New Improved Landmark Blueprint.
That's...different.
Time to revise all estimates for Open Beta. Before Alpha I thought it would be May-June. Even during Alpha, when Smokejumper guesstimated we might see the first iteration of combat before Closed Beta began, I still thought an early-mid Summer soft launch was on the cards. Now it looks like maybe October at best.
I wouldn't be that surprised if Landmark was still officially in Closed Beta come Christmas. Of course, with closed beta buy-in packs ongoing, the Cash Shop stocked and taking money and Player Studio coming online in the next couple of weeks, you could argue that a soft launch is already happening. All the same, if there's ever going to be a transition from a few thousand players to thousands and thousands of players, the pay wall has to come down sometime and this Blueprint doesn't suggest that's going to happen in a hurry.
The comments on the difficulty of AI pathing in a voxel-based world are very interesting. For anyone who's not all that interested in Landmark but very much interested in EQNext, the upside must be that all these systems need to be developed before Next can become A Thing and presumably most of them will port wholesale from one game to the other. Even so, the prospects of getting our hands on even an Alpha Founders Pack for EQNext look further away than ever.
Oh well. July could be interesting. Not so sure about May and June...
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I have been biding my time away from Landmark with WildStar Weekends, GW2, EQ, etc. Bah, now I need to go see what is new. Damn you =)
ReplyDelete"October sounds a bit late for full launch for Landmark. That would be a 9 month alpha/beta cycle. On the other hand, once it’s in Open Beta with a Cash Shop, which will be in early summer, I guess it really doesn’t need to “Launch” at all…."
ReplyDeleteAnother prediction that seemed pessimistic when I made it, which now seems optimistic. Pretty much the story of my life in software development.
I am not sure how long they can run with a looming pwipe. That is keeping me from getting invested, as I don't really want to lose everything I do.
The wipe is very definitely in my mind whenever I think about getting stuck in to do anything significant. That and the really basic issue that while I really enjoy building stuff in Landmark, building stuff is categorically not what I play MMOs to do. I'm quite apprehensive of getting sucked in, as happened with the original Neverwinter Nights.
DeleteEvery time I hear about development of weapons and armour and monsters and combat in Landmark, I become more and more convinced that EQNext will not actually ever be released.
ReplyDelete