If You Build It : Landmark

Landmark launches this Spring. That means Daybreak Games has, at most, just under three months to straighten the rugs and put out the peanuts before opening the doors to anyone who can scrape up the ten dollar admission fee.

Of course, there might be more of a sense of urgency if the game hadn't been in Early Access for two years already. And never forget, if you can't wait, those Trailblazer Packs giving Instant Beta Access and a 48 hour headstart at launch are still on sale for $99.99!

Okay, let's not get into the la-la land of modern MMO pricing. No good can come of it. Let's look at the game.

For a start, is there one? There's a question people have been asking for while. I lose count of the posts I've written describing Landmark's latest change of direction, while wondering if anyone, least of all the developers, have a clue where it might be heading.

Reports of the removal of the Starter Tower turn out to be exaggerated. You do have to build it yourself now, though. It takes 56k stone, which I estimate at around 45 minutes mining.

Well, here we are, heading off down yet another road. Only this time it's different. For once it's not a road to nowhere. As of last week's wipe all roads lead to launch. Come "Spring" this thing has to be "a game". Is it?

No. Not yet. Not nearly. But it could be. If you make it one.

Yes, you. The player. The customer. The Luminary. That's what DBG has decided to call you and I have to say that, daft though it is, it's at least more euphonious than "Landmarkian".

Names for descriptive purposes only.
May not reflect actual environments.
Terms and conditions apply.

Take off all those hats and put on some of these: builder, designer, scripter, writer, director, gamesmaster, entertainment officer, master of ceremonies, unpaid laborer. You're going to need a lot of heads. And DBG is going to need a lot of goodwill, something that was in very short supply indeed on the official forum during the two days downtime prior to the launch but which seems to be slowly returning now people are able to get in and mess around with the new tools.

But before we get to that, let's look at what you do get that you don't have to make for yourself, or, more likely, hope another "Luminary" is going to make for you. I don't propose to go into a huge amount of detail - the changes are very substantial and I haven't had either the time or the patience to explore them all in depth - if you want chapter and verse on the update Domino has you covered here.

Here's the basic deal: for $9.99 DBG will provide all the infrastructure you'd expect - the servers, the UI, the landscape. You get access to a wide range of "props", a catch-all term that includes every pre-made, placeable object from furniture to monsters. Recipes (to make weapons, armor, potions and the like), creatures to place on your Claim Build, and various resources are offered as drops from gathering and adventuring.

Both those activities, never robust, have been thoroughly gutted but Landmark's "adventuring" is perhaps now the most unambitious such activity ever seen in an MMO. Instead of exploring to find caves that were sometimes frighteningly extensive and confusing you simply click a UI button to appear instantly in a randomly-selected bijou cavelet (known collectively and euphemistically as the "Chaos Caverns"), where a handful of extremely uninteresting basic mobs wait mindlessly for you to come slaughter them.

And that, I think, is about your lot. Oh no, wait, there are Achievements as well. Of course there are.

If you were expecting quests, narrative, a storyline, cut-scenes, lore, or indeed any written content whatsoever then you came to the wrong game. Perhaps you were thinking of EQNext?

Landmark exists in an existential void. It is because it is. It has no past. If it has a future it's a future you'll be making for yourselves. That's the collective "you" - the Luminaries.

Could that work? It just might. It's hard to tell right now because although the Wipe and Final Restart (pending one more possible pre-launch wipe but let's not get picky) has brought curiosity-seekers back in numbers, as yet few are back up to speed. The islands Landscapes are almost all bought up but most of the Builds are empty lots as yet.

Almost the last free Build on this Landscape. (Does that really sound better than "Almost the last free Claim on this Island?" Really, DBG?)

I did manage to find a build that was showing off the most basic capabilities of the new scripting system; a compound where a cadre of guards was holding off an incursion by a Toxic Giant. It looked surprisingly authentic. I joined in on the side of the guards and the giant took notice of my amazing DPS skills (press and hold LMB), broke off his engagement with the forces of authority and chased me off the claim. It felt almost like I was playing an MMORPG.

Landmark runs like a drunken pig in stilettos on my elderly PC and looks about as pretty but if you have a machine that can handle it the world, such as it is, looks good enough. The biomes may feel generic and everything might look bland but that's really because they're no more than blank canvas and basic clay. Roll your sleeves up and get on with it: an ambitious myth-maker might work miracles.

Red border means I got beaten up. Makes a nice frame, too.

It shouldn't even be that difficult. It looks as though complexity is out of fashion here. You can, of course, only simplify a set of virtual building tools so far, but compared to where we were a year or eighteen months ago this latest version is pared down to the pith.

All those progression paths for gathering and crafting are gone. The endless grind to upgrade your tools is over. Harvestable plants are back to being mere set dressing. There's just a single craft station left - the Replicator.

The multiple layers of underground caverns and their associated tiers of ore and gems have been replaced by a simple binary: everything is either on the Surface or Underground. Combat, never complex, is another binary. You have your Left Mouse Button. You have your Right Mouse Button. Now go kill something.

The Replicator - Craft Station or Super-villain?

You might have to look quite hard. The decision to have no wildlife on the surface, neither to hunt nor to provide ambient color, seems perverse until you discover that the creatures builders place on claims can wander off. Well, not so much "wander" as chase and kill anyone who disturbs them. It could get lively out there, especially when some people can't tell the difference between mobs and players.

After a couple of hours poking around I feel cautiously optimistic. As an MMORPG Landmark is a complete and utter joke. It's a non-starter. As a toolset for creating MMO content, however, it has genuine potential.

We've seen how players need little incentive beyond the approbation of their peers to put in far more work than paid professionals would ever be willing or able to offer. Star Trek Online, the various versions of Neverwinter, EQ2's own sublime housing and less-than-adequate Dungeon Maker, all of these and many more have been seized with both hands by players eager to show their creativity, get their name on a leaderboard or earn a title or a trophy.

DBG has built a toolset. It's still a little shaky and rough around the edges but it works. If that was all you'd be getting then $9.99 wouldn't seem an unreasonable price but your ten dollars down doesn't just give you the opportunity to build a castle of your own. It's also an entry ticket to every pageant and parade and tournament in the land.

And that could turn out to be quite a bargain.

Not Waving But Drowning : EQNext

The comment thread following Massively's breaking news that Daybreak Games have cancelled Everquest Next runs into four figures. The blogosphere similarly resounds with the clangorous echoes of a mighty giant fallen. Wilhelm, chronicler of all things Norrath, is keeping a tally. I suppose we're all obligated to say something so here goes...

I agree one hundred per cent with Wilhelm when he observes that EQNext "was in its ideal state for a few hours after that first SOE Live presentation about it". It was a great presentation. One of the best I have ever seen for a game. It had verve and enthusiasm and punch. What it didn't have, as became increasingly obvious in the weeks and months that followed, was a game.

Actually, if all the team working on the project hadn't had at that point was a game, they would have been in a much happier place. After all, making games is supposed to be what they do. They could have come up with one in a year or two.

But it was much worse than just not having a game. They also didn't have a game engine or a voxel engine or an AI engine. They didn't have any of the basic infrastructure they needed to hang their game on when they made it.

It didn't stop there. In addition to having no game and no game engines they didn't even have a game plan. Instead they had "open development". That high-concept take on game-making amounted to not much more than a sporadic series of talking shops that asked questions that no-one cared about and didn't even listen to the answers to those.

There was a series of videos offering the unedifying spectacle of various staffers goofing with each other and sending up the project even as they were supposed to be promoting it. There was a whole beta application process, made hideously complicated and controversial by the involvement of PSS1, all for a product that had no earthly chance of entering any kind of beta in any reasonable time-frame.

Let's see, how about we put Qeynos...here!

And, of course, there was Landmark or, as it was initially known, Everquest Next: Landmark.

Landmark came as a total surprise. I never heard anyone claim to have anticipated or expected that SOE would simultaneously announce that they were going to make a new EQ MMORPG and a voxel-based, Minecraft inspired quasi-MMO at one and the same time, let alone that the latter would be available to play in less than six months.

They did, though, and it was. Or it was for those early adopters and curiosity-seekers willing to shell out the price of a triple-A release for what turned out to be a poorly-optimized tech demo.

The weirdest thing about Landmark and its controversial alpha-launch is that, if you go back and read the coverage from those first few months, it seems a lot of people were having a really good time. I was. I bought the most expensive pack for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present and the cheaper one for myself so I could play too.

I have never regretted it for a second. I believe we got good value for our money. If you read my blog posts from back then you can see I was having a lot of fun. A couple of months of fun for the cost of a regular game is about what you'd expect. Of course, some of the supposed perks that were included in the price, like Early Access when the game launched and the ability to carry some of your work into release will never be fulfilled, but I knew then that I was paying a fee to get into the alpha. Everything else was just window-dressing.

I really enjoyed those first two or three months in Landmark. In many ways I liked it best back then, when it was rough and ready and there wasn't much to it. Over the years it has been smoothed and rounded and plumped up so that it's actually quite presentable, although that means it now runs like a three-legged dog on my aging PC.

I'm not so pessimistic as some about Landmark's upcoming launch. It's always been a fun...toy. It's not really a game. At $9.99 it could be a bargain. I'm looking forward to playing it again, whenever I finally upgrade to some tech that can handle it.

Wherever there are Combine Spires there'll always be Norrath

Landmark wasn't only (many would say "even") a "game" in its own right. It was also supposed to be the test-bed for the systems that would drive EQNext. And it was, controversially, the crowd-sourced sweatshop for some of that putative game's actual content.

Landmark players were set contests to design and build what were intended to be the cities of Norrath's future. I forget which ones they got around to doing - Neriak was one. The prize was supposed to be seeing your work immortalized in EQNext; to be part of Norrath, forever.

Now there won't be a new Norrath. Of course, it was actually going to be a very old Norrath, a Norrath from the deep past. Another swirl in the mist of confusion that  obfuscated everything about the project and made it harder and harder to explain or sell as time wore on.

There won't be a new Norrath in Landmark. Officially, that is. The precarious thread between the two has finally been broken. When the game launches you should, as always promised, be able to build whatever you want. I'm betting now that someone, probably a lot of someones, will build Norrath. Just because.

So, we'll have Landmark, if anyone wants it. We won't have EQNext. I'm glad about that. Let's be honest, it looked awful. Other than that jaw-dropping first presentation, when did anything about the project inspire excitement or anticipation from anyone with a strong affection for the franchise?

EQNext was going to be a bright, brash technicolor ARPG in which cartoon characters bounced Tigger-like across frangible landscapes with all the subtlety of a runaway wrecking ball. It would have been a center-targeted, left/right mouse button hammering, console-favoring experience that bore little or no relation to any previous version of Norrath's story.

I would have played it despite almost all the features Dave Georgeson and Jeff Butler crowed over, not because of them. Just because it would, in some peripheral sense, have continuity.

They call this place The Graveyard of Dreams.

I'm very sorry so much time and energy and effort and money was wasted on such a hubristic project. I dearly wish they'd stuck with whatever the first iteration of EQ3 was, all those years ago, before they scrapped it, what was it, four more times? If they'd just have aimed squarely at their core market we might have been playing EQ3 for five years now and I could be writing a piece today speculating on when we might see EQ4.

This is the problem with MMOs. It's great to have a franchise. It's great to have a loyal core audience that wants more of the same. But, unlike a franchise in movies or novels or comics you can't just keep churning them out and selling them to the same people because when it comes to MMOS those same people are still playing your last franchise game.

All that happens if you try to sell them another one is that your same  audience splits into smaller parts. Which is why, instead of making new MMOs you make expansions and stack them on top until the whole thing teeters and totters and anyone not already on the top floor gets a stiff neck looking up at what she'll have to climb to get to where everyone else is supposedly having the time of their lives.

That, I guess, is why Smed and Smokejumper and Jeff "No Gamer Name" Butler were so keen to break out to find a brand new audience. They must have known as well as anyone that all their core audience really wanted was EverQuest with better graphics. That's all the core audience ever wants (although the evidence from EQ's various graphical overhauls suggests that even when they get it they don't like it. Then again, that sums up the average EQ or EQ2 player's response to everything).

Well, the dream of growing the EQ franchise into a new zeitgeist and a global brand is over. It was never more than a pipe dream, at that. The people behind EQ already changed the paradigm once, when they laid down the framework for Blizzard to follow as they made World of Warcraft. You don't often get to change the paradigm or dictate the zeitgeist twice in a career and never by doing the same thing over again.

DCUO: doing much better than clinging on by its fingertips.

What the fallout from this admission of defeat will be remains to be seen. I thought Russell Shanks' statement was quite informative, especially if you read between the lines, as I always try to do. He as much as says that they bit off more than they could chew and that's a lesson SOE never, ever learned. If all that comes out of the fall of EQNext is a realization at DBG that projects need to be proven to be practical, realistic and manageable before work begins on them, that will be a fine legacy.

I believe the EQ franchise has been better-served under DBG than it was for many years under latter-day Sony management. The games run well, get regular updates and new content. The small teams working on them are doing a stellar job. GW2 players can only wish they were getting the same level of service from ANet's vastly larger workforce.

It may be over-optimistic to hope that EQNext going down the pan will free up some extra resources for the older Everquest titles, let alone that we might actually see a new, less insanely ambitious EQ game announced at some point. More likely the individuals not required to work on EQN any longer will be re-assigned to DBG's now-flagship titles, which would be the twin H1Z1s and DCUO.

Whatever happens, though, I am sure it will be better either than the endless silence and suspicion of an unreleased EverQuest Next or the inevitable media car-crash that would have ensued should that unhappy game ever have seen the light of day.

Goodbye EQNext. We never knew you and you won't be missed.

A Trip To The Islands : EQNext Landmark

Today I spent my first full day in EQNext Landmark. In the morning I went searching for the Topaz I needed to craft my Selection Tool, a miraculous device of many functions, not least of which is the ability to save Templates and thereby also to save me from my own incompetence. I visited several islands, trekked across a lot of countryside and saw many wonders. Even at this very early stage, reckless of the wipe to come, people are already flexing their building muscles and, dare we say it, showing off just a tad.

This massive structure was far too large to fit in a screenshot no matter how I clambered and climbed and backpedaled trying to get it all in. It reminded me very much of one of the exhibits at the 1992 Seville Expo. One of the Scandinavian countries I think it was.

An extremely elegant tower and one of the first of many striking buildings I happened upon. This one loomed out of the forest in classic fantasy style. A notice advertized public crafting stations in the lower level but I didn't stop to try them out. It reminded me all too much of a wizard's lair and we all know what kind of a welcome they give curious callers.

The undulating shadows drew my attention to this desert redoubt. It has something of the look of a nineteenth century grain warehouse about it. That's a good thing.

Unsurprisingly there are already a lot of towers. The classic position for your fantasy tower is either a) in the depths of a forest or b) on a craggy mountain-top. This one's on a long, flat ridge. It doesn't look half so dramatic from the other side.

+1 for originality to whoever decided to make this bijou mausoleum. Or maybe it's an over-zealous attempt at a dog kennel. Whatever, it looked particularly spooky in the ethereal morning mists.

There's a whole thread on the forums begging for a cylinder tool to be added. Some people don't need one and they're only to happy to let you know it.

Of all the houses, castles and towers I visited this was probably my favorite. For a start it was almost entirely made of wood, which demonstrates a devotion to craft that goes far beyond the average, or even the rational. Secondly I love hunting lodges. And lastly it was where I used the crafting facilities to make not only my Selection Tool but also a bracer with +1 to Discovery that should help me find more burled wood and a door that actually opens and closes.

That was as far as I traveled. I'd seen a few small parts of three or four islands. There are probably hundreds. No wonder there are plans for a Leaderboard and a Like system when this thing goes Live.

I made my way back to my desert home impressed, inspired, but not abashed. My skills aren't a patch on any of these folks and I haven't had the dedication to grind out the materials to make the tools either but all the same I'm quietly pleased with what I've managed so far. I'm slowly beginning to understand the basics, which, in turn, is allowing me to imagine the possibilities. And as many have said, once you get to building in Landmark the hours purely fly. It's fun!

It's also educational. Today I learned how to use the Selection Tool, not only to save Templates, but to perform mass deletions and additions. I learned how to use select, copy and paste to extract a hemisphere from a sphere and place it as a dome. I learned how to degrade straight edges so they look more like weathered stone and less like Lego.

I also learned that Landmark has an incredibly long day/night cycle and that it gets really dark at night, especially in the forest. I need to get one of those Greater Lightstones. Yes, there really are GLSs in Landmark. If that doesn't prove this is Norrath I don't know what will.

Tomorrow the goal is to gather enough elemental silver and suchlike to make the silversteel pick and from there it's only one more step to mining cobalt to make the Smooth Tool. Until then I think I'll just stand on one of my many viewing platforms and watch the sunset. I'd sit down but there's no animation for that yet.