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Elder Scrolls Online Impressions

February 15, 2014 by Belghast

Feels Good To Talk

This is one of those posts that I have been waiting to make for quite a long while now. Over the last few months there have been various naysayers, and with the lift of the press beta there was quite a bit of negativity towards The Elder Scrolls Online. As usual when someone has something bad to say, they seem to be willing to defy all the rules to do it. However those of us who have been anxiously awaiting the release of the game and been abiding by the rather strict NDA have had to sit and watch silently as all the negativity circulated. Finally this morning they announced that we were free to talk about any experiences from the Beta Weekend content. This means I can now talk as much as I would like about the 1-17 game as it stands which is quite a bit of content.

The Conundrum

Firstly let me start off by saying, that The Elder Scrolls genre is a really difficult one to make into an MMO. Over the course of the beta while listening to player complaints, I have come to realize that there is no one way that people play these games. To some people TES might be a game about stealth and carefully stealing goods out from under the shop keepers nose. For others it may be the grand narrative experience or the lore. For others still it might be about wielding arcane magicks or making deals with Daedra. All of these things are gameplay styles that are possible in the excessively moddable single player experience. However through all of these years the Elder Scrolls setting has felt somewhat lifeless.

The one thing I wanted more than anything else… was the ability to experience all these grand settings with my friends. But as you craft a cohesive mulitplayer experience, how do you make all of these things work with hundreds of players participating in the same experience. This game will not be for everyone, and as I have learned from social media and the forums… the game itself is very divisive. However for me at least the experience is something I am just not getting from other games. At its core this is in fact The Elder Scrolls… Online. This game lives and breathes the Elder Scrolls Lore and settings, and is immediately recognizable the first time you see a creature made famous by the series out in the wild.

Questing

At its core the game has a questing system very familiar to the Elder Scrolls setting. As you move around the compass rose at the top of your screen will highlight points of interest that are near you. You have the option to go over there and engage in the quest, or continue onwards on your own. The very first time I sat down to play the game, I completely ignored the quests wandering off on my own exploring the island of Stros M’Kai in the Daggerfall Covenant. This is completely supported as far as a play style goes. In general there are a handful of quests that are required for you to progress to the next area, however in addition to these there are many side quests that are completely optional.

Generally speaking the side quests serve two real purposes. Firstly they give you a chance at gear, and point you in the direction of places that you might want to explore. For example… above is an image of the amazing Dwemer ruins of Bthzark, which I might add looks and feels like a Dwemer ruin should. You can gain access to the ruins through a quest chain, but in most cases these small dungeons and ruins can be explored by simply clicking on the front door and going in. The game is chock full of hidden places that contain treasure chests and skyshards and all sorts of neat things to find along the way. There are books to read, satchels to root through, and crates to crack open. All of which can have really nifty things.

So while you can play entirely without questing, and there are times I do this… there are also a lot of really epic stories in the game that can only be accessed by questing. One of the things that makes this so enjoyable is the fact that everything is the game is fully voiced. Lyris Titanborn is a character that you will see a lot of through the course of the game, and especially with these signature characters they have spared no expense. Lyris for example is voiced by the ever popular Jennifer Hale of “Femshep” fame. You come to love the characters over time, I cheer inside each time Sir Cadwell as voiced by John Cleese appears in the storyline. The characters live and breathe and you really care about them. The Elder Scrolls series in general has had some really amazing characters, and this just continues the lineage.

Crafting

Over the course of the time I have been participating in the testing process, the crafting system has gone through a number of changes. The current version is probably my favorite crafting system to date in any game. If you are familiar to the way crafting worked in SWTOR, it is somewhat of a cousin. The difference being that while learning all of the really nice patterns in SWTOR involved silly amounts of random chance, everything in ESO is completely logical and predictable. Smithing for example in its most basic form requires you to go out into the world and gather ore and then take it back to a blacksmithing station and smelt it into bar form. From there you need an item purchased from a vendor that relates to the style of gear you are crafting. Redguard require star metal, Dunmer obsidian, so that each racial style requires a unique reagent. These are purchased for 21 gold, which is not a huge sum of money.

The quality and level of an item is determined by a number of controllable factors. Firstly the level is determined by how much of a given material you add. Whereas 3 iron bars might create a level 1 item, but 6 iron bars a level 4 and so on throughout the level range. Additionally you can add a reagent of sorts to improve the quality of the item, shifting it from white to green or blue and upwards. Finally you can add a statistics package to the item, and these are learned through research. When you get a drop out in the world there are a number of things you can do to it. Firstly of course you can sell it for gold, but as a crafter you are generally better off taking it to the crafting station. There you can either extract resources from it, or if it has a stat package on the item you can research that trait.

Researching takes a significant amount of time, generally a number of hours to as much as a number of days. However in the end you are granted the ability to apply that trait to that item type. The traits that daggers can have are different than the traits that a chest piece can have for example. The rewarding part about it however is that once learned you can reliably add that trait to level of that item. Another really cool thing is that you can improve your items at a crafting station similar to how you could in Skyrim. In doing so you have a chance of losing the item, but you can increase the amount of reagent you are using to greatly improve the chance of getting your item successfully.

I feel like I am not really doing justice to how cool the system works. Generally speaking when I roll a new character I can piddle about gathering iron ore and craft a full set of gear far faster than I could earn one from questing. The biggest bonus is that you can craft helm and shoulders at level one, whereas you do not begin to receive these until pretty far into the content. I highly suggest you check out the crafting simulator that is on the newly released esohead.com. I could talk about the nuances of the system for paragraph after paragraph, but it makes more sense if you can actually see how it works by fiddling with the widgets.

Welcome to the Frontiers

I am not normally a fan of player versus player in any game. However Elder Scrolls has me more than a bit excited to be honest. We are finally returning to the most successful pvp set up that any game has had… the Frontiers of Dark Age of Camelot. Essentially the factions each control their own completely sealed territory, and this represents what the players quest through on their journey to level 50. However in the center connected to these realms lies Cyrodil. The map is absolutely huge and would take you significant amounts of time to run across it even mounted. The overarching story of Cyrodil is that the faction that can take the keeps bordering the Whitegold tower, can then place an Emperor on the throne, giving that faction special benefits.

This however really sells what Cyrodil is short. This zone is a living breathing questing destination with all sort of things hidden for players to find. Just like the frontiers in DAoC, there are reasons for crafters, explorers, adventurers to go out here. The excitement is that in doing so you risk getting rolled by one of the packs of players trying to take the keeps and other objectives. Cyrodil of course can be completely ignored if you so choose, but I look forward to going out there with my friends and trying to find out fortunes. From what I have seen in action, PVP in Elder Scrolls Online works just as well as it ever did in Dark Age.

The video above is from the mega guild Gaiscioch, and it shows their guild taking over a keep. Unlike the zergfest that we have seen in the past years brought on my World of Warcraft, this is slow and sustained warfare. If you cannot hold a keep you are of no benefit to your faction, and holding a keep is an extremely difficult proposition. At one point in the video they are being sieged by two different factions at the same time. This is going to be something that is extremely common, but if you can take and hold a keep… there are benefits to your guild for doing so. I am not really sure if House Stalwart will ever pvp enough to hold keeps, but I can definitely see myself helping out as another group does.

Only Scratched the Surface

There is just so much that I want to tell you, but at this point I have rambled on at length about the game for a bit now. I am sure the moment I publish this, I will think of another dozen things to say. Like I said at the beginning… this is not the game for everyone. Elder Scrolls single player purists will be frustrated by the addition of all the people around them. Hardcore MMO players will likely be frustrated with the minimalistic user interface. Personally I admit I have that problem a little bit, but since this game is to support a WoW style LUA add-on system, pretty much all of my woes with the Spartan interface can be corrected easily. I’ve already seen add-ons in various states of progress that will let you have all the bells and whistles you could want.

This is the type of game that grows on you over time. The biggest problem is you cannot go into playing it with the expectations of it being something else. I feel like this game is trying to start its own little genre. There is more than enough meat on its bones to allow players to happily explore it for hundreds and hundreds of hours. I can’t talk about it much but there is an extremely extensive post 50 game that adds more content than I can really even wrap my head around yet. This is not going to be a game that we can “finish” in a few weeks time. Getting to 50 is only part of the journey, there are months of content waiting you after that point. That is not to say that someone who is absolutely crazy will not make it to the absolute end within the first month. But the average serious player will be chewing on this one for a long while.

It feels extremely awesome to finally be able to talk about it. At this point we have been cleared to talk about the first 3-4 zones per faction. So if there is anything you would like to see me talk about, please drop me a comment and I will try and work it in during a future post. I am happy to see the veil lift so we can hopefully start getting a positive buzz going among all the players who are out there enjoying themselves. The beta weekends have been full of players happy to be in the test and happy to be exploring the world. The game is still charting extremely well in its presales. If you plan on getting the game, I highly suggest you put in your preorder. The ability to play any race in any faction is going to be a huge boon going forward.

Saddest Sight Ever Seen

February 10, 2014 by Belghast

Saddest Sight Ever Seen

If this image is not enough to ball up your fists in rage and scream out “why god why!” then you are not yet to the cobalt pick grind in Everquest Next Landmark. The moment you see red in a cobalt vein you know that your hopes and dreams have been dashed on the rocks in front of you. As I entered the cobalt era I was certain that the problem would be elemental cobalt as it had been in every other tier. I have never been so wrong in my life. Up until this point the gem component of your items has been the “easy” thing to get, since gems tend to be surface spawns that you can zip around the map looking for. This all changes with Sapphire… and name you will come to hate.

It turns out that Sapphire can only spawn at the tail end of a cobalt vein. In my experience however this is a one in twenty type occurrence as almost every single cobalt vein contains the crystallized cough syrup known as Rubicite. Don’t get me wrong, I get happy shivers at the fact that I will eventually get to mine up Rubicite… and maybe just maybe make it into an amazing set of armor. I loved Temple of Cazic Thule, and I was a bit too late to soak up the Rubicite armor from there when I started in Velious but it was a thing of mythic proportions that I lusted after. The problem is… since we need 80 sapphire to make our cobalt pick I am beginning to curse the sight of it.

At this point I have found exactly two Cobalt veins that had sapphire at the end, which has netted me 28 sapphire in total. On the other hand I have 25,000 cobalt ore and 170 elemental cobalt to show for my best impression of dig dug. From what I hear it only gets worse when you start needing Ruby, which can only be found at the tail end of ground spawn Rubicite veins. Most of the ground spawn rubicite is sitting beside cobalt generally meaning they are all part of the same mega vein. My friend Rae managed to power through the sapphire level in about three hours, but based on my experience yesterday this seems like she managed to get lucky. Since each of the tier 3 zones tends to have a little bit of a mix, I might just need to abandon my beloved Pingo for a bit and search elsewhere.

The Root Problem

Notice something weird in this picture? Yup that is right, it is in fact silver spawning in Pingo a Tier Three zone. The problem right now is that Tier 3 has become a dumping ground for everything that is high end. This means to find your rarer spawns you are having to sift through a ton of Iron, Silver, Tungsten, Gold, Marble and all of the associated tier 2 and 3 gems. At some point I am sure they will add tier 4 and 5 zones, but until they we have to scrounge to find the higher tier resources in one massive melting pot of a zone. I realize this is all extremely temporary, as they have mentioned already on the forums that tier 4 and 5 are coming, so I am not so much complaining and just venting my frustration… and warning those who have not reached this point yet that they might want to slow down and smell the roses a bit.

There are still a lot of things I want to build, so while I am out soaking up all the cobalt I find in hope of sapphires… I am also trying to gather up as much gold as I can since there are still a few nifty things I can build with it. I have heard that the Viridium Grappling Hook is much better than the bronze one, so I am anxiously looking forward to having enough elemental gold to craft it. Similarly I have a bunch of crafting machines that I can work on upgrading. I plan on making my Cobalt pick at one of the communal crafting hubs rather than trying to craft the Amaranthine forge for my own claim. Though to be honest… since the forge takes no sapphire I might end up with more than enough resources to craft it first.

The Silver Lining

The silver lining is of course that I now have more stone than I know what to do with. This has allowed me to take breaks from all the farming to work on my temple. At this point calling it a temple is maybe a bit of a misnomer since depending on the angle you look at it, it may or may not look like a castle. The biggest thing on my wishlist right now is the ability to completely remove a tree. I have several that keep respawning in awkward places… like the stairwell between the second and third floor for example. At this point I have added a third and fourth floor and have started working on a tower on the upper ramparts. Trying to figure exactly where I want to go from here. I am considering making the undercroft stone rather than its current dirt, but in any case I have more than enough resources to do whatever at this point.

House Husband

I was at a loss for what to write about as my factoid for today, so going to one I have held in reserve for awhile. I have never been terribly big on traditional gender roles in my marriage. I tend to believe that a marriage is a shared voyage and whatever it takes to get through together is what needs to happen. As a result I tend to be the “Mr Mom” of our household. My wife is a teacher, and for those of you who have teachers in your life… they are grossly underpaid for their work. My wife happens to be one of those rockstar teachers that refuses to accept anything but the absolute best for her kids. As a result she quite literally works 70-80 hours a week between classroom, lesson plans, grading, and the plethora of councils that she sits on as a member and the extra duties she has willingly taken on. Most nights I am home by 4:30pm and she doesn’t get home until after 7.

The truth is I have much more disposable time than she does, as evidenced by the fact of my gaming. So as a result during the school year especially I take on the lions share of household chores. This means I cook, clean, take care of the animals, do laundry, do almost all the grocery shopping and anything else that happens to need to get done during the week. The only chore that I do not do, is the dishes… but I could and I have in a pinch. My mother was a Home Economics teacher… and as a result she was tired of seeing boys come through her classroom that were completely incapable of taking care of themselves. Her mission in life was to make sure that I could do whatever I needed to do to be self sufficient. While I suck at using a sewing machine, I can even do that in a pinch… though I am far more comfortable with needle and thread.

The original plan was simple. I have lots of disposable time so I would pick up the slack during the school year, and then over the summer I get a break… and do nothing. This however has not quite worked out as well as we had planned it. The problem is part of being a rockstar teacher is going around the country to various conferences over the summer. My wife has even gone so far as to work with a group of other teachers and found her own summer conference. So several weeks out of the summer I do get to do absolutely nothing, but the majority of it these days is business as usual. I really don’t mind too much, but there are days where I do get sick of keeping the household running. So all you folks who juggle family and house and still try and find some time for yourselves… I know those feels.

Blame it on Lady Vox

February 9, 2014 by Belghast

This is happening a little out of the normal order. Since I wanted to devote a long post to Everquest Next Landmark for Steampowered Sunday, I decided against cluttering the bottom of the post with a factoid. So today I am doing a second really quick post as a sort of addendum. On the days when I have an already existing “thing” for that day, I might start doing this. The Friday Forum Fodder felt a little odd to have a factoid glued to the bottom. I still question if this feature is worth doing, or if folks are going to get bored of me talking about myself.

Blame it on Lady Vox

Since I posted a big long lovestory to Everquest Next for my Steampowered Sunday post, it feels only fitting to chain this factoid on the same day. My first real MMO experience was Everquest, and like I said in the other post it will always hold a special place in my heart. I love the setting of Norrath and its places, peoples and legends. That said I would have likely never gotten into the game on my own. I was one of those people that watched the game as it was being developed with great interest, only to get a bit soured at the thought of paying a monthly subscription. On my Amiga I had flirted with playing Air Warrior and EGA Battletech a bit over the GEnie service, and had already felt the sting of paying an hourly rate to play games. So the thought of doing that again really didn’t set well with me.

So it was very reluctantly that I accepted a request from a friend and co-worker of mine to come to his house one night after work and run his second account during a Everquest raid. The guild he was in had been preparing to take on the great dragon Lady Vox in Everfrost, and that night after work they were going after her. He normally dual boxed Everquest with his Iksar Monk and Halfling Druid, but since he would be pulling the mobs clearing up to Lady Vox he really needed to concentrate on doing that one thing. So I got what ended up being a few minute explaination of how to control my character, how to memorize spells… and which spells to cast… and we were off clearing our way through the ice giants and goblins on the way to the dragons lair.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I had never really played an MMO at this point, and very much never been on a raid of any kind, but I thought it was amazing how everyone in the party worked together towards a common goal of clearing the lair and finally battling the dragon. I stood back and cast nukes, occasionally throwing a heal here or there when someone looked like they were getting low. The battle was absolutely insane, with so many things going on at once that I had no clue what happened. At some point things started to get really hectic when folks started dying left and right. Sooner or later it was my turn, and my friend rather hurriedly explained where i needed to go to get back tot the fight. Luckily a ranger died about the same time so I followed her back into the lair.

My friend told me to “mem a nuke” and it was a few minutes before it dawned on me what exactly he was saying. I did just that and ran back in just in time to land the killing blow. So on my first night playing any MMO… I managed to slay an internet dragon. On that night I also got to see my very first instance of loot drama…. as there was an argument that erupted over who got the “zero weight backpack”. I have to say I was hooked, and the very next day I picked up a copy and rolled my very first character… Exeteroth the Dwarven Cleric. Turning around upon exiting Kaladim and seeing the giant dwarven statue still is one of the most epic experiences I have had in a game. Nowadays it looks so primitive, but at the time it was just staggering that something so big could exist in a video game. While the forced grouping and frustrations that it caused ultimately lead me to quit the game after a few years, Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart, as will my very first dragon raid.

Everquest Next Landmark

February 9, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #4

This morning I have scarfed my tasty oatmeal and downed my huge skull mug full of coffee. Now I am ready to break some of my own rules. Namely I am writing this morning what I had intended to write last week. At the point of last Sunday I had Everquest Next Landmark in my hands for roughly 48 hours, so that in itself was a bit rule breaking since previously my Steampowered Sunday posts were literally me playing the game and then writing my impression of it. However since the Landmark servers spent most of Sunday down, and I could not gather up the screenshots I wanted, I ended up writing a different post and skipping Steampowered Sunday all together. This week, I am picking up where I intended. Next week we will return to my normal slapshod impression posts of a game from my steam list, but this week is devoted to Landmark.

Everquest Next Landmark

Firstly before digging into this post, you have to understand something. Everquest was my first real MMO. While I had played quite a bit of Phantasy Star Online over on the Dreamcast, EQ was the game that got me hooked on the genre. As a result I have this massive soft spot in my heard for all things Norrath. I love the setting, the pantheon of gods, the racial tension… and while I just cannot bring myself to go back to the original Everquest, I always keep EQ2 installed and at the ready for when I need a nostalgic binge. So back in August during SOE Live 2013 when they announced Everquest Next, the game they had kept pretty well under wraps until that point… to say the least I was extremely interested. While I had deep concerns about the class design for Next I was absolutely pumped at the prospect of this new thing they called Landmark.

Minecraft++

I believe it was Jesse Cox that called Everquest Next Landmark, Minecraft on Crack… but in truth that is neither fair to Minecraft nor Landmark. It is very much the case that a game like this simply would not exist were it not for Notch and his vision to create a fully destructable cube world in Minecraft. Landmark is more akin to Minecraft Evolved or to use the codemonkey term… Minecraft++. The world feels completely different at first, but as you dig into it, the same kinds of logic that we adapted to while branch mining for diamonds in Minecraft mostly apply here to. The difference is, that with Landmark it feels like they are only scratching the surface of what they can do with the engine. They have grand plans to use Landmark as a testbed for ideas that will eventually work their way into the eventual Everquest Next product.

The world of Landmark is arranged as a group of “Islands” assigned to a specific server that are connected by a network of the Combine Spires. First I have to say how pumped I am to see the Combine Spire concept visualized so wonderfully in this world. It just wouldn’t feel like a EQ game without the spire travel network. My only desire would be for them to eventually give us a hearthstone type construct that lets us fast travel to our claim. For those of us who were not lucky enough to get claims near the spires, it becomes a trek each time we want to get to our claim to do work.

Your Claim in the World

Right now the claims system works pretty well, but each of the worlds is so full that it become a crapshoot to try and find anyplace to set down roots. Every grey colored flag represents some players claim on Liberation/Pingo where I set down roots. The blue flag represents my home, and it is a fair clip from the teleport spires. When I managed to get into game the Saturday after release, all of the tier 1 and tier 2 zones were essentially full, and there was nothing at all even vaguely close to one of the spires. Right now the game allows you to plunk down a claim in a freeform fashion so long as it is a certain amount of space away from any nearby claims. The problem with this is it allows for some inefficient use of space.

What I would love to see is a system more like Trove with fixed claim points that you just walk up to and take over. This does two things that are really important. Firstly it allows for the space to be divided up for maximum efficiency letting a fixed number of players inhabit each and every map. Secondly… and this is huge… it allows for a “No Vacancy” sign of sorts to be placed on the islands that simply have no room left at all. Right now a brand new player has to teleport from island to island until they find one that looks like it has a bit of free space… sometimes running out there only to find that a new claim cannot be placed. My friend Rae went through this process yesterday and I have to say it sounded extremely frustrating.

Your Pick and A Dream

You are dropped into this world with only the most basic of supplies. Currently everyone playing the game has the founders pick, which is a combination of the lowest pick axe and a pretty high tier axe allowing them to mine copper, stone and dirt and chop down all but the largest trees. Once this goes beta however, most players will enter the game with the Stone Pick and Stone Axe, much slower versions of the founders pick. In order to progress you have to gather a seriously large number of resources. Currently the conversion rate is generally 100 raw resources to 1 finished resource. To make your first upgrade, the copper pick you need to gather 1000 copper, be lucky enough to get 10 elemental copper a rare drop, and gather up 1000 plain wood logs. Then on top of that… not all Copper Picks are created equal. They range from very slow green quality picks to truly amazing legendary quality picks that cut through stone like butter.

At this point I feel like a lot of the resource costs need to be balanced but they do give a player something to shoot for. For example my next tier upgrade of pick requires me to gather up 6,000 plain wood, 90 sapphire, 30 extremely rare elemental cobalt, 500 also rare burled wood, and 3000 cobalt ore. To make it worse… to even craft this I need to upgrade my crafting machines to the next tier. You start off with access to a basic forge at the combine spires, and then after that you need to craft your own machines… or find a very kind member that has all of the crafting machines out in the open on their own claim. This is one of the things I am loving the most about Landmark so far… it is building a little community.

I am going to draw a comparison that rarely gets drawn in a positive light. The crafter camaraderie reminds me so much of the early days of Horizon. That game was ahead of its time in so many ways, but primarily in the great crafting system that made it a positive thing for crafters and adventurers alike to work together on these massive scale public works projects. I remember spending hours as a Reaver guarding crafters as they brought loads of materials to be applied to one of the big bridges that would then connect up to a brand new untouched island. The crafter gear was not suited for combat, and was needed to be able to carry the maximum amount of materials to the work sight, so an alliance sprung up so that these crafters could be ferried safely from the nearest resource field to the very dangerous work sight.

In a very similar spirit, players are dedicating their claim to becoming a crafting hub for their island. The above claim is just off the spires in Liberation/Hollows and belongs to a player that I don’t even know named Linerra. But she has so graciously opened it up to the public, and every night this place becomes a hub of players crafting up new bits for their own claims. I am not sure she will ever fully know how much I appreciate what she is doing. While I want to make the latest machines, when it comes time for me to craft my cobalt pick I will likely visit her hub, instead of gathering the 80 Elemental Cobalt, 8000 Cobalt Ore, 9000 Tungsten Ore, and 6000 Amaranthine to craft the Amaranthine Forge needed to create it.

I have been surprised that my own claim has become a hub of sorts for my area of Pingo, so I have the motivation to eventually upgrade all of my machines to the highest level. I have since moved the crafting machines from my porch to the undercroft, but I left a note in my claim banner indicating where they can now be found. Awesome thing is, I have struck up a friendship with a few of the players who visit my home regularly to craft. This sense of being neighborly is a really interesting dynamic to me. Yesterday as I was working on the third and fourth floors of my forest temple I was constantly having players swing by and say hello.

Building Tool Progression

One of the things that is drawing mixed reception is the gating of building tool mechanics. When you start the game you are given a package that contains the Add, Remove and Heal tools that can be used to build on your claim. The above image is of me clearing the voxels from my claim with the remove tool. These can be scaled and changed in shape and the material and texture they apply, but represent a very rudimentary “minecraft esc” way of building. Later there are much more powerful tools like the selection tool that allows you to apply a material to a much larger section, or use the really powerful cut and paste functions. There has been a bit of grumbling that it takes so much farming before you get these more advanced tools. I however think this is probably a good idea.

Sticking with the three simplest tools forces you to “learn the basics” before getting into something that can cause issues if you are not careful. Selecting large areas lets you do something really quickly, but at the same time you can also make some pretty big mistakes with it. Most of my building is still done with the add/remove tools, and I tend to use the selection and smooth tools extremely sparingly. I have heard that the line tool is even more powerful when you get it, but similarly if you don’t have a basic understanding of how to get the most of using the fixed tools on and off the grid, it becomes easier for you to make mistakes when handed the really game changing tools later on.

The above video is a really good resource for showing off the basics of crafting with tools on your claim. While I have been piddling with this game for a little over a week now, I still feel like I am constantly picking up tricks. The best thing about the system is that it is so simple and easy to gasp, especially for anyone who has ever played Minecraft. At the same time it is infinitely complex in the number of things you can do with it. People are creating some really crazy things, especially using the smooth tool to even go so far as to create massive sculptures. When they finally open the player studio, it will be interesting to see just what sorts of widgets players have constructed. Right now the only thing of any worth that I have crafted is a prefab staircase that I have used multiple times in my forest temple to move between levels.

Only Scratching the Surface

It really feels like we have only begun to scratch the surface for what Landmark can be. I know they plan on adding in a full combat system with randomly spawned encounters, as well as multiple tiers of exploration to each of the islands. They showed digging down into caverns and lava chambers in the launch video, and from all I have heard that is still very much planned for landmark. Even without all of that the game is extremely addicting and is scratching every builder itch I could possibly have. That is not to say however that it is a finished product in any fashion. The thing I warn players before they plunk down their money to buy their way into the Alpha process… remember that this is an Alpha in every sense of the word. Stuff is broken at times… and that is okay.

I grumbled a bit last week as I had my claim completely wiped five or six times before they got to the bottom of the issues with saving voxel changes to the database. I expect this, I knew what I was getting into… and I have begun building in a really large way knowing that at some point down the road it is all going to get wiped into oblivion. By building and testing I am ultimately helping to make a better finished product. I’ve alpha and beta tested hundreds upon hundreds of games at this point, and this is something that I just take as part of the price for helping to shape the end result. But for players who are used to the “almost finished game being called an alpha” definition of recent years… expect things to go haywire.

After saying all of that, I fully believe that this game is worth investing in. The game that is there is extremely fun, but we will be seeing so much more over the coming months. In the week we have already seen a handful of patches and new featured added in like the ability to hit the down arrow in the crafting window to easily craft the maximum number of items. Each time I log in, I find something new that got patched in when I was not paying attention. I love watching a game get created before my eyes, and the level of transparency the SOE folks have been giving us is phenomenal. I look forward to working together to help craft what eventually ends up being Everquest Next and beginning a epic gaming tradition.