EQN:Landmark Beta Starts March 26th!

It is pretty shitty that the early adopters aren't treated a little better. We paid early, a small part of that was to play earlier, but mostly it was about seeing this game get a little bit more funding, traction, and ultimately success. A large part of the success (on social media, work of mouth, goodwill and so forth) of Landmark was due to the passion of the people that ponied up and supported back in the beginning and then demonstrated what could be done in the game.

If Alpha players had got to keep EVERYTHING that we'd ever had, I wouldn't be too miffed. Right now, I'm annoyed that I could have got exactly the same stuff for a fraction of the price.

It'd be like pre-ordering a car for 100k that came with a 2 day test drive, then a year later and a week from the launch of the car to the masses they announce the car will sell at 33k, but because you already had pre-ordered the car you can't shift the price point. Sure, you got to drive it a few times before everyone else (even found out the suspension needed tweaking!) but too bad, can't change the price.

I know, analogies are terrible, blah blah blah, but I'm not really happy about this. I do wonder how things might have changed if no-one had paid for the founders stuff, and just waited til it went on sale. Would the game be in the shape it is now? Would there be as much goodwill?

Utnayan_sl said:

People aren't paying 99 dollars just for early access when other services/content is involved. And when that content is supposed to be (Or at least should be) exclusive as areward for kickstarter funding, it's a pretty damn shady thing to do and then high heel end it on a "Well you played for 5 extra months". I highly doubt that is why people spent $99.00 just to play an extra 5 months in an alpha state when the package came with a LOT of extras. Seeing all those "exclusive" items for $33 on Steam 5 months after negates the bonuses included that should have been for the kickstarter folks only.

I am just posting this for the sake of debate. If they don't make the tools easier to use, this isn't going mainstream. But saying people shouldn't be upset because they got to play 1% of the alpha for the last 5 months through some broken promises doesn't negate their feelings of being fucked over when it wasn't just early access they were paying for.

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But this game wasn't kickstarted/crowdfunded was it?

No it wasn't, and it would have still been made even if people didn't buy in early. It probably would have just taken longer and wouldn't be as good.

Are you even disagreeing with me? I said they could and would have made the game even without early buy-ins. I just wouldn't expect them to be as far along as they are now if they didn't due to the sheer number of testers.

Simply put, that 4-5 months of alpha was shit. If you logged into the game at all during that point, you might have found 1 or 2 projects on the entire island that you were on that looked even remotely nice. People knew that the toolset was rough, and that they might not even play. So without being sarcastic to get my point across - The items that came with the founders pack was what made it special to those players. The possibility that they might really love the game and want to play it when it comes out - and then be able to represent that they had been supporting the game from day one and invested 100 bucks into its development.

I want the game to succeed, and do good. So if they feel the need to bring in new blood that cant afford that price point, then thats cool and I appreciate that. But they havent been around since the beginning, they didnt invest 100/60/20 bucks originally, and shouldnt have the same stuff that a player that did would get. Steam users buying the trailblazer pack shouldnt get the same items for a 1/3 of the price because they didnt invest the same. .. I really dont care about this all that much for reasons I already stated, but it wouldnt have made this big of an uproar (enough to where the original backers would get an amendment) if it was just some irrelevant event. If you cant get that, and dont agree with it, then itll just have to be one of those situations where we agree to disagree.

Utnayan_sl said:

If they don't make the tools easier to use, this isn't going mainstream.

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Totally agree with this. I played for the first few days, got my legendary pick and such. I can't get into the building though. All that garbage-voxeling, whatever you call it. This game centered around building is awesome...except the building.

Utnayan_sl said:

But to call it anything other than that and to say that the game wouldn't be as far along without it, is pretty obtuse.

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I just meant that it wouldn't be in as good of a state as it is right now it they didn't have a huge influx of alpha testers. I'm not saying the budget would have been different, or that the end result wouldn't be as good, just that they wouldn't be quite so far along.

Anybody watch this ZAM interview? Pretty interesting (well, I read thehighlights in the articleand I'm currently watching the full video).Landmark w/ SOEs Terry Michaels and Dave Georgeson - YouTube

zzeris_sl said:

I barely played after a month because i'm just not a very good builder. With that said, I have no regrets and didn't buy for the perks. I've never really seen early adopter perks being worth anything months after release. Anyone else? I got into this to help them test for EQN and hopefully my small contribution helped a little in that regard. I'm not part of the old school crowd who wants to be a special snowflake based off time invested or money spent. I just want to play good games.

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Me neither, or really I don't feel like investing the time to be good at building. But one of the major points of the video was SOE's intention to transcend what Landmark is right now and some of the criticisms about it being a glorified Minecraft. I'd bet most of the population is similar to you, we just bought access to have some small glimpse of EQN (that's what I did anyways). If Landmark develops into something cool with the combat, loot and world building, I'll get back into it in a more serious capacity.

It sounds like their "vision" is to make Landmark into a framework for players to build their own virtual environments/games. Sort of like Second Life, where you have plots of land and you can do pretty much whatever you want on those plots, whether it be a PvP arena, a PvE dungeon, or cyber sex hub. The building and crafting aspects that is Landmark today are only the systems they've developed so far. When they add PvP combat, Storybricks, PvE, and so on, people will be able to create their own dungeons, cities, or whatever they want. Then they'll be able to populate it with NPCs that they program using Storybricks to give out quests, act like antagonists, or just give information on the guild/player that created it.

This sounds like what Raph Koster was trying to do with Metaplace, except instead of making it browser based (and built with flash), it all takes place in Landmark. It's a good idea. Now all they need to do is accelerate development.

Dizzam_sl said:

Totally agree with this. I played for the first few days, got my legendary pick and such. I can't get into the building though. All that garbage-voxeling, whatever you call it. This game centered around building is awesome...except the building.

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yeah.

this calls back to something I was questioning way back when. The boxlike nature of minecraft and terraria really aid in making them userfriendly. Like Lego's its VERY easy for a causal user to visualize, count resources, etc. The voxels make everything much more abstract. While it provides greater potential realism.. making buildings from them is also 100x more work. it much the same issue with every other builder out there. These building games are suddenly popular... but where was everyone for campaign editors for Divinity, NWN1+2, starcraft/warcraft, dragonage, and so on? Obviously, some of these had some good building communities. But, clearly the general public had no interest in real hardcore BUILDING.
Simplifying it, and making it a game, was very important.

Obviously the game has a long way to go. So, adding those simple tools might be on the way at some point. but, opening it to the public without them, probably hurt the hypetrain.