The Road Ahead : EQN Landmark

Last night, just before my bedtime, Drexella, SOE's Community Manager, put the EQN Landmark "Roadmap" up on the Alpha forums. It was too late for me to comment on it but I came home from work today expecting to spend a good while wading through the blogosphere's reactions to this lengthy, detailed and fascinating document.

Tumbleweed...

Annoyingly I still don't have time to dissect, discuss and analyze it in anything like the detail I'd like. That will probably have to wait until after the weekend, when thankfully I have the whole week off to pontificate to my heart's content. For now, though, since no-one else on my Feedly or Blogroll seems to have anything to say about it and in case anyone who might be interested has missed it, here are a few choice extracts. All text in bold is my emphasis:

"In general, the dev team does not want to turn the game into “instant travel"...It’s almost certain that most of these options will be somewhat limited in usage by requiring either crafting of an item or requiring a certain amount of time to expire before reuse".

"Caves : The surface world is cool, but it’s only the top layer of what we promised. So caves are coming. Lots of spaces to mine through and explore. Why add them now? Because the resource tiers are *supposed* to be spread down through the crust of the world, not segregated on separate islands and spawning on the surface. You’re not playing the intended game yet, and we need to move the game closer to the real end-goal now. "

"So we’re introducing Upkeep which is basically a small amount of in-game coin you have to spend to keep your claim from being repossessed into the world and made available to other players."

"New movement methods: Methods of gliding, flying, etc. will be added to the game via items that you can craft and find."

"Death Penalty: Yes, death will have teeth. Try not to die ..things will try to kill you".

"Running (dynamic) water: This is the piece that will come in last. This is the rivers and waterfalls that everyone wants. It adds more real estate choices, but it also creates a lot of gameplay as you folks can start diverting water to do all kinds of interesting things on your claims."

"Achievements are the “quest-like” equivalent within Landmark."

"Unlocking recipes: Right now, all recipes are available at crafting tables as soon as you make them. When this system goes into the game, you’ll need to find those recipes before you can make them at the crafting tables"

"There are a LOT more systems to come after March. All the huge stuff like PvP, advanced combat, better AI, interesting physics features, plus a whole host of “possibles” and “must haves” ".

There's a lot more than that. If you have any interest in Landmark at all it's well worth reading the whole thing. The alpha forums are open for all to read. Here's the link again in case you missed it the first time.

I think this Roadmap conclusively puts to bed the idea, still frequently spouted on the forums and elsewhere, that Landmark is only, or even mainly, a toolkit for builders. SOE have been saying for a while it would be a full-feature MMO and now they're finally beginning to flesh out some of the detail on what that means. I predict a lot of builders who are having a fine old time already will not be best pleased, especially now we know for certain that that one, fleeting reference to PvP all those months ago wasn't a joke after all.

Personally, I can't wait!