Your Next: Waiting for the Real Game
Why Landmark is the game we've been waiting for.
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.
EverQuest Next Landmark is the MMO we've been asking for all these years. Even in its unfinished state you can see the shape of the whole, and the first vestiges of the originality of approach that will make the game a runaway success.
What do we see players crying out for on MMO forums every day? A fresh, challenging, collaborative, social experience not based around box ticking and treadmill based gated progression. We're done with floating punctuation, synchronized swimming style gameplay, we don't want everything handed to us but we don't want to have to grind to get to the good stuff.
For those of you playing the Landmark alpha, I imagine it has ticked more than a few of the boxes on that mental checklist. The fact that the game is only considered 60% finished means we have a host of new features and improvements to look forward to in the coming weeks and months.
How these new features fit into the foundations will be a major factor in how Landmark operates long-term. So far we've seen the short-term excitement and the joy of discovery from players; next we have to wait and see how SOE plans to convert this into long term player retention. Between what we have confirmed, various hints and the odd tease, I think it's safe to say SOE has a good idea of how this will be achieved. For my money, it'll have a few similarities to the principles that allowed EverQuest the first to foster such a strong community. More on that in a future column!
For now, I'm going to call it: Landmark will blow away the competition to be the best new MMO of 2014.
I'm aware of the heavy hitting competition, but let's revisit our mental checklist for a moment; I would say Landmark is the clear forerunner in every category, and from the responses we've seen from players and the press it seems many agree. Obviously it's not a foregone conclusion, but I would say Landmark is the only contender with the potential to add anything of worth to the genre, and its potential is ready to burst at the seams.
So this is for those people who are unsure of the relevance or purpose of Landmark. It's an MMO and it's different, so much so I don't think I've seen one person call it a 'WoW-clone'.
LockSixTime