Landmark Archives - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Mafioso’s Daughter

February 12, 2014 by Belghast

Weekly Routines

With yesterday being server reset day in World of Warcraft, I opted to take a break from my Landmark madness to do my weekly boss farming for mounts. Out of my stable of six level 90 characters, there are three that can solo Onyxia in a manner that makes me not want to pull out my hair. The very first time I tried doing Ony as a Blood Deathknight for example it took at least 30 minutes of diseases/deathcoil/icy touch to finally bring her down to the ground. However I have figured out that as Frost Deathknight, Retribution Paladin, and Enhancement Shaman I can make short work of her. As a result every Tuesday it has become a thing, for me to run those three characters through the fight in an attempt to get the ever illusive reins of the onyxian drake.

Of course like expected the kills went quickly but I had no better luck than any of the previous weeks getting the drop. It was at this point that I decided while I was farming content, I might as well take a few stabs at Kael’thas and his Ashes of Al’ar. The funny thing is… I don’t even like that mount, but it has become a point of pride for me to farm one up. So while I do at least one attempt every week, it is not like I would ever ride it. So far I have managed to solo the instance as Blood and Frost Deathknight and as Retribution Paladin… and I am wondering if I will be able to do it as Enhancement Shaman. Of course once again this week nothing of any interest dropped.

Finally while I was wallowing in my bitterness I opted to run all six of my characters through the holiday event instance. This year around it drops 480 necklaces, which unfortunately all of my characters have better. However I did manage to pick up a tanky necklace upgrade for my Paladin. Once again I am chasing a mount, but more than anything for total numbers… because there is no way in hell I would ever ride the Big Love Rocket around, but I would consider riding the Love Bird. More than anything I would be after the handful of pets. I normally don’t mess with the holiday events. Once I completed my violet proto drake, I have mostly ignored them. They are however pretty fast to run, since no queue last night lasted longer than 7 minutes as dps.

We Were Playing It Wrong

Over the last few days I have been complaining about the lack of Sapphire and Ruby or at least the difficulty of gathering it up. Yesterday I noticed the above tweet from Dave Georgeson, it seems like maybe we as a community was overlooking the intended way to get these. I had piddled around early in the game with a +1 discovery ring and didn’t see much difference, but at the suggestion of the tweet I crafted the Assessor’s Band and managed to get a +4 one. With it equipped alongside the existing +1 I am seeing a massive difference in the number of veins open to me as I wander through the world. I am sure you have been through the frustrating case of seeing a huge vein in the distance, but when you get up there finally there is nothing there. Well apparently that is what discovery is for.

After equipping the two rings, for the most part those veins stay in place as I get closer to them. Additionally the discovery trait also seems to interact with how often I get the rare drop from each item. This means I am getting more elementals, burled wood and as a result seeing more veins that have sapphire and ruby in them. They are still frustratingly rare, but less so. I did not play for extremely long last night, but I did manage to get a couple dozen gems of each type. Supposedly we are getting a patch today or tomorrow that will fix the issues that have arisen with boulders and trees spawning again on claims, with no real way to remove them. I am mostly waiting for this before I do much more building as I can’t really see my keep as a whole until I can remove some trees.

The Mafioso’s Daughter

Before I met my wonderful wife, there were plenty of missteps along the way. Most of them are not really entertaining in any fashion, but one I always felt like I dodged a bullet with… potentially literally. While I was still attending a junior college I met a really nice ballet major attending a nearby college. She seemed great, but early on I could tell that she was used to operating in a much higher tax bracket than I was. It wasn’t anything major, but her expectations of what “going out” meant were far different than that of my small town upbringing. After a few dates she pulled me aside and told me that she was starting to get serious about me… but there was something I needed to know.

It turns out that her family was connected to the mafia. She kind of brushed this off as no big deal or as something “I would get used to”. Her father ran some large electronics store, and they lived down the street from the Gotti clan in Long Island. We didn’t have Google back then, but over the course of a few online searches and some mapquest usage… it seemed like her story checked out. I’m a boy scout literally… I am not the type of person that “high crime” has ever appealed to. While I love watching shows like Boardwalk Empire, I have never once romanticized that lifestyle. It had become very clear over the course of the dates that she was “daddy’s little girl”, so I felt it was probably bad for my health if I did not let her down gently.

I did my best to be “less interesting” that I would hopefully make her lose interest in me, and over the course of a few weeks it worked. I wanted no part of the “family business”, but at the same time I didn’t want to break her heart… and have mine shot in the process. Sure I am probably over exaggerating the danger here, but it definitely freaked me the hell out. Looking back now I can regale you with the tale of the time I dated the Mafioso’s Daughter, but when I was going through it, nothing about it seemed funny. I doubt there was every a time where I would have just “gotten used to it”. Thankfully not terribly long after that I met my awesome wife, and everything before is now just a humorous footnote.

Democratizing Access

February 11, 2014 by Belghast

Democratizing Access

Over the last few weeks there has been a subtopic that has sprung up several times in blog comments threads and occasionally over on twitter regarding the selling of beta access. More so a lot of the discussion has centered around the trend of the public paying to beta test a product for a company. For me I tend to lump all of these schemes together be it a kickstarter you might support, or steam early access or something like the trove or landmark presales. In all of the cases you are giving the company a stream of funding on the promise of getting early access to their game so that you can play it first. Quite honestly I am completely fine with this trend and think it is overall a good thing.

At this point I have been over a hundred alpha and beta programs for various games. I used to try and keep track of them all but to be honest I simply cannot. Every time I turn around I am in a new beta program with a new NDA. Previously getting into these programs, especially the more coveted ones involved knowing the right people or being extremely lucky with a random roll of the dice. I will admit I have talked to a friend of a friend who got me on that desired friends and family list more than a few times for a game I was extremely interested in. To be honest, the system that existed just is not fair to the gamer, and involved a whole lot of cronyism… did I abuse this fact to get access to what I wanted? Hell yes I did.

For the the concept of buying into a program just seems more just. If you care enough to plunk down your money in support of a game, then by all means you should have access to alpha and beta testing. I think it changes more than just that, in the programs I have been a part of recently that really worked well… the company is more accountable to its paid testers. They have been all the more responsive with feedback and taken bug submissions all the more seriously. Additionally in each of these games where I have been essentially a paid tester, I have seen a faster development of new feature sets and rapid patching schedules. Trove for example it is unusual that we go a week without a major feature being added.

For me at least, who is someone that does not mind adding my support to a title I believe in before I have seen it… this trend is a good thing. If you think about it in a certain light, this is really no different than preordering a game months in advance. When you decide to purchase that collectors edition, you are taking a gamble on the game being something you will want to play for the long haul. When The Secret World came out, I took a gamble and purchased the lifetime membership, thinking it would be a game that I would enjoy for a good time to come. While I do not play it every week, I still feel like I got my value out of that initial purchase, and log in frequently enough to feel like I am still using it. I think like most things, all of this is a matter of perspective, but I feel like this shift in systems is far more fair than the previous ones.

Cough Syrup Gems

Last night I managed to find enough sapphires to be able to craft my cobalt pick. Unfortunately it is a pretty crappy one, but so far the ones my friends have made have all been lousy. My hope is that once I can craft the indigo pick I will once again get a blue or better quality. For now however I am using my viridian pick on anything it can mine out, and then only switching to my cobalt pick to actually consume the rubicite and ruby veins. Speaking of which… if I thought sapphire was frustrating I feel like I am in for a long haul when it comes to finding the 120 ruby needed to craft the indigo pick. Right now the only way to find ruby is at the bottom of a surface spawning rubicite vein. Unfortunately like the above image shows… most rubicite you find on the surface is really just an upside down cobalt vein.

So whereas seeing red used to make me a sad panda… seeing blue in my rubicite veins has the same effect. Right now I have managed to gather up 45 of the 120 rubies, but I still need a large quantity of elemental rubicite as well. Luckly I have a ton of side projects that I want to complete, and as a result I still need large quantities of gold and tungsten and to be truthful cobalt and sapphires to be able to complete several of the upgraded crafting benches. Right now I have upgraded to the amaranthe forge, but the rest of my machines are at the lowest possible level. It is funny how often my machines get used by my neighbors. That is one of the aspects I love about this game, I will be in my little keep crafting away and next thing I know someone comes by to say hello and either ask if they can use my machines, or compliment me on the building. There is already a small but budding community happening in the various islands.

Between sessions of looking for sapphires and rubies I put in quite a bit more work on the Forest Temple that has now turned into more of a Forest Keep. I completed the wood brace beams in the ceilings of most of the floors, and started working on the basement “undercroft area”. Now all of the machines are located there and I decided to only display the most current machine to ease confusion. Additionally I built a “vault” area where I wrapped my vault portal in stone so that it just looks like a portal in the wall of sorts. I am almost to the point where I will begin fine detail work. I am considering trying to make some mosaics using the triangle block to inset in the walls, but I am not 100% sold on that notion. Essentially I would use the various ores as a sort of stained glass. I uploaded another album of photos to show the recent progress.

I’ve Never Used My College Degree

The title of today’s factoid is a bit misleading, since any college degree gets used to some extent at least in being able to check off a box on a resume search, however I have never been employed in a field that has actually used mine. Throughout High School I was torn between two loves, that being Art and Computers. There was a point in my senior year where I was enrolled in four different college degree programs for the coming year, because I simply could not make up my mind which path I wanted to choose. Being somewhat pragmatic, I chose to attend a junior college and get my basics out of the way on the cheap as I tried to make up my mind… the whole “what do you want to be when you grow up” question.

I decided to take an associates program that was brand new that year called “Desktop Video Production”. Primarily it consisted of lots of 2D and 3D animation work on the Amiga/Video Toaster, a fair amount of computer science and programming classes, and some old school production video work and classic video editing technique. Being a brand new degree program, everything was experimental and when a few of the classes didn’t make I had to get substitutions made so I could get out of there in two years. At this point I was greatly leaning towards art, so I opted to transfer into a four year university and enter the commercial art program. Since I had an associates, they decided to transfer any computer science hours that did not specifically map up to something they had as a computer science minor.

It was here that I made a shift again, the more into the art curriculum I got, the more and more I shifted to doing as much as I could on the computer. I became the lab manager for the fine arts lab, and tutored folks through Photoshop, Corel, Quark Xpress and a few 3D animation packages. It was around this point when I started looking at the job market that I realized exactly what the term “starving artist” meant. While in college I got a job as the system administrator and webmaster for a small internet service provider. It was here that I managed to get the “by the bootstraps” education in networking, server administration, and a good bit of serious web programming. I realized that if I wanted to be making a decent living, that I would be far better off following my computer tendencies.

Straight out of college I got a job as a webmaster for a fairly large company and over the years that morphed into more serious programming. At this point I’ve shifted back and forth between web and windows programming, even doing a small a bit of low level device driver programming on occasion. All the while almost entirely abandoning the Bachelor of Commercial Arts degree that I ended up with. Sure especially on the web there is a good aspect of commercial art that you end up doing, so this is why I say my factoid is a bit misleading. However it is very true that I have never once worked as an artist, at least for profit. The interesting thing about being a programmer without having a serious computer science background, is that I think it gives me a slightly different perspective. Often times when sitting in a room with computer science majors, I will come up with an off the wall solution that ends up saving the day. I guess in the end I am thankful for my non-traditional background.

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.

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.