What is EverQuest Next Landmark?

Take my money. Take it now. Take it right now! Oh wait, you already did!

I have been saying for months the biggest problem with Landmark is people simply don’t know what it’s about.  This is the perfect tool I need as an influencer and fan of EverQuest to talk about the game and get my friends and readers excited.

EQN Landmark is all about the many ways you can experience a virtual world.  Build, explore, kill, loot, sell, buy, laugh, cry, decorate, hoard, achieve, show off, socialize… and do so in a way that revolutionizes the way players can actively change a world.  That sounds like a load of hyperbole, but those aren’t exaggerations — they can be taken literally.  Hype? Of course.  Not sold on the idea?  It’ll be free to play.  Don’t drop a dime.

I am so ready for February and finally something new.

  • Wait, there’s combat to enemies and combat in Landmark? I thought it was just a sort of building tool for creating virtual worlds and whatnot. Didn’t think combat or anything would happen until EQ Next itself comes out.

    It’s definitely really interesting. Sadly, I just can’t afford new stuff any time soon. What little I have is all being saved up for WildStar – the one game I am desperately excited for! But if this is going to be free to play sometime down the line, then I will definitely check it out. I’ll probably miss out on a bunch of cool rewards for investing early though.

  • @firebomber they are going to give you all the tools they use to build EQN. soo the Ai editor, dungeon maker, quest/scenario editor etc.. So yea it will have combat just not at launch.

  • @FireBomberSeven: That’s why this video was needed so badly and why I have been saying for months that they need to just come right out and clear the air.

    Combat will be in shortly after launch according to one of their previous videos.

    EQN Landmark is free to play from the beginning. Join us day 1 man!

  • While EQN Landmark certainly looks interesting, and the video was enticing, I did groan a bit when he was talking about there going to be Achievements and such.

    Personally I feel there are already more than enough games specifically catering to Achiever type of players (or having grown to cater specifically to them, like quite argueably WoW) and IMO the moment you as designer start building content that particulalrly appeals to them, you risk Elitist Jerks ruining the game for everybody else.

    I’m also still a bit fuzzy on how ‘stable’ your creations are going to be, given how apparently combat and monsters will enter the picture. I personally expected more like a sort of Populous-game with a n avatar interface, if that makes any sense.

  • So as far as I can tell, EQNLandmark is going to be the sandbox, open world, build ur stuffs and kill the mobs and sell and trade and guild up and whatnot MMO.

    And EQNext is going to be the themepark, group-finder, loot grind, public quests with a slightly different atmosphere, regular nowadays MMO.

    Which is cool. And interesting. And smart of them. Same game engine, two different games, cater to both of the main crowds…. if this is accurate the planning is amazing.

  • I wonder how encouraging players to sell in game items for real cash will affect the gaming experience? I can foresee rl Asian sweatshops flooding the marketplace with vr items.

    It will also be interesting what would happen if other people can harvest materials by destroying other players’ creations (note I am not sure if this is actually the case); these nice happy built a hearth in my comfy house videos might actually belie a ruthless world of bands of reaver resource harvesters slash and burning communities as concentrated sources of easily obtainable resources. Why spend time mining when there are enormous piles of readily obtainable resources available in the form of houses?

    I also am unsure how one will be able to obtain a sense of immersion with chariots riding alongside bulldozers and robots.

    I am curious to see how combat works. Does a battlemech do the same damage as a catapult, that is how would damage potential be assessed and how does it fit into the individual modeled items and maintain logical integrity?

  • Keep in mind that I have never played any of the Minecraft type games so the idea of building whatever your imagination can conceive is foreign to me.

    In such a game that allows combat, what rulesets are in place that limit my ability to build a bow over a sword, a musket over a bow, or a plasma cannon over a musket? Are there pre-set recipes for such items waiting to be discovered or purchased from vendors?

  • …which brings up the more general question of functionality. For instance they have made a point to show battlemechs in a number of their videos. Do they actually move, can their weapons fire, or are they nothing more than statues?

  • They are statues. If you pause this video at the mech, you can see where the “armaments” on the shoulder launchers are really just barrels. It is just a demonstration of people using the editor in imaginative ways.

  • As far as roving bands of destructors, from just looking at the preorder//buyin//sellout page (call it what you will), they mention losing your “claimed” area after the alpha. So items you build inside your claim will most likely be purely carebear safe. Whether you yourself are safe inside that claim is an interesting question though.

  • You won’t be able to ruin other people’s stuff. It’ll be safe. PvP isn’t even in right away. Claims will hopefully have permissions to allow others to share in building.

  • @gankatron On the mixing up of chariots, bulldozers etc there is one World that operates entirely under Everquest Lore. Stick to that one and there will be no crossing of the streams. Beyond that there are supposed to be a variety of worlds with different settings. Whether those also have internal rules isn’t yet clear.

    @Keen I didn’t think this video showed or told anything new, It’s certainly the case that it restates several previous announcements in a clearer and more unequivocal fashion but I didn’t feel much wiser about the things I wanted to know.

    I understand that in time EQLandmark will effectively provide a full development kit that one could, in theory, use to make an entire AAA MMO. What we don’t yet know, and it’s the part that matters most, is how that would be licensed. I’d love to see you, for example, use this opportunity to mobilize the community that coalesces around this blog to create the MMO you’ve been discussing, theorycrafting and wishing for for years. I’d certainly chip in and offer what skills I have towards a collaborative project. But until we see some hard detail about what’s allowed it remains in the realm of wishful thinking.

    As it stands I’m very interested in Landmark and I’ll be on board from beta if not alpha, but it’s still EQNext that I really want to play.

  • @Bhagpuss: You’re absolutely correct — it restates in one place what they have recently shared here and there. Lots of newer visuals, though.

    As for your suggestion…. 😉 I have my plans already in place. If they give us the true tools we need, we’re in for some fun.

  • I will most likely have to wait for the release (or maybe a beta key /beg) of this as I’m not sure I can warrant spending the money on a founder’s pack.. however, this video. Just. Wow. I’m incredibly stoked for Landmark now!

  • I have some questions too. Is the world heavy instanced or is it seamless? How big the world is? So lets say I login the first day and there are hundreds of people next to me…who builds where? And how you claim the land? With in-game currency?and if yes, how you get this in-game currency? doing the usual “kill mob-sell stuff”?

    Can someone explain me more specific how all this gonna work?

  • These kinds of projects have to be the most exciting development in gaming in the last few years.

    The idea of leveraging the passion of the player base to build the world *along side* the developers is just too good to pass up. Not to mention that content creation is by far the most expensive component of modern MMO’s. It’s basically crowd sourcing your content. Fantastic idea.

    Hopefully this will eventually extend to scripting out full quests / dungeons / raids within the game. We’ll get to the point where the developers are ally about enabling the community to build they game they most want.

    Looking at how CCP has leveraged this kind of investment from EVE Online, I can’t wait to see how this all pans out.

    It has the added advantage of serving as a kind of recruitment platform for the best and brightest of the community as well. If you produce amazing, highly valued content, there’s a chance you might end up working for the company directly.

    We’ve already seen this happy offline with the modding community from Skyrim.

  • do you guys know that in EQ Landmark every player has their “own” world/server, right? (like minecraft)
    yes you can invite X persons to your world so they can build on your server.
    the rest of the people only can join your server like a spectator they can look but they cant touch anything or interact or kill mobs.

    if you dont have friends you will be alone in this game.

    im saying this because people is thinking that this is a huge world where everyone is building in the same server. so you will never meet unknown people in EQ Landmark.

    in EQ Next there is 1 world for everyone (like WoW) but in EQ Landmark not.

  • @TheCrow: I think you are mistaken. In several videos and texts the developers have said there will be multiple worlds and players can all build them up. For example, they have specifically mentioned if someone builds a sci-fi base next to your fantasy castle, you can pack up your whole place and move it. This implies you do -not- get your own world.

  • If its not personal instances, it will be group instances. It would take less than an hour to crash the game if it was one world, or even a bunch of server-worlds like games use today.

    Also they are rather murky on how building works. On the one hand, they show you a video that appears to be god-mode building (character was flying, no ‘resource count’ while building), then in the next part Dave is talking about finding resources/items to use while building. There is a reason serious builders in Minecraft turn godmode on, but if the plan is to allow players to sell stuff for RL cash, how does that work with godmode?

    Still see this being a huge hype, huge burnout experience for most. There are a few who just enjoy building for building, but most MMO players want a game, and EQNL isn’t a game.

  • @SynCaine: I’m pretty positive they said the worlds are shared like servers are today in normal MMOs (WoW, EQ, etc).

    They explained a bunch of this other stuff in a previous video:
    – Crafting DOES take resources that you must gather or buy from someone else
    – Flight is a bonus ability you earn in some way (this is the god mode flight you refer to)
    – e-commerce is done on selling things like a tower or a castle, not like 3,000 blocks of wood.

  • Not a fan of adding RMT to MMO’s, especially when it influences gameplay. THE RMT AH ruined D3.

  • I’m not sure it really influences gameplay. It’s more like “Hey I made a really neat tower. Want to buy the schematic?”

    The trick will be whether or not you still need the materials to place it. If not, I can see that being problematic, especially if you can reclaim the resources placed.

  • @keen exactly. 1 player = 1 world, 100 players = 100 worlds. and you can all build them up if the owner of the world invites you.

    in your example what they meant is:
    keen invites graev to his world.
    keen builds a medieval castle.
    graev builds a sci-fi castle.
    keen doesnt like it and move his buildings far from graev (but still in his own world or even keen could move them to a new world so graev cant bother him again).

    but is always 1 world = 1 server = 1 player (unless he invites more people). and you could have a building on your home server, a building on your friend’s server, a building on your father’s server, etc…

    they are using lets say “jedi mind tricks”. they arent being clear with this issue because they know that a lot of people wouldnt like this game knowing it so they arent lieing but they arent saying exactly the truth.

    ask them about this in twitter/forums. i would love to see what they answer.

    obviously im talking about eq landmark. in eq next is exactly how you are imaging: 1 world = 1 server = 100000 players

  • 1 World = 1 Server = ~3000 Players 😛 Fixed that for you.

    Only place you are going to find 100000+ people on a single server at present is EvE. (And single server is misleading there, but it is a single instance of the game).

    It’ll be interesting to see if this is set up the way Minecraft is as far as multiplayer, or as an MMO. If it is like Minecraft, that would definitely explain why they are releasing it before their huge MMO. (Will not compete)