What is EverQuest Next Landmark?

eq next alpha screenshotI find myself still asking the question: What is EverQuest Next Landmark?  I’m one of the biggest EverQuest fans you will ever meet, yet I feel like I can only define EQ Next Landmark as this ethereal ‘thing’ that exists somewhere between a MMO and Minecraft.

I know that EverQuest Next itself is a true ‘traditional’ MMO.  I thought Landmark was originally announced as a world exploration, world builder, tech demo ‘thing’ to build hype.  While it may actually be all of those things, I feel like the EQ team is actually trying to turn this into a full-fledged game meant to be ‘played’.

eq next alpha screenshotA lot of people share my confusion.  I’ve had a dozen people this past week ask me if I have any clue about the game.  I’ve had emails from a few of you asking if this is a sandbox MMO like Vanguar.  My favorite was a question I got in vent: “Wait…Landmark is a GAME?”

Maybe one of the fine folk at SoE who read our blog can chime in and help clarify.

As for how the game looks, I like it.  I really love how EQ Next (Landmark) straddles the line between realistic and stylized visuals.  I like the idea of building things, claiming land, going out to harvest materials, crafting, and now the idea of hunting makes it all sound like Minecraft truly taking on MMO form.

Oddly enough, despite being confused and really unsure what this will turn out to be, I’m dying to get in there and start building a house and gathering materials.  If I can be some kind of Halfling, Dwarf, or Gnome and build a little house, act like a hermit, and hoard things I’ll be happy.

Here’s the number one question I have for SoE: When EverQuest Next launches, what reasons will I have to continue playing Landmark?  That should clear up a few things.

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  • Landmark is a game and at the same time is not. Landmark is just to build structures, scenery, etc, you can do what you want. The idea is to help developers to build the world of everquest, they said that maybe when the game is launch, you will find things that you did 😉

    I think this idea is excellent, think that out there is a lot of people aficionated to create and with a big imagination, so for them is like contract the best designers that will work for them for free (between of course many people that will create bad things also).

    They give to us the same tools that they have, we are going to develop the world of everquest together with the developers and nobody knows if one day this feature will be over and in my opinion will not, if we think that there will be expansions.

    Also is necesary to understand the revolutionary concept of the world in everquest, where you can destroy what you want, you can do a hole where you are step. The monsters they are not always in same locations, they move around the map depending the situation… i mean is incredible how it sounds…

    You need to watch all their videos to understand what is landmark and what is gonna be the game everquest.

    • Oh, believe me I’ve watched everything I can find. I get on the surface some of the things they are doing with it…. but I guess I don’t ‘get it’ in terms of maybe the why? Like what’s the sum of all these parts supposed to be? And most importantly why am I going to play it when EQ Next comes out?

  • Landmark isn’t just building. Soe has said landmark will have crafting, combat, gathering, exploring, etc as well

    It sounds like a full mmo to me, just more like minecraft

  • I’m as confused as you are, Keen. When they dropped the EQLandmark bombshell at SOELive I was pretty sure they were revealing a clever twist on Minecraft with a nifty direct feed into EQNext. I didn’t think for one second they were floating the idea of launching a fully-fledged EQ MMO as a lead-in to another fully-fledged EQ MMO to come just months later. That would surely be crazy.

    It seems, however, that they are doing just that. If EQL isn’t quite a traditional combat-based MMO it’s beginning to look like something remarkably similar. What that means for EQNext itself I really have no idea but I’m not complaining. It means I get to play something like a new version of EQ maybe a year or more before I expected and that’s fine with me. I’ll worry about what the implications for EQNext are further down the line.

  • @Bhagpuss: I an identical point of view. Can’t complain about 2 new EverQuest games. I’m itching to know the inside details, though.

  • I thought it was a parallel game they were launching first that allowed people to go in and generate content in the form of buildings, terraforming, etc…and then the areas they liked the most would get incorporated into the MMO’s actual world. That way they could continue to run both entities simultaneously and be a unique way to add content to the ever changing MMO.

  • It seems pretty obvious to me. Playerbases of Landmark and EQ Next aren’t going to fully overlap. Some people like Minecraft style games, other prefer MMOs. So I don’t think that no one will be playing Landmark when Next comes out. And the reason for Landmark’s existence? Well it seems pretty genius – they will get free player generated content that they can use in Next. That ties pretty well into their “constantly evolving world” concept and might be actually the only way to make that viable.