After all the teases and guesswork, SOE dropped the A-bomb announcement at its 'Year of EverQuest' community event last Friday. Now, that's how you kick off a party, not to mention the year of EverQuest: 15 years of EverQuest, 10 of EverQuest II and now the foundation of what will become EverQuest Next.
At least, that's how many people see the arrival of EverQuest Next Landmark, and they're missing so much.
As someone who has closely followed the progress of Landmark since the surprise announcement at last year’s SOE Live, it amazes me how we see so many of our peers talk about 'waiting for the real game', and that they're simply not interested in Landmark. Beside the baffling rejection of an opportunity to help develop the tools that will be used to build the game you're looking forward to, the perception of what Landmark is seems desperately skewed.
Landmark in its current state is all about building. The beginnings of the crafting system are in there, but they exist almost exclusively to facilitate building. It's no surprise then that players think of Landmark as a building tool rather than a game in its own right. A tool to build EverQuest Next, 'Minecraft on steroids'. For me, this attitude does a great disservice to what Landmark will be, or rather what it could be.
Landmark is an MMO that has links to another in-development MMO, this is the kind of situation that leads to questions like 'If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?'. It would be better to think of the two games as having a common ancestor, more like cousins than direct descendants. Still related, but contemporaries. The important point to note is that Landmark is an MMO, and should be viewed and judged as such.
To be fair, why shouldn't the situation lead to this misunderstanding? SOE is blazing their own trail right now; we are in uncharted territory, and the shock of creativity and innovation into the MMO genre has left many stunned. We're so used to being stuck in our rut that when we're shown the way out we can't even recognize it. This same innovation is why it seems to be a monumental task to describe what Landmark is in a satisfactory yet concise manner, but since I've started,I'll give it a bash.