Steampowered Sunday Archives - Page 7 of 8

Farcry 3: BLood Dragon

February 23, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #6

A few weeks back I did Steampowered Sunday over Far Cry 3, and thanks to the frustrations of dealing with UPlay I didn’t really give it that stellar of a rating. The forced stealth play just was not my thing, but one resounding chorus from folks responding to the post was… play Blood Dragon instead. From the moment I saw the artwork for the title… I knew I would love it, because I am an unrepentant child of the 80s. Everything about the game artwork alone screams 1980’s arcade cabinet artwork. Hand drawn polygon landscapes were a thing that became insanely popular in the post War Games sequence of games. We all wanted to be part of cyberspace in one way or another… even though at the time this was a largely fictional destination. Which leads to the question… did William Gibson predict the future in Neuromancer… or did we just build his future because of our love for it. That however is a topic for a completely different day.

All the Movies Rolled Into One

This game is in every way a love song for not only the video games of the 1980s but the movies as well. You start off with a minigun raid on a base form a Helicopter, while Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” plays on the stereo… a song that featured heavily in the pinnacle of 80s scifi action movies… Predator. It just keeps getting better from there. If you took Robocop, Universal Soldier, Ultraforce, and dumped them in a blender with Bad Dudes, Shinobi, and Duke Nukem… you might come close to creating a game like this. The visuals seem like a 1980s movie arcade scene vomited its magenta and red neon all over your screen. I could pick apart the picture above and name a dozen different movie and video game references in this one shot alone.

The Music is So Authentic

The visuals would not be enough to deliver the feeling of travelling back in time… but the music is really where the game scores 110%. Listening to the insane synths gave me flash backs of so many separate movies at once. I mean you could take this game as making fun of all the absolutely over the topness that was the 1980s, but instead they chose to make it some sort of a time capsule. For someone who lived through all of this, it is like a really crazy trip down memory lane. I had moments where I remembered the first time I watched Terminator, the first time I caught Highlander on HBO, the first time I watched Big Trouble In Little China… and Escape from New York. While none of it really is some kind of clone of the original tracks that obviously inspired it… it has the same feeling of sonic dissonance, driving drum machines and power chords.

Neon Archery Should Be A Thing

The weapons not only look great, but they are really functional. There is a sequence not far from the start of the game where like every 80s movie… you are captured and stripped of all of your weapons. Your fearless hero that has named Captain Rex Colt Power… has to get by with nothing but a bow and the ability to use the environmental behemoths… the Blood Dragons to take down a base. Sure the Blood Dragons do a lot of heavy lifting, but I feel like some sort of Neon Green Arrow as I headshot the guards with a bow. Firstly… I would wonder how the hell I could sneak around with glowing arms, and massively glowing weapons. However since everything in this world seems to glow… I am guessing also glowing is a form of camouflage? Whatever the reasoning behind it, things look badass. I mean as a child of the 80s… making something glow neon and putting skulls and spikes on it… is the absolute guarantee for making something awesome.

The Stealth Did Not Piss Me Off

Normally I hate stealth in games, but there is something about this game that simply changing the skins and color palettes immediately makes the default Far Cry 3 engine feel so much better. I think in part it is because I know that if I perform a take down, I get to see the awesome glowing blue wakizashi slice through the enemy and spill light blue glowing cyber fluid. Additionally there is a completely broken and overpowered ability to chain a bunch of take downs together by pressing your movement keys in the direction of the next mob in sequence. So far I have managed to take down 4 at once, but I imagine in later levels this becomes completely ludicrous. I think mostly my problem with stealth in games is the whole idea of a “bloodless” victory. I play these games to kill everything that stands, and when a storyline impedes me from doing this… my brain rebels.

The Cut Scenes are Amazing

Normally I also hate cut scenes of pretty much any kind. However apparently if you take those cut scenes… make them infused with the spirit of the 80s… and hand drawn… apparently I love them? The combination of the arcade game style pixel artwork and cheesy action movie dialog makes the whole experience enjoyable for me. That seems to really be an undercurrent of this game, “taking things Bel hates and making them enjoyable.” One of the more humorous moments is when your stereotypical mouthy partner initiates a tutorial sequence moments after dropping you on the island as a way of screwing with you. So you are forced there to sit through a sequence of tutorial commands… all the while you are yelling at your partner for making you do them. This is an awesome and irreverent way of making you play through the basic commands so that you know how the game controls.

The Game Is Still Farcry 3

Everything about the game is still very much Farcry 3. You move around the world capturing back positions… but instead of doing so from generic badguys that happen to all wear red bandanas… you are doing it from the Omega Force androids. I guess at the end of the day it is all about the packaging. If you have played Farcry 3, you know how the gameplay works. Capture a base, which opens up side missions, which then leads to the next base to capture. The key difference everything from Farcry has been taken to eleven. One of my favorite things is capturing cyber hearts and then using it to lure the Blood Dragons to bases and make them do your work for you. I mean what is cooler than than giant dinosaurs with glowing neon stripes… that have a plasma cannon breath attack? While I gave Farcry 3, a colossal score of 3 Mehs out of Meh… I have to give the Blood Dragon counterpart 5 Kick Asses out of Fucking Awesome.

While I have not really made it terribly far into the game at this point, I know this will be one that I return to and play again quite often. It is the sort of game you need to be in the mood for mindless carnage to be able to enjoy. At this point I have secured the first base, and started working on some of the side missions. Every now and then I come home from work, and just need to kill something. This is the ideal game to reach for, because the objectives pretty much are all “kill all the things”. There is zero subtlety here, but I am not really that subtle of a person, so it works for me. Since this is such a nostalgic ride for me, I find it odd how popular it has been among generations of folks who did not live this experience the first time. Maybe the camp of the 80s is universal and will always appeal. God save us all.

Belghast and The Ark

February 17, 2014 by Belghast

Horribly Sidetracked

Saturday when I wrote my little impressions piece on the Elder Scrolls Online, I managed to get horribly sidetracked in the process of explaining the questing section. At one point I said “Generally speaking the side quests serve two real purposes” but only actually managed to give you a single purpose. I managed to get myself on a tangent and forget what I was saying. So let me take another stab at explaining the questing system. Generally speaking when you go into an area there is a critical path that you can take to go through it with the least number of quests. If you want to piddle around and carve your own path this is a good thing.

For example in Stros M’Kai the Daggerfall Covenant starter zone, you are asked to find one of three crew members before continuing on. You can literally just find one crew member and be just fine, and the game will allow you to continue forward. However you can find all of the crew members, and each one will do something for you in the final quest before leaving the desert island. Additionally your choices matter going forward. If you choose to kill someone, or fail to save someone… they won’t be there later on at a critical time when you could use your assistance.

That is one of the things I like most about the questing system. It works much like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, in that you get introduced to a character that keeps popping back up in later quests and even later zones. Failing to save a character, means they will no longer exist in the later stages. Occasionally the game will force you to make a hard choice, between two sets of NPCs. When this happens one of those paths will forever be sealed from you. I you choose to help this person, the other person will either die or be so infuriated that they will never help you again.

Basically your decisions matter, and they matter a lot. So while it might not seem that the immediate consequences are all that bad, they will have future ramifications. So while the first purpose of side quests is to get gear, the second purpose is to unlock future story points. You never know when a person you have helped will show back up and lend assistance later. Often times this is in the form of making a future quest a little easier as they lend some unique ability to the fight. However in a few cases this means you may have missed out on a really cool quest chain because the NPC was not there to give it.

Turret Orchestra

After my little write up yesterday about Portal 2… I got a whole lot of responses that amounted to “no wait, you haven’t even gotten to the good part”. Then that they apparently couldn’t tell me about the good part without massive spoilers. Sure enough I managed to play through to the beginning of chapter 5, and the game has changed once again ever so slightly. Now I think I want to know what is going to happen enough to continue playing. I have my assumptions of the end result, but who knows they might be completely wrong. For the most part I have managed to stay blissfully unaware about the ending of the game to this point.

There were a few really annoying levels, but now I am in a part that is more freeform. The coolest thing I have seen to date is the Turret Orchestra. While roaming around in this new free form area, I kept hearing this music playing that sounded kind of like a bunch of accordions. Finally I was able to see what it was, and it was several of the turrets playing in unison. I have a feeling that I will somehow be freeing the various robots under the control of GlaDOS, or at least that seems like a potential subtheme for the game.

Like I said right now I have no real idea where exactly I am heading apart from following what seems like an obvious path carved out for me. I am sure at this point I will plan the game to its conclusion, so it managed to get its hooks into me. While I am not sure if I would call it a truly great game yet, it is enjoyable. I am sure there is some grand reveal to happen down the road, that will make me shift my opinion again. However I stand by my original assessment. Fun game with a cool gimmick.

Belghast and The Ark

It will come as no real surprise to anyone who has ever followed me on the various social media platforms that I use… that I am a pet person. That said there are probably few people who really know how deep that particular rabbit hole goes. As it stands right now, neither my wife nor I plan on having children. My wife swears that teaching high school is the strongest form of birth control known to man. This is not to say we don’t have children, they just happen to be covered in fur. I personally have always had a close affinity with pets, and even if it is something I would not want for myself… I seem to be able to befriend animals quickly. While I would never have a bird, each time I went over to a friends house one of his birds would hop up on my shoulder and stay there until I finally placed him back on his perch.

kitties_sunning Currently we have three cats, all of which are pictured above sunning themselves in the afternoon light of our stairwell. On the left is the mammoth monster cat Chloe, in the back is our mostly black Calico Allie, and if you have been reading these factoids you have already met little shit. Each of them is a rescue, because I believe all animals deserve a second chance at a great home. Each rescue especially has its own personality, and comes with its own quirks. These “quirks” can be frustrating at times, but they make up the complex personality of each animal… so even the annoyances you come to love. Chloe for example obsessively licks anything and everything… which can be sweet at times until she hops up in bed with you at 3 am and licks your arm. Seriously there is nothing freakier than waking up to that. She however is the most amazing snuggler, when you can succeed at the complex game of keeping your arms and hands away from her mouth.

Similarly we also have three ferrets, and they are some of the most adorable animals you could ever have. Here they are snuggled together under a blanket in their playpen. At this point I have woken two of them… and moments later they will be bouncing around the cage like mad. This is the problem with ferret photography… you get one chance to take a shot before they go super sonic. From the left we have our old man… Smokey that came to us as part of a rescue pair of littermates. His sibling Bandit passed away some time ago, and he himself is nearing the end of his journey as well… but we are trying to make him as comfortable and happy as we can while we have him. Next to him is Shiloh, that was a returned to a local pet store and put back up for adoption. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever return her because she is so adorable, and has a little badger face. Finally we have miss “Bella” which is short for Bellatrix, the name her original mommy gave her. She had a much older ferret named Judah that Bela apparently upset regularly, so it was with many tears that she gave her over to us.

Over the years we’ve had lots more animals, including a hamster, a guinea pig, and a pair of sugar gliders. All of them have been our babies while they have been with us, and we have sought to give them the best home we can. Often times it is these little guys that are the reason for me getting a slightly later start than normal. When one is begging for attention… and they are damned good at giving you a guilt trip… how can you possibly say no? The best at begging has to be Bela. She will run over to the edge of the playpen and press her body against the ground sticking out her snout in his pouting “poor pittiful me” look. You would think she NEVER got played with ever. The moment I reach down into the playpen she will bolt over to me and wait to be picked up. All she really seems to want is to be picked up and carried around for a bit before finally going back into the playpen and snuggling up for a nap.

Portal 2

February 16, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #5

Okay here it comes… huge confession time. Prior to today I had never actually played Portal 2. I have owned it for ages, and picked it up when it was damned near free on a steam sale. I always meant to play it, but something… namely an MMO usually happened instead. Here goes confession number two while we are at it. I didn’t think Portal was that amazing of a game. I know shock and confusion all around… but it fell into the “cute and cleaver” games category. The whole portal gun thing was brilliant, but the concept of essentially a “puzzle shooter” was fun for a bit but I quickly got tired of it.

To be truthful I am not sure if I would have owned the original portal were it not for the orange box. I got it as part of that, and even then it was probably a year before I fired it up and played it. I mostly got the orange box for Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and Portal for me was a bit of a footnote. Based on the copious amount of cosplay and fan art out there… I can tell that the Portal franchise is a life changing thing for some people. I was just not one of them. For ages my friends have pestered me for owning Portal 2 but never actually playing it. In a way I made a promise to redress that wrong during my Steampowered Sunday series. Things happened… and I am finally getting down to playing it today for what would be week 6 if I had not skipped a week.

We Weren’t Even Testing That

For the last hour and a half I have been sitting here playing Portal 2. While I still for the most part consider this game to be a novelty, so much about it has improved. Namely the setting seems more enjoyable to me. The sterile environment of the first lab was interesting, but watching the place fall down around me is far more enjoyable. It has a Portal meets Fallout feel that I really enjoy. Additionally the characters are so much more interesting this time around. GlaDOS was a really cool character in the first game, but now that the gloves are off her lines are that much more enjoyable. Then we add in Wheatley, which near the beginning of chapter three I have not seen a ton of since the first chapter, but I am figuring that will change soon.

The game setting is absolutely gorgeous and they have managed to pull off “believable decay”. Things are broken and out of whack and it feels like they are legitimately so. Like they used to work at one point and then just collapsed. So often in a game when the world is disintegrated, you cannot piece it back together in your mind to see what it looked like before the fall. Here the rooms seem to have all the right number of bits laying around to have been a whole unit at one point. I am not really sure why this is important to me, but in the games where it is not this way there is a nagging feeling that something is just plain off. Even in my beloved fallout series there are plenty of locations that have a chunk of the building broken off, but nowhere near enough debris to account for it.

There are two really cool stories going on at the same time, that are what if anything would keep me playing through the rest of the game. The first is… GlaDOS seems to think you are the same person who destroyed her in game one. If that is the case… how did you end up back in stasis. The other thing going on that I want to know more about are the weird messages that get left to you through the chambers. These are almost always well hidden, in a chamber behind an angled panel or something of the sort… just a bit off the planned path. I’ve snapped a few of these so far but I imagine that when taken together they will make some additional story.

I’ve really let the place go since you killed me

I have no idea how long the game is, but at this point I saved out and gave up on the first of the light bridge puzzles in chapter 3. This seemed like a good stopping point since it was the first time I had actually died. I feel that maybe the puzzles are easier this time around, either that or I was simply lucky. I was able to breeze through most of them to that point. Since the first game was so popular I wonder if maybe they watered down the difficulty level a bit for mainstream success. Not saying that is a bad thing necessarily, but it does give the game a feeling that it is just easier. I remember in the first one I was having to retry levels pretty early on at least by the time I reached room 10. It feels like I am further into the game right now than that. Maybe the “real” game didn’t actually start until Chapter 2, and I am just counting all the training stuff at the beginning to make it feel longer.

The rooms I always do badly at are the ones that involve going out over massive pits of water. I don’t handle platforming over open air that well, never really have in any game. Those levels add extra anxiety to my movement and I think I screw up more often. Namely on the light bridge I just could not see the hook point for a portal where I needed one. I figure that room is one I will have to die a bunch on to be able to find the “secret”. Generally speaking the key to every room is this one little nugget of information that you either see immediately or it takes a truly silly number of tries to finally find it. I am by no means an observational genius, in fact I am usually good at overlooking the painfully obvious… so I am sure it is just a case of that at work again.

…there’s nothing to stop us from testing for the rest of your life

I have to give my friends credit in that Portal 2 is a much better game than the original. However that said I still do not see it as this life affirming phenomena that everyone else seems to. It is a good game, and has some interesting characters and an even more interesting setting. The gameplay is novel, but there is a point where I feel like I am just done with it for a a sitting. I am not sure if I will go back and finish playing through it. The best thing about the Portal experience is that for the most part you can play a single level at a time without feeling like you are missing something. I know I played through the first one over the course of about 12 gameplays. When I couldn’t really play anything else that was too involved, like when I was waiting on something to cook… I would fire it up and figure out a level, constantly inching closer to the finale.

I have a feeling Portal 2 may just claim this slot for me, that game I play when I don’t have time to play something more detailed. At the very least it did not instill in me that feeling of “omg I have to finish this”., I am happy to eventually beat it, but I am also equally happy not to. The game however is really well done, and I can at least see why so many people love it. I think I am just wired wrong for this sort of single player experience. At some point I would like to check out the multiplayer game, as I have heard that it is a completely different animal. I would imagine it plays a lot like forced where you can royally screw up your friends by not doing the right thing at exactly the right time. For now at least I have to say it was an hour and a half well spent.

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.