EverQuest 3 - What, This Again?!

I'm just going to put this down as a marker. I kind of feel I have to, for some reason, although God knows why.

MassivelyOP has a concise, if somewhat snarky, run-through of such facts as exist. If you're interested, as I'm unfortunately aware a lot of people will be, I suggest taking the thirty seconds or so it'll take to read it. (TAGN also put up an excellent post about it as I was typing this.)

The gist, for those who can't be bothered - and who could blame them after the EQNext debacle? - is that EG7 qua Daybreak Games has finally confirmed, unequivocally, that there is an intent to create a sequel to EverQuest and EverQuest II.

The project is in what they uncharmingly describe as the "ideation phase", which means they're still thinking about it. They haven't done anything yet. They don't even plan to start spending any money on it until next year, at which point they're in for around $30m, maybe more.

That doesn't sound much to make an AAA MMORPG but it does happen to be the same amount FromSoftware spent developing Elden Ring. At least, that's what CEO Ji Ham says in the presentation, although where he's getting that figure from beats me. Some sources suggest it cost more like $200m. Even the low end estimate is $50-$70m.

In any event, he's big on FromSoftware: "Those guys? Love 'em - in terms of their model." He believes their success proves that hardcore gameplay can be both mainstream and highly profitable. And he wants the proposed EQ3 to be all of those things. Especially the hardcore part.

I haven't watched the whole of the near three-hour presentation but I have skimmed a fair bit of it and it's surprisingly entertaining. Ji Ham is an even more surprisingly engaging presenter and a lot younger than I imagined. He's also very clearly a gamer, something I definitely did not expect. At one point he speaks rather wistfully about the hours he spent trying and failing to beat one of the bosses in Elden Ring.

If nothing else, I recommend listening to a few minutes from 2:18:00 onwards, when Ji Ham buys heavily into the narrative that EverQuest back in the day was a very tough game and that that's nothing to be afraid of, commercially. I don't personally go along with all of it but he's not saying anything out of line with the generally accepted view of either the franchise or the genre.

He even goes as far as to suggest that the time and effort spent trying to make the EverQuest IP (And by implication MMORPGs as a whole.) more accessible was a mistake, even if that interpretation does somewhat fly in the face of the success of World of Warcraft (For which he correctly names EverQuest as an ancestor and prime influence.) much of which can be put down to its design brief, which was in great part to be an easier and more accessible take on the successful EQ formula.

That's all in the past. Now, the future for the IP is uphill in the snow both ways. Again.

And he seems genuinely enthused by it, that's the strange part. It's like listening to a gamer as much as a businessman. Forget the uncomfortable fact that Elden Ring is a finite, single-player experience and the proposed EQ3 an open-ended, massively multiple live service title. Forget that the FromSoftware ethos, far from being any kind of universal gaming paradigm shift, is instead deeply divisive and the subject of endless, often acrimonious debate.

Even leaving Elden Ring out of it, it has to be acknowledged that the mass market credentials of self-styled "hardcore" MMORPGs are seriously tarnished following the failure of high-profile titles like WildStar and the consistent crash-and-burn meta surrounding just about every indie attempt to turn back time to the self-styled Golden Age of MMOs. But hey, props for trying!

A few years ago something like this might have given me heartburn but I just can't summon up the indignation any more. I've seen all this so many times I can barely be bothered to raise a skeptical eyebrow. This proposed game hasn't even begun development yet. Whatever anyone says about it now will be utterly irrelevant by the time it becomes publicly available, if indeed it ever does.

The timescales quoted in the presentation seem radically optimistic. Apparently the plan is to begin development in 2025 for a 2028 release. I'd be interested to know what the last AAA MMORPG to go from concept to launch in three years was. Even more interested to hear about the last one that did it successfully. 

I suppose if you start the clock running from now, you can stretch it to five years, which does sound more reasonable. Maybe the 2025 "Start of Investment" has some financial implication rather than meaning literally what it says. Maybe there are people working on the project already.

Even then, if the putative EQ3 were to hit some kind of Early Access in 2028, by then I'll be seventy years old. I will not be playing a "hardcore" MMORPG in my seventies. Even if you considered me to belong to one of the older cadres of EQ fans, I'd guess by 2028 the majority of EQ vets will be in their 40s and 50s. This game better not rely on the same kind of reaction times as Elden Ring.

It seems to me that, as I've said before, if EG7/DBG really want to publish a third iteration of EverQuest (A count, by the way, that ignores a whole bunch of titles that have used the IP, not least the PlayStation 2 exclusive MMORPG, EverQuest Online Adventures.) they really ought to think about buying Visionary Realms and having Pantheon rebadged as an EverQuest sequel, which it patently is anyway.

And that's about as much as I want to say about EverQuest 3 for now. In fact, I'd as soon forget about the whole thing altogether, at least until there's some kind of alpha or beta or Early Access that I can sign up for or buy into (Because, obviously, no matter how unsuitable it is or how far outside the target demographic I am, I'll have to at least give it a try...)

As Ji Ham rather gleefully suggests and MOP glumly acknowledges, this is a hype train no-one's going to be able to ignore. For reasons I really don't begin to understand, given that the original EverQuest was by absolutely no reasonable measure any kind of global brand, just the biggest fish in a very small pool that most people at the time didn't even know existed, the mere mention of any resurrection of the IP now seems to incite a frenzied response from gamers, most of whom surely can never have played any iteration of the IP at all, far less been there in 1999, when it all began.

At this point, the whole EverQuest phenomenon reminds me of the infamous Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols gig of 4 June 1976, which was attended by fewer than a hundred people but claimed as a seminal life experience by thousands. I look forward to years of listening to people droning on and on about what they imagine the new EQ will be like and throwing toddler-like tantrums when reality intrudes on their pipe dreams. Just like happened with EQNext and Landmark. Joy!

As for the plans for H1Z1... don't get me started!

Don't Go, Kitty, Kitty

The PC Gamer post-WoW roll-call of births and deaths I was discussing yesterday includes eleven MMORPGs I could reasonably claim to have played plus one that no-one ever did. They break down into three categories: games I took seriously, games I dabbled with and games I merely glanced at.

Of the twelve, there are two that shouldn't even be on the list in the first place: EQNext and City of Heroes. I'll get to EQN later. First, let's think about City of Heroes.

Did no-one fact-check the copy? The title of the piece is "25 MMOS that lived and died since World of Warcraft launched" but the North American launch of CoH pre-dates WoW's by a full six months. It says so right there in the article! I believe I may have played it in beta as early as late 2003.

CoH looked, on paper, like something I'd really enjoy. I've been a superhero fan since before I learned to read. My mother, in her late eighties, still occasionally complains about how she had to read those speech bubbles out loud to me when I was four years old. At the time the game was announced I was deep into EverQuest and the MMORPG genre - it looked as though it could have been made for me.

It wasn't. Not even close. What always appealed to me most about superhero comics, even as a child, was the soap opera. The fighting? Not so much. CoH, in beta at least, seemed to be nothing but an endless conveyor belt of  meaningless battles, most of them in featureless offices and warehouses or bland city lots.

I played the beta in a desultory fashion for a few weeks, on and off. It was deeply disappointing. When the game launched I didn't buy it and during its eight year run I never once considered giving it a go. For my money there has never been a good superhero MMO. DCUO is the best I've played but that's more for the glorious movement controls, the well-realised cityscapes and the housing than anything to do with the combat or the story.

When City of Heroes miraculously re-appeared earlier this year (in true superhero "I was never really dead" style, I might add) I gave it a try and enjoyed it a lot more than I had back in 2003/4. Just not enough to keep logging in after the initial rush.

Moving on from the game that shouldn't be on the list at all, we come to the ones I tried just to say I had. Chief among those is Hello Kitty Online. I played HKO maybe two or three times. I downloaded it because people insisted on using it as a pejorative in general chat in MMORPGs I did play and that irritated me.

What's not to love?

My feeling was that none of the people using the fashion-challenged feline as a stick to beat their supposed inferiors with would actually have played the game. If I wanted to be able to call them out on that I had to have some basic experience myself.

Also, I do like Hello Kitty, with whom I have a little history. I remember the first time I happened upon a display of HK merchandize in real life, in the El Corte Ingles department store in Barcelona sometime in the early '90s. I was so amazed I bought a couple of items, one of which I later gave to someone I worked with as a leaving present, when they went back to the U.S.

I can remember all of that but almost nothing about Hello Kitty Online, except that it was a lot less casual than I'd imagined. I know I used that as a deflating counter-argument in chat battles a few times, although finding Hello Kitty Online more challenging than I expected was perhaps not exactly the argument-clincher I was looking for.

Speaking of memory and its failings, this is where I offer a practical dmonstration. I thought I'd played Mythos, which is why it's in this section instead of in yesterday's post, where it should have been. Turns out, on fuirther investigation, I never played it at all.

There was a brief period when a clutch of online games using Greek and Roman mythology as a backdrop appeared at around the same time. I played at least two of them and I thought Mythos was one of those but, looking at some reviews and screenshots, it clearly wasn't.

The game I was thinking of, which I remember playing quite a few times, was Mytheon not Mythos. It's still running. You can get it on Steam. Looking at the screenshots, Mythos looks like a more interesting title. I kind of wish I'd played that instead.

Moving swiftly on, we come to games I played a fair bit, on and off, but which never made it into the majors. Minions of Mirth is almost the poster child for my personal minor leagues. (Way to go there, Bhagpuss! A mixed metaphor combining two cultural touchstones, neither of which form any part of your own immediate culture. Some kind of a record, I think. Plus now you're talking about yourself in the second person...)

Someone exploring much further into Minions of Mirth than I ever managed.

MoM was unusual in that it could be played either as a full MMORPG or as a single-player game. That seemed like a great idea back in 2005 and it still seems like one now. Wouldn't it solve all kinds of problems? And if an obscure indie like Prairie Games could do it, what's stopping the big guns?

Minions of Mirth was an EQ-inspired game with graphics that looked more dated than EQ's even in 2005. I must have played through the starting area four or five times over the years but I never really got much farther than the equivalent of Qeynos Hills. The MMORPG closed its gates a couple of years back but the single-player version is still available. I even have it installed although I doubt I'll ever play it again.

Marvel Heroes is an odd one. I played it quite a few times and read about it a lot more because several bloggers I followed seemed to be very into it indeed. For me, the game doubled down on two things I really don't like at all: the Diablo-style lootfest and the aforementioned superhero action mode.

I grew up with the Marvel characters, although I was (and remain) a DC fan at heart. Marvel Heroes seemed to me to strip away virtually everything that had made Marvel the most successful comics publisher of the late twentieth century and which went on to make it one of the most profitable and worshipped global brands of the early twenty-first.

It seemed to me like a game designed by people whose only knowledge of the characters came from a short conversation with a six-year old child. Costumes? Check! Powers? Check! Personality, motivation, backstory, depth? I dunno what those things are, mister. It was the MMORPG equivalent of smashing action figures together and shouting "Bam!", something I didn't even do when I was six years old.

The most interesting thing about Marvel Heroes for me was the bizarre way it ended. Made no sense at all. Just like the game.

Stolen from my own blog.

But then, what happened to Marvel Heroes at the end happened to Firefall time and time again, while it was still running. Was there ever a game that changed direction so many times? Or suffered so many public disputes among its developers?

I played it in a couple of its variants. It wasn't the sort of game that seemed likely to appeal to me - I'm not mad keen on shooters and I don't have a lot of time or affection for mech-suits - but a couple of bloggers kept writing interesting stories about it so I thought I'd give it a try.

I enjoyed it much more than I expected, even though I was absolutely terrible at playing it. I liked the environments and the jetpack movement. It also looked great in screenshots, which always helps, particularly since, by this time, I had a blog to put them in.

The thing about opinions on Firefall is this: they depends entirely which version the opinion-holder played. Each major revision was so radical Red5 might as well have re-marketed them as new games. I liked the version with the public quests based around thumping. That one would have made for a solid MMORPG experience, I think. When they took that out I liked it a lot less. It felt more like a single-player game the last time I logged in.

That's the last of the also-rans. looks like this is shaping up to be to be a trilogy. Part three will get to the games I played for long enough to have something of substance to say about them. Or so we may hope.

Except there's one anomaly to dispose of first. The game I mentioned at the top of the post. The one that really has no reason being on PC Gamer's list at all. Not because someone can't read a calendar but because someone apparently can't read reality.

Much though some would like to believe otherwise, EQNext never existed. There was no game, ever. All there was were some videos, a lot of concept art and a few minutes of faked gameplay put together for a convention.

Blurry and out of focus. How appropriate.

It's quite hard to dig that little fact out of the welter of "Oh noes! My beloved EQNext is no more!" eulogies that clog the filters of a google search but as Feldon explains in an incendiary demolition of the entire EQNext debacle at EQ2Wire, "The EverQuest Next “combat demo” shown at SOE Live in 2013 was entirely smoke and mirrors, with developers back at the home office “playing” NPCs."

It wasn't just the demo; the entire EQNext project was smoke and mirrors. There was no game. There never had been a game. There never would be a game. It has no place on a list of MMORPGs that lived and died because it never did either of those things. I'd say good riddance to it but even that gives its existence more credence than it deserves.

Landmark definitely did exist, though, and I'll get to it next time, along with Vanguard, Warhammer, Free Realms and Wildstar. I'll even bring my own screenshots!

EQ3 Eh? Eh? Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink, Say No More!

Wilhelm sent me a link to an EverQuest site he'd discovered, called The EverQuest Show. I think it was intended primarily as a YouTube channel, which debuted in February this year, but so far there have only been three episodes, while the website has been considerably more active. There was a new post there just today.

I've added The EverQuest Show to the blog roll but it wasn't the site itself that drew me to make this post. As I was flipping through the articles I spotted a link to an AMA with Holly "Windstalker" Longdale and three other Daybreak devs, hosted by Fires of Heaven.

It looks as though the AMA happened in May or June so it's very current. It's also very long. I read the whole thing and it took me a couple of hours. There's plenty of waffle and nonsense but also plenty of tidbits that would interest any EQ fan.

One question that crops up over and over again in different forms is whether Daybreak are working on a new EverQuest game. Holly attempts to keep a poker face on this for a while but as her answers pile up the winks and smiles give the game away, literally. Ok, metaphorically.

I've severely trimmed these but here's some of the "evidence":

Q. Since there have been some rumors going around it, Is there another EQ game in development (other than the Nantworks stuff) by DBG?

Alan VanCouvering (Lead Content Designer): Wouldn't you like to know!

Holly: ….. 

Q. Being the 20th Anniversary, what is the future of the EQ Franchise? Be specific please. Is there another game in developed or at least in the talks of being developed or are we to expect that EQ will just receive expansions and new servers each year? 

Holly: There is a future and I don’t have specifics for you. The specifics will come when we have meaningful news. 

Q. So in 2019 if I’m an old school EQ guy who loves the world (nostalgia is a hell of a drug) but I also don’t want to play 20 year old games, is there a reason to care about the franchise? Are y’all going to surprise launch an early access EQ3 or am I stuck with ignoring a mobile game?

Holly: We have spent a lot of time looking into the future and how we build this franchise up even better than we have in the past. We did some research over a year ago with all ages of gamers. It’s amazing how many young people know the name “EverQuest” because of family and other gamers. We are still relevant and considered an original. Someday soon we hope to take advantage of that global recognition and release something new. Can’t say when. Have no details. 

Q. Will daybreak ever do anything worthwhile with this IP? Specifically getting a green light to do some real development work and create an Everquest remake with the same mechanics as the original plus 2 expansions updated graphically and from an audio perspective with consoles included and cross platform play?

Holly: We will definitely do something with the IP. A strict remake? Probably not. Will it embody the EQ spirit, most likely yes.

Q. With such an iconic IP will we ever see EQ3?

Holly: 😄

Q. Now that Blizzard is showing cracks in the armor, and the MMO space is super-dry, how about you announce right here that EQ3 is in production?

Holly: Another EQ game? 😊

 In an answer to a question on EQNext, Ed Hardin III (Lead Systems Designer) said 

One of the hardest lessons we learned from Landmark/Next was to not start publicity until we are certain the promise of the game can be realized. 

From that I think we can take it we won't be hearing anything about whatever Daybreak has cooking until they're almost ready to take it out of the oven. But something is definitely cooking!

Elsewhere in the AMA there's confirmation that the mobile project NantWorks was supposedly working on, using the EverQuest IP, is still ongoing. The EQ team has some involvement, presumably advisory, but no control over what the game turns out to be.

Q. Can you give us any details at all on EQ Mobile?

Alan VanCouvering :  I don't know if anyone here knows anything about it, but it's outside our control. 

Ed Hardin III: While we (as a company) will have input into what anyone else does with EverQuest on mobile devices, we (as individuals) aren’t going to be designing it.

Holly: They are in their early days and will tell you when they are ready and confident. We are definitely involved though.

Going back to EQNext and Landmark, the team's answers confirm what I've thought for a very long time were the reasons the game never got anywhere: it was beyond the technical capacity of the company to produce, at least within the budget they had to work with.

Q. Landmark seems like a huge setback (time & financially). I spent a good chunk of time "building" in that world, but once I realized it was overtaking EQ3 production completely, I abandoned it. My drive at the time was the hope of watching EQ3 be built. Is there any regret/animosity toward going the Landmark/Voxel direction?

Alan VanCouvering: Yes, Landmark/Next cost us, but if you don't try you never know what can be done. I don't think we really regret trying, just that it didn't work out.

Q. How much of EQ: Next was real and how much of it was smoke and mirrors?

Holly: EQ Next was real, but a long way from completion when we had to walk away from it. Very tough, but the right decision at the time. There’s mountains of great work that went into that game that won’t go to waste. We aren’t done with this franchise. Not by a long bowshot.

One thing that was asked repeatedly and was shot down in flames every time was the possibility of a "Remastered" version of EverQuest. Too expensive and the resources would be better spent on a new game. Couldn't agree more.

Other topics of note (to me, at least) were:

Reverting the notorious Freeport revamp for the TLE servers (they'd like to but too time-consuming).

What happened to the Quarm special event server? (Not as popular as expected and took more dev resources than the limited interest justified).

Why isn't there a PvP server? (there is and no-one plays on it (as Wilhelm always suspected)).

Why do they keep making expansions for EQ and EQ2 that no-one plays? (Lots of people buy them).

Did the then-team know what a disaster they had on their hands with the Gates of Discord expansion (oh, yes...).

Was Brad McQuaid actually any good as a designer? (He was and remains "a driving force", "an unstoppable force").

And to finish, a couple of short ones that deserve re-quoting in full:

Q. Any thoughts on Legends style TLP servers? Premium fee on top of regular sub, DBG gets additional funding, we get real GMs and regular events? (For those who missed it, Legends was a Premium server with a much higher subscription charge than the regular game)

Alan VanCouvering: Legends was a disaster in all possible ways. I highly doubt that enough people would actually want to pay as much as we would need to ask for to run a server like that.

Holly: What Alan said. Entitlement breeds demands that no dev team could realistically meet. Doesn’t mean we won’t offer premium-type stuff, but that server was super painful as a business model and play experience for a bunch of reasons.

And my favorite of all:

Q. Why does my Clockwork Rhino mount eat all my food?

Alan: There might be a gnome living inside it. 

Ed: I can’t say there isn’t a gnome.

There's a lot more in the full thing. I recommend reading it thoroughly if you have an interest in EQ or, indeed, in how Daybreak operates these days. And thanks again to Wilhelm for steering me in the general direction of this little goldmine. If it was reported or referenced anywhere else I didn't see it.

Second Time Around

In a post called "What Should Everquest 3 Even Look Like?", Wilhelm quotes John Smedley, ex-CEO of Sony Online Entertainment and Godfather of the EverQuest franchise, as saying the main lesson he learned from launching EQ2 was that he shouldn't make any more MMO sequels.

Smed didn't follow his own advice and neither has anyone else. Off the top of my head and in no particular order I can think of

Lineage II
Guild Wars 2
Asheron's Call 2
FFXIV (Twice!)
Planetside 2
EverQuest II 

Releasing a game under the same name with "2" or "II" appended (or XIV, if you're Square) isn't the only way to follow up a hit MMORPG. Ultima Online was going to have a sequel, Ultima Worlds Online: Origin. That never happened. Dark Age of Camelot is hoping for a spiritual sequel in Camelot Unchained. That may or may not ever happen. City of Heroes spawned City of Villains and Wizard 101 was followed by Pirate 101.

You don't even have to make a new game. Archey, in the comments to Wilhelm's post, suggested World of Warcraft already had its sequel in Cataclysm. Or you can just port your current game to another platform. It worked for H1Z1.

Sequels, then, seem fairly well-established. Success varies but by and large the effort seems worthwhile. FFXIV and GW2 have been unequivocal successes and most of the rest would seem to have washed their faces, at least.

What's missing from the above round-up is threequels. Quite a few companies have seen fit to take a second trip to the well but no-one so far has risked a third. Okay, that's not strictly true. NCSoft has had a third Lineage title in development for seven years and that's where it remains - in development.

The only MMORPG I can think of that actually has had three discrete versions of the same IP, all running as full MMORPGs simultaneously is... EverQuest. Long before Lineage Eternal, just after the peak of EQ's success, in the mid-2000s SOE had three MMORPGs set in Norrath : EQ, EQII and EverQuest Online Adventures, the PS2 Console version. Arguably they had four, with the Mac version but since that was effectively just a sliver of the main EQ game, frozen in time, we'll discount that for now.

By that count, if Daybreak did go for a new EverQuest game it would either be EverQuest 4 or EQ5. No wonder SoE went with EQNext. Whatever number or name they stuck on the back of it, I'm not wholly convinced it would be a great idea even to try. But then, if they don't try, where does that leave them?

As I've mentioned before, there's been an increasing murmur of speculation among GW2 players about the possibilites of a second sequel to Guild Wars. There hasn't been the least scintilla of a hint from any official source that such a thing is even in the earliest planning stages, let alone imminent. On the contrary, there have been past statements suggesting the developers are minded never to let it happen.

Even so, people talk. MMORPGs have very long lives and by design they don't need to be replaced. They can be refurbished and re-purposed to meet changing requirements without any need to scrap the whole thing and start over. But.

Yes, and it's a very big "but", indeed. Old game is old game. Old players are old players. Every time you make a radical change to attract new blood, first you have to convince anyone you have something genuinely fresh and then you have to calm your existing players who think you're going change the game they love. Hard circle to square.

It's a dilemma no-one has quite figured out yet. Blizzard has been steadily "re-starting" WoW with each expansion for years now but the evidence for that approach working is sketchy at best. If they'd just carried on building on top of the same systems instead of tearing them down and starting over every 18-24 months, would they have fewer subscribers now or more?

Perhaps it is a safer bet to launch a sequel after all. Maybe you will split the audience but you also might find a way to keep your hardcore while also attracting players who hadn't really wanted to buy what you were already selling.

When you've made the decision and your sequel, what then? Maybe you planned for obsolescence and your elder game goes to maintenance (FFXI, Guild Wars) or even sunsets. Maybe you run both in tandem, serving two sets of players, hoping they have synergies you can exploit (EQ/EQII, Lineage/LineageII).

And then what? What happens when your sequel is itself fading, long in the tooth and bleeding players, server count shrinking and press releases going unreported? Do you double down on what you've got, dig in for the long haul, husband your diminishing resources and declining revenues to keep the lights on as long as possible? Or do you risk throwing everything you have to the winds with another roll of the same dice?

No-one knows the answer to any of these questions. The concept of online video games with no "use before" date is still fresh and untried. As Wilhelm regularly reminds us, people still play MUDs. Why? Who? For how much longer?

TorilMUD, EQ's direct ancestor and therefore WoW's, too, turns thirty in four years' time. EverQuest is twenty this year, EQII and WoW both fifteen. Are these things ever going to stop? Will they die faster if they spawn sequels or will the publicity extend their lives, too?

The calculations are going to work out differently in every case and there is, of course, the small matter of whether the sequel is any good. FFXIV:ARR and GW2 are strong sequels because they're strong games. Had they been launched with different titles they'd most likely have been successful too.

On the other hand, standing on the shoulders of strong, successful MMORPGs probably didn't do either of them any harm. To go back to Wilhelm's original question, if it ever happens, what EverQuest 3 should look like is a good game.

I'm not naive enough to believe that quality is its own reward. There's timing, luck and publicity to consider, for a start. I also understand that brand recognition matters. When you have a tainted brand like EverQuest, however, people knowing your name cuts both ways. Whether the next Norrath comes to us on PC, Console or Mobile, it is going to have to be good.

It doesn't have to be original. Originality gets you column inches and awards but it doesn't necessarily get you customers. It also doesn't have to be perfect. Was Fortnite? Was PUBG? Was WoW?

No, what EQ3 has to be is a game that people want to play; a lot of people. Those people could be the people playing EQ and EQ2 right now, in which case EQ3 could replace either or both, or they could be new people, in which case Daybreak might end up running three EverQuests again.

When - if - DBG announces a new EverQuest title, what it can't afford to be is something no-one wants. Something that alienates almost everyone. Something people laugh or sneer at or even plain ignore. Something no-one believes will ever happen. Not again.

It's a big risk. Would you take it if your livelihood depended on it?

For what it's worth, I think the opportunity waiting to be explored here is indeed a sequel. Not to the original, nor yet to EQ2. The Norrathian game that's crying out for the full-blown sequel treatment is EverQuest Online Adventures.

PC gaming is in its twilight years. The future is Mobile, Consoles and, one day, VR. The concept of MMOs, once alien, is becoming very familiar to console gamers. They seem to like it. And DBG already has a very successful console title with DCUO.

What's more, EQOA has an unblemished reputation and a nostalgia market of its own. Combined with the much-discussed trend towards less-punishing mechanics and more action-oriented gameplay, interest in a new, well-designed, console-based MMOLite under the EverQuest rubric could be considerable.

I'd buy a console to play that. Although, come to think of it, I'd have to buy a television, too...

Can I Click It? : Ashes of Creation

When Intrepid Studios released their latest video this week I didn't take much notice. Yes, I backed the successful Ashes of Creation Kickstarter but my attitude to crowdfunded projects tends towards fire and forget, with the emphasis on forget.

I probably should be paying more attention. After all, I didn't just back AoC once, I backed it twice - firstly in my name and then again on behalf of Mrs Bhagpuss. She didn't ask me to do that, it just looked to be one of the only two possible post-GW2 MMOs we might end up playing together (the other being Pantheon).

I thought I might as well get both our names down early in case the beta turned out to be fun. The last time we tested something together was probably Landmark and that worked out pretty well - for a while.

There is a connection between Landmark and Ashes of Creation, of course. The "Companies our team has worked with previously" section on the Intrepid website has Daybreak's glaring eye front and center. Even more tellingly, of the nine listed titles members of the team worked on before joining Intrepid no fewer than seven are SOE/DBG MMOs. Landmark doesn't get a mention but EQNext does. Is that a healthy MMO lineage or does it suggest a worrying degree of inbreeding?

Mrs Bhagpuss was never sold on the voxel aspect of Landmark and I became quickly and increasingly skeptical about almost everything planned for EQNext. Whether either of us  would want to see any of those ideas carried on by a new studio is uncertain.

Nice dungeon.

While Landmark ended up being a fun toy that I would have gone on fiddling around with for years, I can't say I suffered even the slightest pang of sadness or loss when DBG shut it down. It was a directionless mess that never came close even to working out what it wanted to be, far less being that thing.

As for EQNext, what began as an exciting new direction fast turned into a vanity project that looked set to rival Star Citizen for hubris. I was positively relieved when someone at Columbus Nova finally had the gumption to pull the plug.

Looking at the design brief and some of the concept art for Ashes of Creation, I can't help but think that there's some carry-over from the doomed Landmark/EQN project. That might be concerning but the proposal for Ashes of Creation does look less insane overwrought. It still strikes me as over-ambitious in some respects but then so do the feature lists of almost all in-development MMOs. At least this time the suspicion is only that some features may have to be cut rather than that the entire underpinnings of the project are so far beyond the technical grasp of the people involved that the game will never even manifest a working prototype.

Obviously I think Ashes of Creation has potential as an MMO I'd one day enjoy. If not I wouldn't have backed it. Even so, I don't spend much time speculating about how it may turn out. I don't expect to be using my guaranteed beta invite until 2020 or so. These things always take much longer than the promises and pledges would have you believe.

Nice woodland.

Consequently I have barely been skimming the odd flecks of PR that drift into view. I took a very quick glance at the recent video when Massively OP featured it but I saw nothing to comment on and I'd already blanked it from my thoughts - until I read UltrViolet's brief observation:

My first draft of this post had a whole lot more negative words here, but I’m editing it way down to just this: I didn’t think the game looked very good, and I’m shocked that they released that video.

 Was it really that bad? What did I miss?

So I took another look at it. I still skimmed, but this time I dipped in and out of the whole thing, watching thirty seconds here, thirty seconds there.

And it looks pretty good to me. In fact, it looks remarkably similar to the footage from that other would-be MMO on my watch-list, Pantheon. Two upcoming MMOs, each heavily influenced by the design ethos of SOE/DBG, looking not unlike each other. Who'd have thought it?

Mouse pointer clearly in shot there - appeared to be used to target.

The characters look like fantasy rpg types. The world looks like a fantasy rpg world (western variant). The spell effects look like spell effects and the combat looks like combat. There's a lot of running around, the animation looks decent, movement seems smooth, even the cloaks ripple in the breeze. No-one gets stuck on scenery or falls through the world - at least in the bits I watched.

What more do you want from a "pre-alpha"? Performance-wise, in my testing days that would have exceeded the brief for what we called mid-beta. I think Pantheon looks the better of the two on all counts so far but I'd happily play either of them right now on the evidence I've seen.

Most importantly to me I spotted something in the recent AoC video that I've looked for in earlier footage and failed to see - evidence that the game uses standard MMORPG controls. I hadn't until now been able to ascertain for certain whether the game was going to go with old school, tab-targeting and hotbars or the supposedly more widely accepted ARPG route.

While I can and do play MMOs that hide the cursor and lock the mouse for combat only, it's very much not my preference. I find it awkward and cumbersome even when, as in DCUO or Black Desert, it's done well. Mrs Bhagpuss, who can also use that system if she has to, dislikes it more than I do. She would have to be incredibly interested in a particular game to make the necessary effort.

Watching the developers playing their own game this time there were plenty of moments where I could clearly see the mouse cursor moving purposefully across the screen while the characters were traveling. Several times I thought I saw someone select an enemy with the mouse pointer and that enemy's nameplate window appear on screen as a result.

I don't think you can see the pointer in this shot but he did just use it to target that flower.

That was reassuring indeed but the best part was a moment late in the video when I clearly saw the mouse pointer move to one of the icons on the hotbar and click it to fire off an attack. It had long been my hope that the visual presence of the hotbar indicated it had a use in combat but naturally no developer is going to be a clicker like me. Except this one time, so thanks for that, GM Steven!

Of course, it may be that there's an invisible GM/Dev overlay in use - it looks that way quite often in the video. Also this is pre-alpha - anything can change and most things probably will. Nothing is proven until I can actually play it myself.

In an attempt to nail this one down I went and did a bit of research. Unsurprisingly at this stage everything is still somewhat vague. There's also a good deal of the familiar hand-waving you always get in conversations with developers of MMOs that almost no player can actually play yet, wherein everything is going to be amazing and all the systems will be innovative and nothing like anything you may ever have played before.

With those caveats, the basic plan appears to be a form of tab-targeting with control of the mouse left open. There will be telegraphs and dodging and it all sounds a lot like GW2, which would be wonderful.

We'll see. Eventually. I remain hopeful that Ashes of Creation might end up an MMORPG in the grand tradition, not just yet another ARPG with pretensions. I hope so, anyway.

And with that I think I'll forget about it for another year or two.

It's Not Easy Being DBG : Landmark, EQNext

In a move that surely surprised no-one Daybreak Games yesterday announced the intent to sunset Landmark on February 21 2017. Why this particular date, who knows? It's a Tuesday, which is DBG's regular patch day, so I guess it's just convenient. Everything has to end sometime. Why not then?

The announcement has stirred up the inevitable, expected and by now immensely tedious flurry of schadenfreude and faux-rage from people who most likely never played Landmark or indeed any other SOE or DBG game. Not, at least, in the last decade or so. Tyler F.M. Edwards at Superior Realities has the best take on the hand-wringing, fist-shaking echo chamber that passes for a community in some quarters these days:

"To be blunt, I think the blame for Landmark’s end rests squarely on the shoulders of the MMO community. When EverQuest Next was cancelled, the community turned on Daybreak, apparently not understanding that sometimes new concepts simply do not work...the community, however, chose to demonize Daybreak as some sort of ogre. They took EverQuest Next’s cancellation personally. And a lot of that hate spilled over to Landmark.

People hated Landmark because it wasn’t Next. People hated Landmark just because it was made by Daybreak. People hated it because they had misinformed or unrealistic expectations of what it was supposed to be".

Read the whole of Tyler's post. It catches the tone exactly, how Landmark meant a lot to those who loved it, how much it will be missed, and how galling it is for anyone who actually spent real time in Landmark to see the almost self-congratulatory bloodletting unleashed by those who never did.

An even more instructive read is Feldon's excellent post-hoc analysis at EQ2Wire. Feldon, as always, knows more than he's able to articulate openly but here you scarcely even need to read between the lines. The numerous quotes from ex-SOE devs, who worked on Landmark and EQNext during what must have been some very miserable and disturbing times in the dying days of the ancien régime, are devestating.

These are just a few of the highlights:

"…the decision to publish Landmark was not driven to sell something to players. It was done to show that SOE had a pipeline of products so it would be more attractive to prospective buyers"

"Landmark was a disaster. It should have remained a toolset for building EQN and nothing more."

"Landmark was Dave’s (Georgeson's) obsession, and there simply was no way to convince him otherwise about it being a game. I believe this ultimately killed EQN."

"Dave approached the project with the wrong assumptions and when the market pushed back he doubled down on his mistakes. EQN was his responsibility and he blew it, and Smed should have removed him sooner when it became clear what was happening."

 All from people who worked on the project. And there's a lot more. Go read it if you haven't already.

Feldon himself has some choice observations, the headline among which is probably this one:

"The EverQuest Next “combat demo” shown at SOE Live in 2013 was entirely smoke and mirrors, with developers back at the home office “playing” NPCs."

 This one won't surprise anyone who plays EQ or EQ2:

"Feedback from the existing EverQuest and EverQuest II teams was largely ignored. Instead, credence was primarily given to outside feedback from recently laid off 38 Studios staff and other outsiders in the industry."

And, perhaps most tellingly of all:

"Sony Online Entertainment took a $62 million writeoff in 2013 for development costs associated with EverQuest Next and H1Z1". 

I hold my hand up. Dave Georgeson, John Smedley and the rest of that whole, sorry crew fooled me the way they fooled the industry, the media and the rest of the fans. I wrote pieces in praise of EQNext even as I understood it would be an MMO that wasn't being made for me or for the millions of former and current EQ and EQ2 players but for a whole, new, much larger audience. I understood the compromises that would require and I knew and wrote that the game would not, in all likelihood, be one I'd enjoy very much, yet I wished it well and hoped it would succeed.

What I didn't realize was that there would be no game, no matter how long we waited, because no-one who was making it had any idea how it could be made. I didn't realize the Smed and Smokejumper dog and pony show was just that - a carnival huckster operation linked to some of the widest-eyed, most naive wishful-thinking ever seen outside a pre-school playground.

The very first comment on the EQ2Wire piece sums it up nicely:

"I am just speechless as how much Georgeson fucked over this franchise."

Aren't we all?  And yet I don't "hate" him for it. I don't believe anyone in this whole unholy mess was acting maliciously. Like so many other games development stories it's a tale of people who think they know more than they know, who think they can do more than they can do, and above all, who believe if they say something often enough and loud enough it will become true by the sheer force of their wishing it so.

Well it doesn't. It won't. It can't. EQNext always sounded too good be true and it was. Or rather it wasn't and never will be.

As for Landmark, far from being the full-fledged MMO Dave Georgeson claimed, promised and finger-crossed it would be, it never even managed to be the toolset it should have been. As Feldon's investigations plainly discover, even the tools didn't work and when they did no-one knew how or why.

And yet for all that we had fun. I had fun.  Aywren had fun. Tyler had fun. Even Wilhelm, who's keeping a list, had a few moments. Hundreds, thousands of amazing structures were built, projects started, memories made. I had good times in Landmark, some of which I've written about here. I spent many happy hours noodling around there and if I regret anything it's only that I spent too much time.

Far from feeling ripped off for paying some $150 for two alpha packages I feel I got my money's worth and then some. Between us Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent hundreds of hours in Landmark and almost all of those were good hours.

So, will I miss Landmark? No, not really. I'm glad to have experienced it but if I'm honest I was done with it a while ago. All my houses eventually fell down, including the final one I built after the game officially went Live. The main he reason was I couldn't ever remember to log in often enough to keep them standing. When you have to remind yourself to log in you can hardly claim you'll miss it when it stops.

And in the end, what was Landmark? It wasn't quite a game and it certainly wasn't a virtual world. It was supposed to be those things and a toolset too but the best description I can come up with is that Landmark was a toy.

Like a toy, I played with it now and again, when the mood took me, but as soon as I put it down I forgot all about it. If I miss it, ever, it will be the way I miss my old Hot Wheels set, vaguely and with a mild, warm nostalgia. I wouldn't go out and buy another.

I understand that's not how many will be feeling right now, although you'd need to define "many" rather specifically, since these days peak population across the entire game falls short of a couple of hundred people. The builders and creators, working on some of those stunning projects or just puttering around, like my old gaming friend who was busy building his own take on The Shire with some guildmates from LoTRO, those folks will be angry, upset, hurt, bereft.

Some will feel tricked. Some will feel betrayed. They will curl in or lash out. Inevitably, the blank slate of Daybreak Games and the faceless corporate monolith that is Columbus Nova will take a splattering of paint while the real perpetrators of this outrage not only escape condemnation but even reap the deeply undeserved rewards of misplaced sympathy: Dave Georgeson, who appears to have left the industry and Smed, who the industry appears to be leaving behind, not to mention the ever-anonymous Russell Shanks, who presided over DBG while more poor decisions continued to be made, as well as the rest who slipped away quietly while the sign-painters were changing the names on the doors.

Yes, Columbus Nova and the current Daybreak management could have finessed the end of both EQNext and Landmark with a softer touch. It was foolish to claim EQNext was being canned because "it wasn't fun". They should have said "because it won't run and never will". Because "we bit off more than we could chew, we had dreams bigger than our ability to realize them, because we made promises we couldn't keep".

They might have adopted a warmer, more empathic tone. They might even have resisted slamming the door on any remaining hope quite so fiercely, although that in itself might merely have compounded earlier errors of judgment.

They should have said sorry and meant it but by the time there was no putting off the inevitable any longer all the people from whom an apology would have meant anything were nowhere to be seen. I imagine the main thing Columbus Nova is sorry about is that they ever got involved in this farrago in the first place. Like the rest of us I imagine they were mesmerized by smoke and mirrors and sold a handful of beans. When they rubbed the fairy dust from their eyes the carnival was gone.

I'd love - I'd love -  for the closure of Landmark to draw a line under this whole sorry episode. I'd love for late-period SOE to slip away into the history books taking its ill-conceived, ill-fated, ill-humored EQNext project with it, never to be mentioned again. I'd love for the current management team at Daybreak to be allowed to get on with day to day operations and business as usual.

Yes, I'd love that but this is the internet. This is gaming. No grudge is ever forgotten. No wound is ever allowed to heal. The very best those of us who love the franchise can hope is that Daybreak under Columbus Nova finally becomes so boring that no-one remembers it's there.

Fat chance. Next up, some necessary but controversial decision involving LotRO or DDO. Or an announcement of some new game that everyone can project their fantasies and fears onto without ever needing to see let alone play. The caravan rolls on.

Cut To The Chase : Pantheon

Visionary Realms, the developer behind Brad McQuaid's "Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen", has a predilection for releasing very, very long live streams, during which various developers talk at great length and in considerable detail about the systems and concepts behind the game. This is a form of publicity that has its merits but for anyone with a less-than obsessive interest in the project it can be counterproductive.

It's true that watching other people play video games has become a thing in the second decade of the twenty-first century so there's probably some demographic that actively looks forward to a full evening of watching a bearded guy in a beanie hat talk over muddy footage of a pre-alpha but its a demographic that doesn't include me. That doesn't mean to say I'm not interested. I'm very interested. It's more that I just want the bullet point version.

Amazingly, someone has thought of that. And not just thought about it but done something to make it happen. Thanks to the invaluable MassivelyOP my attention was drawn to this google docs summary.

It's a fantastic list of topics hyperlinked to the exact point in the stream where those subjects are discussed. I spent half an hour flipping through it and learned a lot. And what I learned I liked.

CohhCarnage, hosting the stream, asks the VR devs a number of questions put to him by the viewers of his channel. Sometimes he answers from his own perspective as someone who's played the game as it stands right now. There's a wealth of detail but the key takeaway comes in his reply to the simple question "How close to EverQuest is this?" to which he replies "...in my mind it's what EQ2 should have been...EverQuest One with a little bit of Vanguard and some modern mechanics".

And isn't it just? You can see that in every second of footage. It looks like Vanguard, it plays like EQ and the footage of the Perception System demonstrates that everything doesn't have to be exactly the way it would have been a decade ago, let alone all the way back in 1999. What's more, if you scroll down that Google Docs page to the summaries and screenshots after the links you can see the similarities go way, way further than skin-deep.

When Pantheon was announced I think it's fair to say we were all skeptical. No, let's be fair - the most optimistic among us were skeptical - the rest varied from derisive to outraged. When the Kickstarter crashed and burned you couldn't have taken bets on Pantheon ever appearing in any form, not at a thousand to one odds. And yet here it is.

Perhaps the reason Visionary Realms are so keen to use lengthy livestreams of actual gameplay as a promotional tool is that this way no-one can be in any doubt that the game really does exist. Look, there it is. Those are people actually playing it. And having a good time.

Compare that to the EQNext "gameplay" footage that some people at the time seemed to think was almost too good to be true. Irony, much?

So it seems Brad is back for real this time. After all the debates and discussions over just how much input and influence he ever had in making EQ into the classic it became, there can't be any doubt any more, can there? EverQuest, Vanguard and Pantheon - separated at birth. The common factor would be Brad McQuaid. Whatever it is he does he's doing it again.

Kind estimates would suggest we won't see Pantheon hit anything you'd call a "launch", whatever that means these days, until 2018 at the earliest. I will be sixty in 2018. God help me. I was forty when I picked up EQ at whatever that long-forgotten, long-since closed down video game store was called.

Twenty years on, will I want to start over again, playing an MMO that looks to all intents and purposes to be the same damn game I started with? You'd think not but every one of those streams I dip into the more I want to say yes, I probably do.

Even the lore, which on the initial announcement underwhelmed me to the point that I couldn't find my whelm at all, is beginning to grow on me. This explanation of why the Gnome character in the party looks like an android kabuki player had me thinking "I want to play a Gnome". And yes, I know I always want to play a gnome, but now I want to play that gnome.

There were other things in the stream that made me feel more positive about the direction development is taking. The reply to the question "Is this game able to be played by a soloer?" was immensely reassuring, for example. "On the whole we're a group-centric game but we will never discourage soloing" seems to me to hit exactly the right tone.

There's also a great moment where Brad talks about the game going into wider access next year and a PR person comes in behind him to say "When Brad says we hope to do something for Q1/Q2 it's really, really important to note that's a goal - it's not set in stone". You tell him, PR Guy!

If that alpha does arrive in the first six months of next year it will be for "pre-alpha pledgers only" (PR Guy again). I'm glad he clarified that because I was idly considering pledging if it would get me into the game early. It looks entirely playable already and after all, who knows if any of us will be around when Pantheon actually releases? We're none of us getting any younger.

Too late for that though. Take a look at the available pledges. The cheap seats are all gone. No one else is getting into alpha and as for Beta, well, I might be interested but not without a date. $100 isn't out of the question, seeing it includes two digital copies of the game itself, but a hundred dollars for something that may never happen? Although that makes it half the price Smed was asking for Landmark at the same stage of development...

No, I can wait. But I'll wait with interest. And if there's a beta announcement sometime next year then I'm not ruling anything out.

A Landmark Day

Early access for DBG's Landmark began a few days ago. Mrs Bhagpuss, for whom I bought the highest-priced of the original alpha packages some time back in the late Cretaceous era, would certainly have been entitled to first pick of the claims, only she lost interest long ago.

My account cost rather less and without revisiting the terms and conditions I really can't recall whether it allowed me to slip under the velvet rope or not. Makes no nevermind because I was working all week and didn't have time for such fripperies, what with dailies to do and keeps to defend in GW2 and what-not.

Thus it was that I didn't get around to scoping out Landmark Live until this morning. I was put in mind to get on with it by Wilhelm's post-of-record regarding the launch, which I read immediately after waving Mrs Bhagpuss off to work.

I started to comment on the thread at TAGN, which at the time consisted of one disgruntled complaint from Scree. He was representing yet another division of the ever-growing army of grudge-bearers with axes to grind in the faces of either SOE, DBG, or both. In this case the bad feeling comes from the sense of betrayal or abandonment felt by that group of players who bought into Landmark purely on the basis that it was, or would be, a feeder app for EQNext.

Go on, rub it in...

My own view is very different. I reserve my ire, lukewarm though it ever was, for the old regime. Indeed, I look back on my latter days as a customer of the Smedley/Georgeson era SOE with something of the bemused confusion of a partially-recovered sufferer from Stockholm Syndrome. (Somewhat bizarrely, one of the very first songs I ever wrote as a teenager was about Patty Hearst...).

As I commented at Wilhelm's, "The change to DBG has been an absolute breath of fresh air as far as I can tell. Communication is smarter and clearer, decisions make more sense, and above all things that are promised are actually completed....I feel quite confident in believing that where DBG players are now is a much happier place than where they would have been had the previous management team remained in control". The caveat is always that this could all end tomorrow if Columbus Nova decide the time has come to cash in their chips but until that dark day comes I intend to enjoy the late Autumn sunshine currently warming the franchise while it lasts.

60s in-joke

Whatever, there will be no EQNext, which may be a mercy. We'll never know for sure. There is Landmark, like it or not.

My dilemma over Landmark has always been that even though I've never been sure what it's supposed to be, I still like it far more than is good for me. From the first minutes in the tech demo they called an alpha I was hooked in a way I have rarely if ever been hooked in any MMO before or since. I can't think of any MMORPG in which time simply evaporates the way it does in Landmark. As I've said before, I don't not play Landmark very often because I don't enjoy it - I don't play it often because I enjoy it far too much.

This morning I logged in just to take a few screenshots for this post. That was not long after 8 am. I finally pulled myself clear more than three hours later, having spent the last hour cutting and pasting the same short section of wall a couple of dozen times, trying to get it just right. That way madness lies.

Before I got to that state of distress I first had to patch the game, and make a new character, following the full pre-launch wipe. Not fancying yet another multi-gigabyte download I tried just logging into the beta build. That didn't work. I considered, briefly, going through Steam but I find Steam a very poor substitute for a standalone client and try to avoid using it wherever possible.

A quick trip to the forums solved my problem:

open the .ini file and replace the line reading environment=beta with environment=live

Anyone who's played an EverQuest game for any length of time will be very familiar with making manual alterations to the .ini file. If nothing makes Landmark feel like an EQ spin-off that will.

With that done it was just a short patch to Character Creation. The options there remain as criminally limited as ever they were. I understand a lot of the limitations of Landmark but why we only get to play extremely dull human characters with fewer customizations than the rankest chop shop F2P beats me.

Once into the world itself things improved. As a brand new character I landed on the flat plane of the default Newbie Island Landscape. Why it's taken years to come up with the genius concept of letting people build on a level surface beats me but I'm not a design professional so what do I know?

For once, in the interests of science, or at least blogging, I chose to follow the tutorial. It's very much improved, as indeed is much else about the game.

It's what I'd call a "soft" tutorial. It takes place entirely in the world, not in any special instance or zone, and there are no compulsory exercises to complete, nor any aggressive pop-up windows or commands. Mostly what happens is a small window shows a list of tasks you can complete at your leisure and as you finish each one it ticks a box and more appear.

Achievements. If we're talking about Stockholm Syndrome...

Sometimes, often, you gain an "achievement. Whoever wrote the text for these is a big fan of puns. A big fan. Also, I would guess, no younger than their early forties. Quite possibly fifties.I wonder if that's the target market - GenX and Late Boomers with a propensity for rearranging the building blocks of landscape and language? If so it's no wonder I feel at home.

The instructions are clear and the tasks are straightforward. I don't believe it's possible to make the controls of any kind of building game entirely intuitive but the UI has been polished far beyond the arcane mysteries of the early days and I can't imagine, in a world where Minecraft rules supreme, that many will struggle to understand what's expected and how it's to be managed.

80s in-joke

Instead of raising my trusty tower yet again I built the required castle as instructed. I chopped wood  and mined ore. I visited another player's Claim Build Site and voted it up. You can't vote anything down, I'm very pleased to say - you either give your approval or keep your misery-guts moaning to yourself (although I believe you can leave comments...that might be a problem somewhere down the line).

Oddly, when you click on the travel option to visit another player's build for the first time the game minimizes and you find yourself back at the Landmark website on the Showcase page. You even have to log in, which seems a bit redundant given that you are already logged in - to the game. I'd smooth that out.

The Build I visited wasn't technically one created by another player. I went to Domino's Winter Wonderland. No prizes for guessing it was gingerbread themed.

From there I was sent underground to fight some of Landmark's extremely limited selection of off-site monsters. The tutorial had already had me place a training dummy and some skeletons on my own build and practice killing those so I knew what I was about. Combat in Landmark is unbelievably simple but I rather like it. It has a certain minimalist elegance that appeals. Definitely don't come here for the full-fat fighting frenzy though.

After that it was back to my Build for some pointers on building basics. All the time I'd been playing messages had been popping up across the screen telling me that so-and-so had become a Luminary and now it was my turn. The steady drip of congratulations as players complete the tutorial, like the ever-scrolling general chat, suggests that the game has found an audience of some sort.

I feel so...erm...give me a minute, it'll come to me...

As indeed it deserves. For an "MMO" at launch it seems to be well set up. You can get in, it works, it's not lagging or crashing, there are things to do. It looks attractive, it plays comfortably and for my psychology at least the "gameplay" is dangerously addictive.

Is Landmark all it could have been? Not nearly. Is it what was once promised? Nowhere even close. Is it going to appeal to anyone who only really paid it any attention because it supposedly had some connection with EQNext? I very, very much doubt it.

But I like it. I always liked it. And I'm going to go on playing it. Only not too often. I'm not safe to be left there without adult supervision.