Project: Gorgon, the old-school fantasy MMO that launched in Steam Early access back in 2018, finally has its big 1.0 update.

As someone who cut his teeth on Ultima Online and EverQuest way back in the day, I've had a passing interest in Project: Gorgon for years. The game was conceived by husband-and-wife duo Eric Heimburg and Sandra Power, former lead developers on legacy MMOs like Asheron's Call and EverQuest 1 and 2, but Power sadly passed away in 2025 following a three-year battle with cancer. Seeing Heimburg carry the torch and launch this ambitious and highly unique MMO into 1.0 is made all the more poignant with that in mind.

What distinguishes Project: Gorgon from so many other MMOs is its stubborn faithfulness to the guiding principles that defined the genre in the pre-WoW days: zero handholding, near limitless player agency and consequence, skill-based progression with no defined classes, lots and lots of grinding, and most of all, a deep sense of community with tools for player-created quests, a player-driven economy, and player housing.

It's also the only game like this, that I know of, with a still-active community that wasn't made in, like, 1997. Yes, it's as ugly as sin, but it seems Power and Heimburg, under Elder Game, LLC, used resources they would've otherwise spent on visual fidelity to create an unapologetically old-school, hardcore MMO whose dedicated, but notably very small, community seems to have nothing but good things to say about it. Steam reviews are also highly encouraging, with 85% of its 2,200 reviews being positive at time of writing.

Project: Gorgon 1.0 brings fully revamped character models, an overhaul to vendor stalls, performance fixes, and the capital city of Statehelm, which houses over 200 new quests and unlocks new skills and abilities for those who make it their new hub city. Here are the full patch notes in case you want to read about all of the new stuff.

The full game is a modest $25, but there's also a chunky free demo I can personally recommend that'll get you up to level 15. As with any demo worth its salt, your character and progress will carry over to the full game if you decide to buy it.

Here are the best MMOs you can play in 2026.

It's harder to re-animate a dead game than Frankenstein, fans of BioWare's defunct looter shooter Anthem are learning.

They were able to resuscitate the, by most accounts, middling 7-year-old game long enough to post a proof-of-concept server test on YouTube last week – but it sounds like their progress has been paused right around there. The fans behind the server project have just discussed some of the challenges they've been facing in a new interview with Ars Technica, and they ask you not to expect too much.

Project administrator Laurie, who helped establish a team of devs on The Fort's Forge Discord, tells Ars Technica that their hope to revive Anthem came "out of little more than spite for EA and Bioware around the time the shutdown got announced." Anthem publisher EA said in a 2025 post on its website that it decided to abandon the game "after careful consideration," and Anthem's servers were officially taken down on January 12, 2026.

With the Stop Killing Games movement's energy still crackling in the air, fans weren't ready to say goodbye. Even the official Stop Killing Games Twitter account said, about Anthem, "You as the customer should have the final say as to when you're done with a game, not the company."

So Laurie recognizes that their project's server test video was invigorating, and "people are going to get their hopes up." That said, it's been difficult to reverse-engineer EA's proprietary Frostbite engine, "I don't want to be the person that's going to have to deal with the aftermath if it turns out that we can't actually get anywhere."

Dragon Age veteran defends studio's attempt to make something different with Anthem: "BioWare's always been changing."