everquest next landmark Archives - Page 4 of 4

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.

Beardly Dedication

February 8, 2014 by Belghast

Press NDA Lifted

There has been a lot of confusion in the last 24 hours as Zenimax has lifted the NDA just far enough to allow a bunch of press outlets to post stories. Massively crafted a really poorly worded tweet stating that the ESO NDA Had lifted. Even though they followed up almost immediately with a correction stating that it only applies to the press and media beta… it has caused massive amounts of confusion. As a result there are so many video leaks going on right now, a good number of them seem to have an axe to grind with the game in general. I am still very firmly under a gag order but I feel that is a bit of a disservice to the game as a whole.

Most of the albeit scathing reviews of the game seem to be missing the general point. I feel like right now a lot of people are going into this game with the expectation of it being something that it is not. This is the problem of a broad game like The Elder Scrolls. Every player has a certain way that they want to play the game, and if their chosen game play isn’t supported then obviously it is a horrible game. Apparently there are players out there who legitimately do nothing but steal stuff from stores, or players who do nothing but kill quest giver NPCs. These are just a few of the fringe game play styles that I have seen mentioned on the more public forums that certain fragments of the population are up in arms over.

Thing is… the game seems to be selling extremely well. The game has firmly been on the top 10 best sellers list on Amazon.com since releasing. So lots of people still have interest in the game despite the sour grapes reviews that are coming out. At this point I feel like Zenimax needs to open the flood gates and let the actual fans who have been sticking by the title speak for it. This is not an insignificant number of players mind you, but each of us is bound by the same NDA gag order, and unable to say a single thing in defense of the title. Keeping the NDA in place, and stating that there will not be a fully open beta before release… only serves to give the public the impression that the game has something to hide. The game has absolutely nothing to hide, and I look forward to the day when I can talk about it without hedging everything I say in grand generalizations. The video I linked above is my favorite of the batch of “reviews” and Dan Bull seems to “get it”.

Forest Temple that Isn’t

I have still been plugging away on building my “Forest Temple” and posted some photos the other day yesterday on the EQ Next Reddit. Turns out my name is a bit controversial. I am building a temple in a deeply forested region of the Pingo island, so to me that is a Forest Temple. But apparently to a lot of people that has a specific meaning, which is the Forest Temple from Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. I am just too old for this to have a significant meaning to me I guess. Ocarina of Time came out when I was in college, and while I played it and enjoyed it… it really didn’t imprint on me as being anything more than a fun game. A Link to the Past is my Zelda game and the one I hold up as the pinnacle above all others. For me the Zelda franchise is best in its 2D form.

So to clariify… I will try and come up with a better name for my place, because I don’t want to give the impression that I am trying to build “The Forest Temple”. At this point I have massive amounts of resource farming to complete the temple. I want to do one more floor and a ramparts area at the top, as well as build out the undercroft more fully. Right now I am planning on moving the craft machines from the porch area to the undercroft. I hope I can unlock the paint tool because I think with that I can help to age the temple with little bits of mossy grass on the stone. I also want to do some work to make things more intricate, but i figure over time I can work out the fine details. I posted an album of pictures of my most recent progress.

Beardly Dedication

This is one that my wife suggested so I am running with it. Early my Sophomore year in High School I started growing a beard, and unlike my friends who were cursed with the inability to do so… I was able to grow one rather successfully. From that point until today I have only been clean shaven twice… and both of those times were horrible mistakes. Granted I vacillate back and forth between a full beard and a moustache/goatee combination… but for the majority of 22 years I have been proudly dedicated to beardom. Basically my beard started as a way to make me look older, because I suffer from a baby face. If I were to shave right now at age 37… I would look like I was about fourteen. Well maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is not a good thing to say the least.

The first time I shaved my beard was during my Junior year. I was completely smitten with a girl who barely knew I existed. I asked her out to the prom and she accepted, but she really pressured me to shave off my goatee at the time. I should have stuck to my guns, because quite honestly nothing about that night was worth the pricetag of shaving my beard. I did not realize I was mired quite so deeply in the friend zone as I actually was, and at least if I had my beard I could have stroked it while pondering the situation as she danced with someone else the majority of the night. Beard stroking apparently is a legitimate thing, and it actually spurs on mental activity.

The second time I shaved it… I did it mostly by accident. I took off a little too much from one side while trying to even out my beard. Rather than shaving down to a goatee, I decided that my wife had never actually seen me clean shaven. At that point we had been together five or six years, and she was polite about it… but told me to grow it back as soon as I could and to never do it again. Apparently the beard suits me, either that or she couldn’t handle the fact that she looked like she was married to a teenager. I figure at some point when I do actually want to look younger I can instantly loose 20 years by shaving, or at least this is my planned exit strategy. The actual secret to my beard is more akin to the fact that I simply hate shaving and will do whatever I can to avoid doing so. At one point this year I was sporting a beard that would make the guys of duck dynasty take notice… but that was more a test of just how long I could let it go than anything else.

Belghast: Wedding Photographer

February 4, 2014 by Belghast

Belghast: Wedding Photographer

Most kids growing up end up working food service of one form or another, but I somehow lucked out and missed that experience during my formative years. Honestly I had a pretty good string of jobs throughout High School but probably the most bizarre would be that of Wedding Photographer… or more so the Photographers Assistant. My father was a machinist by day and professional portrait photographer by night and weekend. Essentially I grew up in the darkroom and was extremely comfortable around photographic equipment before most kids had learned to ride a bicycle. As I got older and needed an allowance, I often got drafted into helping out with the “family business”.

This was not as glamorous as it might sound. Essentially it usually meant sticking me up in a balcony somewhere during the service with a zoom lens and getting the nifty overhead shots that my father could not get from the ground. By my teen years I could name all the basic parts of a wedding, and could spot little variations coming before they actually happened. This whole experience has caused me to loathe weddings. Being the wedding photographer is a really uncomfortable experience, for a few hours you become part of the family and have to figure out how to wrangle your way through getting the shots taken. Thanks to tradition no one wants to take the photos before the wedding… and then after the ceremony it becomes a sheer struggle of wills to keep everyone in their clothing and willing to line up in the various shot arrangements that the bride and groom will want. Everyone wants to mingle with family because they go away… and while the photos don’t seem that important on the day of the event… they will certainly catch the fact that you didn’t get a photo of them with uncle bob afterwards.

This summer I had to reprise my role of Wedding photographer as I got asked by the same neighbor who cleaned up my blood mess to photograph her wedding. I mean seriously… how could I say no? So I gave it the good ole college try and I think overall the photos turned out pretty well. Within a few minutes of the ceremony ending I remembered all the reasons why I hated doing this in the first place however. We couldn’t keep the groomsmen from changing out of their clothing into shorts. This was an outdoor wedding in the middle of a August Oklahoma heatwave. I feel like I got the workout of my life trying to wrangle a bunch of people who did not want to stand still for photos. All in all however it was pretty successful and over time I managed to get everyone together. It did not help to improve my hatred of weddings however.

Giving Up, For Now

For the time being I am going to give up on building anything in Landmark. This is the fourth time in recent days that the servers have gone down and I have logged back into my claim being fully reset. I could clear it fast enough again with the select tool, but it feels absolutely futile since I know I will likely be logging back in again to nothing. Dave Georgeson posted this tweet last night which I seems positive… but we have had some optimism in the past as well.

I ended up clearing a little bit this morning so if things are still clear by the time I get home this evening I will consider that a positive sign and maybe just maybe start building again. Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but it seems as though if you use ctl+v instead of delete when you have a large area selected… it appears that you harvest the materials contained within that area. I made the mistake of clearing the last time with the delete key, meaning I likely lost all of my props permanently. Honestly right now I wish I could figure out how to make torches, that is really the only prop I need to be able to craft a whole bunch of.

Another huge plus is that I managed to figure out the lightstone. Essentially unlike Everquest, it must be equipped in a slot. Since the slots are not marked at all, you just have to keep dragging them into each slot one by one until it finally fits there. You can see in the above picture the light radius that it gives off, which is more than enough to be able to see what you are doing. Really that is all I was wanting since my claim is mostly cast in shadow all the time. I like that aspect of it, and once I actually get my temple ruins built it should look really cool. Before I can really do that however I need to figure out how to make torches. I realize at this point I only have two crafting machines and based on what I saw yesterday there are like half a dozen or so that someone had out on their claim for people to use.

Since I can’t really craft I have been working on upgrading my tools. This morning I managed to craft the Heavy Silversteel Pick shown above. I am not sure if it is always a legendary item, or if I just lucked out in the randomizer. Previously I had been using the starter pick to clear any tier 1 material away from what I was actually wanting to harvest since the Pick/Axe combo was so much faster than any of the upgraded picks I had gotten. However this one seems to finally be roughly the same speed. Now that I can harvest another tier higher of material I am hoping I can craft the next set of crafting machines, and maybe even the next tool which I think is terrain paint, but I am not really sure. At this point mostly I am looking forward to the voxel database stabilizing enough for me to start building again.