable fashion I am often content.

As hinted at in my previous post but perhaps not explained very well, is that PG has a skills based character progression system.

There is nothing revolutionary in that. A lot of games have gone that route. EVE Online has skills based progression. Hell, now that I think about it, Palia has skill based progression.

And PG has gone the classic route where doing a thing related to a skill earns you xp towards that skill that makes that skill go up. So I go kill things with my sword and my skill at swords goes up. And so does my endurance. If I pull with my bow, get in a couple of shots, then finish off with my sword, both of those go up.

The first few levels are always the easy ones, but that gets you sucked in. And I like it. It has been a long while since I’ve been in a solid, skill focused numbers game.

So Many Numbers to Make Go Up

The thing is, PG has a lot of skills. I have been half paying attention to updates about the game, which often include a statement about some skill or another being added to the game. But if you go over to the wiki there is a list of skills on the front page that adds up to something like 130 available.

Sure, they are not all combat skills. They aren’t even all crafting skills. But if you can figure out where to start off with a skill… which is a whole aspect to the game itself… then you can work on improving it.

So I have learned and improved myself in interpretive dance, so that I now know all the basic dance steps. That meant finding the NPC that could teach the skill than dancing where somebody was playing music.

I also picked up a lute and got the starting skill for that. I leveled that up enough to enable me to learn to be a bard… because bards are totally a thing. And that all happened because I was at the Serbule Hills inn to learn about surveying and then picked up interpretive dance as a skill.

Travel

My first big adventure was a learning about travel. On the long list of skills is teleportation, which is expertise in using the teleport pads scattered around the world. Currently all I can do is recall to the pad set as my home… and I cannot even do that at the moment as my last amethyst was used up. Have to go find some more somewhere. Something else to do.

The world is discreet, rectilinear zones, connected by portals. It isn’t a seamless world, but oh well. But zones are fine. Also, making a seamless world comes with a cost and it looks like that time was well spent elsewhere.

The zones seem to be about the right size in that they feel big when you’re running around on foot, but it still doesn’t take you very long to get across. So running isn’t a huge chore.

Even still, you see wild horses roaming the zones and you can interact with them. Petting them gets you on the path to taming them and it isn’t too long before you’re there.

Potshot becomes that guy on the horse

You do have to learn some gardening along the way and there is the whole choosing a horse from those available. But eventually I figured it was better to have any horse to start than to spend a lot of time wandering about trying to find the best one ever.

Death as you Like It

As mentioned in that post about my first big adventure, I have ended up dying quite a bit. The game, it keeps track of that for you, which I do like.

Causes of death…

I am not sure of the distinction between “exposure to freezing temperatures” and “frozen to death,” but I am pretty sure they all happened out in Gazluk.

Also, dying is a skill… nice to have something I am good at available… and you get bonus xp for dying in new ways.

Insane cultist! Add it to the list!

The effects of death are very light. You just end up at a nearby respawn point otherwise ready to go. They were so light in fact that I started to wonder if that might change once I ventured further afield. Was this just a newbie benefit.

But then I found the Hardcore Board in Serbule Keep, which lays out your various death options.

Choose your style of death

I am always a fan of the idea “why be normal?” but for now I think I will stick with that as it makes me a little less skeptical of taking on something new.

Overall

This has all been a somewhat scattered attempt to pull together some minor insights over the last two weeks or so.

Overall, as I may have mentioned previously, it is an oddly synergistic mixture of old school and more modern learning around the genre.

I mean, you start out on the beach without a much guidance. The game does prompt you for this or that… it scolded me for sitting down after a fight to speed health revive, saying that things don’t work that way here… but I was able to wander around pretty aimlessly otherwise.

There are few things as old school as using a skill to increase its level… I was doing that back in TorilMUD in 1993… and the lack of hand holding quest chains taking you on a guided tour provided by NPCs with punctuation marks hovering above them makes it feel more like early EverQuest than anything created post-WoW.

But there are quests (and a quest log that isn’t limited to so few quests that you have to keep deleting them) and NPCs to gain favor with and skills to learn and places to explore.

Still running around Serbule for things…

Its features come together in a strangely compelling mix that has kept me bouncing around for nearly two weeks now without really having anything like a goal outside of exploring what things do and how I learn this, that, or the other skill.

We’ll see what happens when Potshot and I decide to go somewhere or accomplish some larger task. Probably a few more entries on the list of ways I have died.

Guild Wars – The Battle for Rin and Arrival in Yak’s Bend

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Despite the fact that Potshot and I have been devoting most of our gaming time to Project: Gorgon, we have not left Guild Wars Reforged fully by the wayside. I am pretty sure there will be a post at some point to compare the two, which are different in so many ways.

Guild Wars Reforged

But the group has been aimed at GW for two months now and we try not to inflict too much whiplash on the crew, so we went back to Tyria where we last left off having arrived at Nolani Academy after having discovered missions.

That put us out in the Diessa Lowlands where, the week before, where we spent the week before running some quests and getting to the settlement at Grendich Courthouse, during which we ran into many of the same problems I stumbled across in my attempt to get there solo.

The Bridge of Trouble remains trouble

Henchmen can be more difficult to control, but they are more consistent in how they do things than we were. Still, we knocked out a couple of quests and made it once we refined out group a bit. Basically it came down to our group, which was a warrior/ranger, a monk/enchanter, and a ranger/necro dumping the DPS henchman we had been dragging along for a monk henchman.

Our lineup

It turns out more healing to keep us alive is better than more DPS.

At Nolani Academy we had a new mission ahead of us, but decided to jump back to Grendich Courthouse to go do a quest as a warm up.

We had a mission to go slay Garfazz Bloodfang which was not too far away. How hard could it be?

Well, old Garfazz is surrounded by several roaming groups of Charr and, while you can pull one group easily enough, their ranged members hand back in the area close enough to the paths of the other groups such that adds can start piling on pretty fast.

We held our own for a while and nearly got them all down… but the healers were both down by then and then the pets and soon I was there alone tanking and using my self-heal and it did not end well for us. We wiped and ended up back at the revive spot just outside of Grendich Courthouse.

Before I could say anything, somebody on our team said, “Let me reset the debuff!” and went back into town. That was followed by a loud groan by me as, even with the debuff, we only had a couple mobs left to kill. It would have been a walk over for us.

But, going back into town removed our debuff and reset the zone. When we went back out again all the mobs had been restored. So we headed back and, in attempting to scout the right was to pull a group managed a proximity aggro and it was on again. This time we got down to just me and Garfazz before I went down. Another wipe. But nobody moved on revive until we started heading back to finish him off. Op success. The quest guide on the wiki says that one can pull just Garfazz if you approach from the correct vector. Or you can half ass brute force the whole thing like we did I guess.

That done and turned in we decided, on very little evidence, that we were ready for the next mission. It was off to Nolani Academy where we ventured out with the same composition. The mission, which put us with Prince Rurik again, gave us the following goals:

Return Prince Rurik South of the Wall to Safety
Sneak out and ambush the Charr forces besieging the academy.
Return to the Nolani Academy to rendezvous with the prince.
Defend Prince Rurik on the way back to the capital city of Rin.

I figured this was not going to be too tough as I had done this with an alt and three henchmen previously, so had at least learned a bit of the “how to” aspect of the mission. I had done a lot of that learning the hard way. I think I spent 45 minutes wandering around before I got to the point of ambushing the Charr.

But I had found the bonus mission and stumbled through that to the point that I knew where to find it and what to do. And, once you go out the back gate and start following the path… once again GW keeps you practically on rails for a route… finding the bonus quest isn’t too hard. You end up going left at one of the very few choices of path and end up at the guy.

The guy!

Watchman Pramas took the Tome of the Fallen and found out it was cursed and awoke the dead and could we please put it back for him?

Sure thing. It will be super easy, barely an inconvenience… or so I thought. I mean, I had managed this once already on my own. Sure, you have to carry the damn thing, but you can drop it then pick it back up if you need to fight.

We had to wander around a bit to get back on the path that took us to the wall and then down onto the plain before the academy, where you can go one way to ambush the Charr and another was for tome returns.

I had no real memories about how I got the tome returned, just that there was a place in a pit where you had to click on a thing and the quest would update. So we went down the stairs and through the front door, where the dead were waiting.

I remember fighting some of the dead when I did this, but mostly just avoiding them. However, they are marked in red and are semi-aggro… some come get you, others won’t. But I didn’t mention any of this because it was only just coming back to me when Holden opened fire on the dead.

Whatever I did before I don’t think that was it. That seemed to rile up the dead and they came from all over at us and we were swamped and wiped.

We then learned that when you wipe on a mission you end up back in town and have to start over. Well, we knew where we were going. I told Holden he would be the one carrying the tome this time. That would keep him from shooting things.

So we ran down the path again, found Pramas, Holden picked up the tome, and then we headed back down the path we had just traveled.

The thing is, we had picked up some Ascalonian NPCs who were keen to follow and fight along side us. So when we got down the stairs to the first set of dead our NPCs immediately went into action, attacked the dead, which got the rest to swarm us and… boom, we were back in town again.

Weren’t we just here?

Back into the mission. This time for sure! I dug deep into my memory and could visualize how I went to the tome return point… and it wasn’t down those stairs. So we ran the route again, picked up our stray Ascalonians, spoke to Pramas, then headed to the dead. This time I went to the right of the stairs, over a hill, through some of the usual wildlife, to what seemed to be the perimeter of the dead.

I could see where I had to go. It wasn’t too far. So, in hopes of not aggroing literally everything yet again, I told everybody to stay where they were and I would just run the tome back trying to avoid dying.

I forgot to tell out monk henchman to stay behind… I know how to do that, but just didn’t consider it… so she tagged along. But everybody else, including our trigger happy followers, stayed behind.

The dead were not best pleased with me and some began to attack me… but only a few. I ran to the pit, down the steps, clicked on the tome return dingus, got an update… and the dead kept on hitting me.

Almost to the tome return slot

I did a self buff and a heal, but the monk was down and so was I soon enough.

And then, as I am laying there dead, the quest finally finishes, I get the sword and shield thing, the dead disappear, and the NPC you speak to after returning the tome… I did click on him just before I died… tells you everything is fine now.

Oh, now the spirits are at peace? Why not 15 seconds ago old man?

Fortunately my plan had mostly worked. While I and the NPC monk were down, Holden and Zbignew were still up and Zbignew, being a monk, was able to revive me and our downed henchman.

I still don’t know how I did it the first time. There is probably a “right way” to do it, but there is also my way I guess.

That done, things went considerably more smoothly from that point forward.

Surprising the Charr and relieving the siege of Nolani Academy was quick. There are a bunch of Charr out there, but they are mostly in discreet groups. Plus we picked up some more Ascalonian stragglers to act as cannon fodder for us.

Having lifted the siege, Prince Rurik was keen to go, racing ahead back to the wall where he badgered the guard on the gate to let us through. The king had left strict orders to allow nobody through, but it is tough to argue with Prince Rurik and his flaming sword… though, as we saw in a later cut scene, the king seems to hand out such swords like they were on sale at Walmart. He and his whole royal guard have the same sword.

The guard lets us through, asking the Prince to please let the king know he did this under duress. Then we’re off with Rurik, who is keen to get to a giant horn that, for some reason, faces the city it is supposed to protect… I don’t know… the mouth piece for which was a plot point at the end of the previous mission.

So we get there and cut scene to Rurik blowing the horn and all the Charr with sudden comic looks of surprise on their faces or some such.

The mouth piece in place, we find that Rurik just blows

I don’t know. I am not up on the horn lore or why the city of Rin had it installed… or why they built the wall behind the city… but Rin itself was not looking good.

After that it was just keeping Prince Rurik alive and killing one named Charr to finish the mission. I knew this because, when I did it solo I ended up looking up the mission because I felt like I was getting nowhere just schlepping a stupid tome round and saw the suggestion that you just kill the named Charr to keep Rurik from getting into trouble.

The problem was there were a few named Charr and I couldn’t remember the name so we ran about smiting anything with a name. It worked out in the end because eventually you end up at the right one. Bonfaaz Burntfur is the right one, btw.

Once he is down it is the mission reward screen.

Shield and double swords for us!

Then it is time for more cut scenes.

Prince Rurik was very happy with us. Then his father, the king showed up… somehow from the other side of Rin I think… with his whole royal guard… which would have been handy during the fighting… and was also happy about the liberation or Rin, promising a plethora of public works projects to rebuild the place.

Prince Rurik however was not on board with that plan, pointing out that the Charr had been pushed back for the moment but that Rin was still, you know, on the wrong side of the freaking wall.

Rurik’s plan was to abandon Ascalon and go hide in Kryta to rebuild until they have they strength to defeat the Charr for good.

The King was not best pleased by this plan and clearly had his “not best pleased” face on when he heard it.

Either that or this all just woke him up from a nap…

Anyway, he disowns Rurik right then and there and Rurik calls for those who will go to Kryta to follow him. We’re on Team Rurik it seems, so we lined up and follow him.

Then the mission ends and we were dropped into Yak’s Bend, a settlement up in the mountains with snow about and dwarves running around. A nice change from the overly seared and mostly ruined regions around Ascalon. It is a fine place… to be from.

Yak’s Bend is not the starting point for the next mission, but my alt has already been to the next mission site, so I know it is around there somewhere.

Next time out I think we’ll be doing some quests, gearing up, and maybe experimenting with skills… and henchmen. One thing Yak’s Bend gave us immediately is two more slots in our party and a few more henchmen to choose from. We can have another melee up there with me!

So figuring all that out is on the agenda.

A Decade of Skill Injector Drama in EVE Online

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Ten years ago today, on Mardi Gras 2016, we got the YC 118.2 update… CCP was in a mood about naming updates during that era and kept changing it up… and with it came skill extractors and skill injectors. For just 1,000 Aurum you could buy an extractor that allowed you to yoink 500,000 skill points out of your character, turning it into a skill injector that you could sell on the open market.

Skill Extractors – Base Price

Your first question here in 2026 is likely something along the lines of “What the fuck is an Aurum?” and all I can say is that the cash shop was different back then, before CCP made PLEX the sole RMT currency.

Anyway, CCP would sell extractors for real world cash as well.

I can remember it for you retail…

If I were to make a list of the top five most controversial things CCP has added to/done to EVE Online… and you had best bet I have that post sitting in my drafts folder waiting for a day when I am bored and looking for an argument… then skill extractors/injectors would absolutely make the list.

The argument for them, as made by CCP, is that a lot of newer players felt behind because the mechanics for acquiring skill points meant that they could never “catch up” to veterans who had been around since launch.

And I can confirm that I had heard that argument before, often put out there as a criticism of the game by people who only wanted to throw mud at it but who never had any interest in actually playing.

It was a classic “won’t somebody think of the children!” play.

But the accept that CCP really believed that you would have to assume that they had never heard of Malcanis’ Law. Just as a reminder, here is its original rendering:

Whenever a mechanics change is proposed on behalf of ‘new players’, that change is always to the overwhelming advantage of richer, older players.

Yeah, that one. And putting skill points on the market meant that very rich players immediately benefited. Within days soon to be banned RMT casino operator Iron Bank had raided the market and injected himself with enough skill points to get all of the then available skills in the game to level V.

Also showing off with that wallet balance

Just for comparison, after 19 years of playing EVE Online I had a combined total of 409 million skill points earlier this year. Ten years ago I was closer to 180 million skill points.

So there is Iron Bank waving his e-peen at us, with max skill points, 100 trillion in RMT ISK, and clone grade alpha… alpha clones were something different back then, don’t get me started on that… because he was never going to undock and go into combat. That is Malcanis being proven right yet again.

Because in Jita, skill extractors were going for 300 million ISK on the market while full injectors were going for 650 million ISK. In 2016 those were not ISK amounts that new players had rattling around in their hangars.

The only way a new player could get their hands on that would be to either buy PLEX and sell it on the market for ISK… the obvious “this is all just a CCP cash grab” route… or to go to the illicit RMT sites to whom people like Iron Bank were selling their again soon to be banned casino ISK.

Casinos were such an obvious pipeline to illicit RMT, and that CCP let them run as long as they did… which is to say just long enough for that illicit ISK to fund the Casino War against Goons… makes one question either the depth of their intelligence or their claimed impartiality. Or both. It could be both.

But that is another tale. Back to injectors.

So new players, while no doubt buying ISK in some way to get injectors, were not the primary beneficiary of this move in any way. It was the old hands with lots of ISK and a yen to get another titan alt boosted up, something that used to take more than a year via the old skill queue method.

Now you could get a titan alt in a matter of hours… possibly minutes… in Jita.

Yes, CCP did try to but up a barrier for the rich by reducing the amount of skill points you got as you accumulated more skill points.

< 5 million total skillpoints = 500,000 skillpoints per injector
5 million – 50 million total skillpoints = 400,000 skillpoints per injector
50 million – 80 million total skillpoints = 300,000 skillpoints per injector
80 million skillpoints = 150k skillpoints per injector

And that certainly inhibited somebody like me, a middle class pilot in New Eden, no longer poor but nowhere close to space rich. But this was no barrier to the actual space wealthy.

Add in the soon to arrive Rorqual mining upgrade… remember, people were asking for the Rorqual to have a role, not to turn it into an infinite null sec money cheat… and there were cheap and abundant mineral to build all the supers and titans that those freshly injected characters.

You want capital proliferation? Because that is how you get capital proliferation.

CCP eventually started bitching and moaning like the players somehow tricked them and pulled up the ladder so no new players could afford to get a titan… and for quite a stretch nobody would undock a capital because the CCP Rattati economic strangulation plan wasn’t just driving down player numbers, it was making capitals too expensive to replace.

And all of that would be controversy enough for a CCP feature. That would get it into my top 5 list. CCP being dumb in a game breaking, blew up in their face sort of way… well, blew up in game, I am sure it made them a lot of money, which was the goal in the first place. It also spawned a whole skill point farming industry which doubled as a CSM election vote selling platform, because why not make some additional ISK on all those subscribed characters?

So top 5 controversial, but a contender for the top spot? Not yet!

No, the icing on the cake for all of this was from the Skill Trading in New Eden dev blog, in which CCP Rise wrote:

It’s very important to note here that this means all the skillpoints available to buy on the market in EVE will have originated on other characters where they were trained at the normal rate. Player driven economies are key to EVE design and we want you to decide the value of traded skillpoints while we make sure there is one single mechanism that brings new skillpoints in to the system – training.

The emphasis is from the dev blog. That is what CCP chose to highlight. That wasn’t me.

And by now you see where I am going with this, right? You know what the game is like now? You know you can go to the web store right this minute and buy skill points for cash. Look, this is there right this minute.

Psst… wanna buy some SP?

And here it would be very easy to get into my usual “corporations are never your friend” routine, or go into how every corporate promise has an expiration date, that being the moment it is mildly inconvenient for them to maintain the illusion that they had any intention of honoring their statements in the long term.

Or I could go into how anybody paying attention called this as the eventual state, that CCP was ALWAYS going to end up just straight up selling skill points directly to players for real world money and how the fan boys and the CCP stans who defended the company at every step to this point… and it did go drip by drip… until we reached today where not only is selling skill points normal, but CCP just hands them out in game like the cool house on the street at Halloween.

Is there a login event? Have some skill points! Did two daily AIR tasks? Take some skill points! Managed to do the AIR task a dozen times in the same month? Well, that is a lot of skill points for you! Watched a twitch stream? Well, maybe it will be some skill points!

The game and the relationship with skill points for both the company and the players has changed dramatically over the course of a decade. Ten years and a day ago everybody in game only had the skill points they trained up. Now there is no purity. Nobody is saying “no” to CCP handing out skill points.

Those would both be viable ways to close this out, either “CCP lied again” or “We told you so!”

But I am going to go even deeper and and place my transition into a true bitter vet on one event in particular.

Any regular reader should not be surprised to learn that I am not a fan of CCP Rattati’s tenure driving. There are certainly many reasons not to admire him and the job he has done at the helm of EVE Online since the departure of CCP Seagull.

But much my own distaste for his style goes back five years, to the point when CCP finally just went ahead and started nakedly selling skill points for cash, when the last bit of pretense of caring about their statement from 2016 fell by the wayside. Because the very week that happened, CCP Rattati was on a podcast with TheOz and said this:

We definitely don’t want to sell skill points

-CCP Rattati, EVE Online Director of Product, OZ_eve interview

On Monday he did the interview. On Tuesday it got posted. And on Wednesday, CCP started selling skill points.

I can choose to believe that the director of product was completely unaware that this was going to happen, that he was either incompetent at his job or wasn’t really in the role he said he was, or that he was a lying liar who lied and said that just because that was what he thought The Oz or the audience wanted to hear.

And it wasn’t even in service of anything really. One could argue that the ship had sailed by that point, that CCP had already done us dirty and started straight up selling skill points nearly nine months earlier, in which case that statement looks even dumber.

But it doesn’t really matter. None of the choices reflect well on him or speak positively towards his running the game.

That, however, was my introduction to the veracity and character of CCP Rattati, the person still at the helm of EVE Online. I believe he even got a promotion since then, no doubt for his fine work on the New Eden economy.

That doesn’t mean he is a bad person, that he cheats at cards, kicks puppies, chews with his mouth open, or ends sentences with a preposition. I’ve known plenty of very nice people who ended up in leadership positions and who maybe shouldn’t have been there. I’d certainly say that about myself.

And, of course, we’re just talking about a video game. It is even a video game that serves an audience that arguably thrives on overcoming adversity. If you don’t enjoy that, you’ve probably quit already.

One of the finer aspects of being in the Imperium is that it has an organizational philosophy of taking the dumb stuff that CCP does and trying to turn it to our advantage. The Imperium is at its best when we’re down, its finest hour was arguably at the Siege of 1DQ when we were backed into one constellation and had two thirds of null sec camped on our doorstep with us rising to fight them every hour of every day. It was one of my favorite times in the game. Adversity can bring out the best in people… though not in everybody.

But that doesn’t mean I enjoy seeing CCP make objectively bad decisions. I don’t want to fight the mechanics.

This last decade of CCP changes has turned me from a fairly optimistic player to a card carrying bitter vet when it comes to what the company has planned and what they favor. That is the lesson of this debacle; how to turn your base into skeptics who distrust your word.

So welcome to the ten year anniversary of the real start of that process!

Now I am thinking about getting back to that top five list of most controversial changes to EVE Online. I have four 100% shoe-in moments for the top of the list… if you can’t guess at least three of them then do you even lift bro… and then probably a multi-way tie for fifth place. Or maybe a few honorable mentions. Feel free to throw out in the comments what should be on a list of the most controversial things CCP has done in EVE Online. If nothing else, I’d like to see if I am missing any possibilities.

CCP Dev Blog – Skill Trading in New Eden
CCP Dev Blog – Skill Trading Launch and Offers on AUR, Subscriptions and Plex

TAGN Fantasy Critic League 2026 – Week Six Sees Two More Players on the Score Board

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And both players ended up with decent scores. We’re here at week six… which means just forty-six weeks left to go in the league… and there were a pile of updates.

Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

We are now far enough in that I am going to follow the pattern of posting the previous week’s score so we can see how things changed over the last seven days.

Week 5 Scores

As we see, only three people even had scores last week, with Shintar leading the pack with two titles released already and the league predicting her for victory and the crown.

The first thing that popped up on Monday was a score update for Dragon Quest VII Reimagined.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined

The title was out the gate strong with some early reviews.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined
- [Picked by Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)]
- Now has a score of 85.1

85 is a solid score and, when it hit its release at the turn of the day to Thursday, that put Corr up on the scoreboard, landing him in second place.

Publisher Score Updates
- Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)
  - Score has gone UP from 0 to 14.6
  - Moved from 10th place to 2nd place
- Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)
  - Moved from 2nd place to 3rd place
- Anthania Interactive (Ula)
  - Moved from 3rd place to 4th place

Shintar held onto first, but both Nimgimli and Ula dropped back a position.

The same day we got the first score in for Nioh 3, the other title set to launch last week.

Nioh 3
- [Picked by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)]
- Now has a score of 86.9

Again, another strong showing, and as the next day dawned we saw another shift in the scoreboard as Cyanbane arrived.

Nioh 3

However, between that first score and the release it sagged a bit on more reviews… and Dragon Quest climbed a bit. Not by much, but enough to leave Corr in second place for now.

Publisher Score Updates
- Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)
  - Score has gone UP from 0 to 14.8
  - Moved from 13th place to 3rd place
- Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)
  - Moved from 3rd place to 4th place
- Anthania Interactive (Ula)
  - Moved from 4th place to 5th place

Nioh 3 moved up and down a bit as more reviews came in.

Nioh 3
- [Picked by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)]
- Score has gone DOWN from 84.8 to 83.7
Nioh 3
- [Picked by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)]
- Score has gone UP from 83.7 to 84.7

But it did not move enough to change the rankings on the board.

That was all we had for score updates that warranted a ping by the league bot, so the scoreboard ended up looking like this come Saturday evening.

Week 6 Scores

Shintar remains both in first place and the league pick for winner. However, the league is favoring Potshot for second place and Nimgimli for last. As usual, the league estimate is pretty wild until we get closer to the end of the year, but it is interesting to watch it evolve.

Then there were bids, where we had three new titles picked, and three counter picks in play. Those were resolved like this:

Bids in TAGN League
- PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant
  - Won by Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey) with a bid of $10
- Life is Strange: Reunion
  - Won by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli) with a bid of $8
  - Dropped game ‘Unannounced Fallout 3 Re-Something‘ conditionally
MLB The Show 26
- Won by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane) with a bid of $1
- Dropped game ‘LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight‘ conditionally

Then there were the counter picks:

Counter Picks in TAGN League
- Unannounced Witcher 3 DLC
  - Won by Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod) with a bid of $8 (🎯 Counter Pick)
- Star Wars Zero Company
  - Won by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane) with a bid of $1 (🎯 Counter Pick)
- Unannounced Fallout 3 Re-Something
  - Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)’s bid of $10 did not succeed: Game is no longer eligible: Game has been dropped by the other player. (🎯 Counter Pick)
  - TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)’s bid of $6 did not succeed: Game is no longer eligible: Game has been dropped by the other player. (🎯 Counter Pick)

So there were three new titles picked, but two conditional drops, for a new increase of one pick.

And the counter picks… a gutsy move by Cyanbane, shorting Star Wars Zero Company… though I guess there is a rumor out that it will be pushed to 2027.

Shilgrod jumped on that Unannounced Witcher 3 DLC, which seems like a pretty reasonable counter pick right now.

And then Pallais might have out bid me in the rush to grab the Unannounced Fallout 3 Re-Something counter pick, but Nimgimli got out from underneath it with a conditional drop once we all found out that the count down was not for a remake but just for something related to the show. That pulled the rug on that counter pick.

And then there were some release timing updates.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales
- [Picked by Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)]
- Release date changed from ‘2026’ to ‘Thursday, June 18, 2026’.
Orbitals
- [Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)]
- Estimated release date changed from ‘2026’ to ‘Summer 2026’.
Planet of Lana II – Children of the Leaf
- [Picked by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)]
- Release date changed from ‘Early 2026’ to ‘Thursday, March 05, 2026’.

All of that leaves the next ten upcoming titles as follows.

Coming Up for Week 7

This coming week is going to be a big week with SIX titles going live. In fact, there was already a score update for one of them.

Mewgenics
- [Picked by TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)]
- Now has a score of 90.1

Looking like a strong pick for me, though we’ll have to see how it holds as reviews come in and launch day hits. And that is where we stand at the end of week six.

Binge Watching – The Last Frontier

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Veni, Vidi, Scripsi