Dragonchasers

This weekend the EQNL team is getting some much deserved rest, as far as I can tell. In a way, we players are getting a rest too. There was a fairly big patch on Friday, as well as a couple of European servers rolling out, and since then the game worlds have been up and running and we players have been able to stuff ourselves on Landmark goodness without having to worry about whether the worlds will be up.

I think the biggest aspect of the patch was the new system for finding available land for Claims. Instead of the confusing cross-hatch of 3D claim cubes you now get a map that is tinted red where you can’t build. It’s MUCH easier to find any available land on an island.

I was happy with my mountain-top claim on a Tier 2 island…right up until I started needing materials that were only found on Tier 3 islands, at which point the run back and forth to the Spire to jump between islands started to bug me. Saturday morning I island hopped around, checking a dozen islands on the Courage server, and found a new claim spot. It was close to the Spire, but not too close, on a Tier 3 island (Scarp) and in a wooded area. It’s not as cool a location as my mountain top but it is more practical and I’m pretty happy with it.

New Player Tip #1 Find a claim on a Tier 3 island. Yes, it’ll mean you have to go elsewhere to get started but you move through the stuff found only on Tier 1 & 2 islands really quickly. While you’re gathering materials like copper you don’t even really need a claim. You can use crafting stations that other players have built to get you going. [This tip expires the day SOE gives us some kind of ‘teleport to spire/claim’ ability.]

The big Friday patch did have some rough spots. Lots of people are struggling with trees and boulders popping up on their claims, over and over. And I noticed the camera has gotten a little jittery when harvesting. The camera tries to move when something occludes your view of your character and with this latest patch it seems to be trying to compensate for particles and/or your character’s pick head at times. So as these items move across the screen the camera flickers in close, then back out again.

Still the game feels in good shape, the servers are running with populations between medium and low, and things seem on track.

We’re starting to see some really incredible building projects crop up. As usual I refer you to Dave Georgeson’s twitter feed for examples.

I haven’t built much yet. I’m still working towards getting all the tools, and practicing techniques in little ways. Here’s the crafting station area on one corner of my claim:

In terms of tools I now have Add, Delete, Heal, Select, Smooth & Paint. I REALLY want to get to the Line tool but it’s going to take me enough time that I’m not sure I want to bother during alpha since I know this will all get wiped. We’ll see though. I just finished making a Tungsten Reinforced Saw Table which will let me build a Gold Trimmed Work Bench which will let me work Amaranthine so I can make an Amaranthian Forge which will then, I think, let me craft my Line tool. Each of those steps will probably take me a few days of harvesting materials.

There’s been some debate on whether or not we should have to craft these tools. My mind is really divided. On the one hand, crafting the tools gives you a concrete goal to stretch for, so if you’re into the whole RPG Progression mentality, these are awesome ‘rat pellets’ to strive for. On the other hand, at least right now, Landmark is a building game, and making people do a lot of harvesting just to start making cool things seems like gating the fun.

[My feelings about this are changing now that tools are becoming so much more time consuming to get. The early ones come pretty fast.]

I do find mining fun, but harvesting wood is pretty tedious since it’s so passive. Target a tree, hold down a mouse button until the tree goes away. Walk 2 steps and target another tree. Repeat until you’re nodding off at the keyboard. In mining you first have to find an exposed gleam of minerals, then start digging, following the seam. It’s not rocket science but at least you feel engaged. Though when I started to need a bunch of elemental gold, even mining started getting tedious. You see, you find gold at the end of a seam of tungsten. So to get elemental gold you first find tungsten. Then you mine out that seam of tungsten until you get to the wad of gold at the end of it. Then, hopefully, you get a some elemental gold. You don’t always (and sometimes you get two). I think on average you probably get 1 piece per gold seam, but when you need 30 of them… it can start to get to you.

I know the amounts of materials you need for making all this stuff is in flux, and I’m guessing it’ll be toned down some. And once there’s combat and stuff in the game I think the whole vibe will change. We’ll see.

The building tools are cool though. I wanted to share one tip I learned. I already wrote it up for Google+ so I’m just going to cut and paste:

One thing that hadn’t occurred to me until I watched a couple of videos, is using the Smoothing tool with the Select tool. In these shots the upright posts used to be perfectly rectangular posts with razor sharp 90 degree corners. I was going for something more rustic so I used the Select tool to encompass an area around them. It was flush against the walls behind them but had some ‘buffer’ on the sides and in front.

Then I hit the Smoothing tool once or twice and here’s what I got.

I’m still not happy with the horizontal boards. One of them looks like living room wall paneling from the 1970s. The other is better but a little too perfect for my tastes. In an ideal world I’d be able to streak them with dirt or even leave tiny gaps between the boards here and there.

(These are supposed to be retaining walls that keep my dirt hole from caving in on my crafting stations.)

New Player Tip #2 Craft a grappling hook as early as possible. Not only do they help you get out of holes you’ve literally dug yourself into, but they help you travel faster too. Here’s a too-long video of me running out to my old claim but you can see how the grappling hook really helps climb hills, and it’s fun too!

I guess that will do it for today’s update. I can’t wait to see what the week brings now that the team has most of the fires under control and can get back to adding new functionality to the game!

Hmm, I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep track of the day count?

I’m still not getting a super amount of time to play due to a big project finishing up at work this week, but that hasn’t kept me from keeping tabs on things. Angela and I both have the bug bad. The other night when the new server came online we got up at 4:30 am to find new claims. Last night we got to bed at about 3 am (I worked until about 1:30 then HAD to spend some time playing) and a few hours later I was woken up by her getting back into bed. I asked where she’d been. “Couldn’t sleep so I went to play some Landmark.” LOL

Anyway on to the changes. I’m wondering if SOE is regretting this ‘transparency’ experiment yet. There are two downsides that I can see from my position on the outside looking in. The first is the amount of time it takes the team. Transparency = communication and communication takes time. The second is the fact that they’re really taking a beating in the process of teaching customers what “alpha” means. You see a lot of upset people complaining in the forums and on Twitter that they lost work or were bitten by some other bug-related issue, and being typical hysterical gamers about the situation, screeching about how SOE is ripping them off or whatever.

In fact “It’s Alpha” has become something of a meme and source of ridicule among the players. When someone tries to report a problem they’re now met with a chorus of “It’s Alpha!” Some of these replies are in jest, many are from staunch defenders of the game who refuse to see it as anything but a perfect jewel. Of course the people BUILDING the game don’t see it as a perfect jewel yet.

Yesterday the Alpha forums were opened up so anyone can read them. You still have to be part of the program to post. This was a bold move because, as with any game I think, for every 10 people playing and enjoying the game, there’s one who is frustrated and venting in the forums about what a piece of crap the game is. I’d like to be more pro-active in the forums to try to balance that out but frankly they’re already pretty toxic (as most official forums are) and I usually just get mad at the stupid things people are saying. When I do say something I make it a point NOT to revisit that thread in order to avoid being pulled into an argument.

My one criticism of SOE as far as transparency goes is that they need to route all their communication through one source. As it stands you need to watch the forums and a few different twitter accounts to really know everything that’s going on. I mostly stick to watching John Smedley and Dave Georgeson but I miss things from other team members. The official twitter feed mostly focuses on the big issues, but by following Georgeson, in particular, you learn a lot about upcoming features; much of that info never makes it to the alpha forums, or if it does it quickly gets lost in the noise.

Anyway enough about that. How about the game? Well the past couple of days has seen a new server, and the addition of 13 more islands/shards/continents for each of the 3 servers. The three biggest pain points (as far as I can tell) up to this point have been claim changes not saving (the world kept reverting to its original state) which I believe is fixed, lost/missing bonus items, which I think they’re still working through, and a lack of claim space.

This last one… it’s a complex situation. I moved my claim just before Serenity (the 3rd server) came online. There WERE spaces to plant a claim. The problem is everyone wants to be near the Spire (you use the spire to move between shards and you HAVE to move between shards to harvest different materials). Those plots get snatched up quickly and then the griping starts. It’s like any real estate: Location, location, location!

So there have been open spaces to claim if you look hard enough. But you did have to look hard. When the new server came online it seemed to fill up to the same extent as the old servers within the first few hours. Where are all these people coming from? One problem was that some people had managed to get more than one claim. And when a character was deleted, that character’s claim didn’t go away…it just became orphaned. So another fix that was run last night was wiping out those orphaned claims, and wiping out any 2nd, 3rd or beyond claims players had. We’re told that freed up the equivalent of 7 additional shards of space.

Some people got burnt in this clean up, losing the only claim they were aware of (at one point I lost my claim for 2 days before stumbling upon it again and I suspect at least some of these people had a claim they thought had poofed, but hadn’t). As far as I know SOE is still sorting that situation out.

One of the next big projects is a re-working of the map and how it displays claims, and I think that’ll be a help. I relocated my claim (again!) last night and found that the new shards on the older 2 servers have lots of space left. I finally went up a mountain this time. I wonder if I’ll regret it, as climbing that hill is a pain!

A European server is scheduled to come online next (maybe this week) and even more servers are on the way.

But the one change I’m really looking forward to is a toggle for harvesting. You do a LOT of harvesting and have to hold the mouse button down constantly right now. In the works is an ‘auto attack’ for harvesting. Toggle it on and your character starts swinging until you tell him not to. That can’t come soon enough!

Oh, and some kind of compass on the HUD, PLEASE!?

That’s all I have time for this morning. I’ll leave you with a couple of random screenshots of my new hill-top claim:

Work is pounding me this week, so I didn’t get to play Landmark much yesterday. Maybe 15 minutes all told? When I finally decided it was time to relax, the servers were coming down for a fix. Such is life! I went back to my own job and got a little ahead of schedule so maybe I’ll be able to play tonight.

So as has been mentioned frequently, SOE is being really open about the whole development process. When stuff breaks they tell us why and what’s going towards fixing it. We’re given a general idea of what’s being worked on currently and what’s going to be next.

As a player this doesn’t matter that much; knowing why the servers were down doesn’t change the fact that you can’t play, right? But as a ‘student of computer games’ I find this all fascinating. I’ve had Dave Georgeson’s twitter feed open constantly. By learning the specifics of what goes wrong you can start to build a kind of vague mental road-map of what it takes to build something like EQNL. Even if I didn’t like the game I think I’d keep reading his feed.

The Alpha Forums are locked down for people not in the alpha, but they hope to change that so anyone can read them, but only ‘Founders’ can post. I hope they can make this change because beyond Georgeson, there’re several devs who drop in to post now and then and they add to the knowledge pool.

The big fix from last night (assuming it worked…I haven’t had time to test it) is a problem with claims reverting to their pristine state any time the servers restarted. Assuming that’s fixed we should see some awesome building going on soon!

SOE says they think they can get lost tools back too (a lot of folks placed crafting stations on their claims and came back to find they’d vanished). So that’s more good news.

A new server should be coming online today and more are on order and in-bound. Should be plenty of open space to stake a claim soon! Also a re-work of the map is planned for the near future. Part of the issues with finding a claim are that the map shows bogus results under certain conditions.

I guess that’s it for today!

When SOE dropped the NDA for EQNL, they seem to have jinxed themselves. Last night (Saturday) they brought the servers down for an expected hour or two… which ended up being more like 12-15 hours. When they finally came up, they were having issues staying up until a queue system was put in place.

Last time I checked the team had been working for something like 30 hours non-stop in their effort to give us a good experience. And this after what was undoubtedly a crunch week in the run up to Alpha Launch.

Remember… ALPHA. The fact that they’re working so hard for us to have a good alpha experience is really impressive to me. I’ve seen “finished” games have worse launches, for sure.

Of course we had a certain segment of the gaming community bitching about the problems. SOE has already offered a full refund to anyone who isn’t liking the alpha experience, and the team is working literally non-stop to get things working. But that’s not enough for some gamers. What would be enough? Who knows? I think some gamers just enjoy being angry or something.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about folks voicing frustrations to a small group of friends, I’m talking about the people getting on Twitter or the official forums and endlessly bitching and whining.

My favorite exchange so far. Someone tweeted at Smokejumper saying “How does one demand a refund?” and he answers “No need to demand. If you feel Alpha is not your cup of tea, just call our Customer Service department and they’ll refund you.” So what does the guy say in response? “Thank you for the quick answer! I won’t refund, i have faith in you guys!”

I guess people just need to vent, but when someone is working as hard as these guys are… I dunno, show some restraint.

Anyway enough of that.

I did get some time to play… as the day wore on the servers seemed to get more and more stable and the queue got shorter and shorter. SOE will be adding more servers, they say. One could be in as soon as Monday and two more to follow.

Angela and I both lost our claim, so we spend our time gathering and improving tools (we’re confident the claim situation will be sorted out in short order). There are claims belonging to other players out there with crafting stations on them that are not locked down, either through kindness or the inability to lock people out of using them. Either way we appreciate them being there.

I got as far as crafting a bronze pickaxe and almost to an iron one. First thing you ‘ll learn about Landmark: You need more burled wood logs!

I also spent a lot more time just running around, exploring the world and looking at the sights. Digging tunnels for the joy of digging them. Building towers out of all the extra dirt I’ve harvested, then destroying them. Trying to climb over the wall that surrounds the world. I just find the environment a rather wonderful place to goof around, at least for now.

And remembered to take screenshots! So here’re a bunch of them! Click through for bigger versions.

Here’s what the crafting stations look like. Of course silly me took the screenshot with the simplest recipe showing.

This is… silver maybe? I found it after I’d mined out a seam of iron. My pick wasn’t strong enough for me to harvest it, but I was able to ‘work around it’ and expose more. I’ll know more when I get my Iron Pick completed, but I’m sharing this example just to show that we’re not talking about a world of nice even cubes here. There’s chaos wherever you look.

OK it’s late and I need to get to bed, so I’m just going to through a bunch more screenshots at you and let you imagine why I took them. 🙂 Mostly they’re just pretty scenery.

Late last night, Sony opened up Alpha access to Everquest Next Landmark. It happened very late for me, but I was able to at least log in and create a character before I went to bed. I entered the world, gathered a bit of dirt and stone, built a little wall thing, and then I HAD to go to bed.

All night I was like a kid waiting for Christmas Morning. At 4 am I got up, walked in and looked at the computer… then my inner adult took over and I went back to bed.

When morning came I dragged poor Lola (she’s our dog) around the apartment complex as fast as her legs would take her so I could get back in and play.

And I played as much as I could today. Which wasn’t nearly enough to scratch my itch. I am LOVING the direction they’re going with this game.

I’m also loving the transparency. Yes, it’s alpha. A for-real alpha with missing features and UI elements that SOE freely admits suck (and that they’ll be improving) and stuff getting lost and characters getting locked out of servers. So what did they do tonight? They lifted the NDA. So the Alpha NDA was in place for less than 24 hours.

The downside is I didn’t bother capturing screenshots or anything since I figured I wouldn’t be able to share them. So forgive the wall of text.

So what’s the game like? First, graphics. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but I’m finding the world rather breathtaking. STUNNING skyboxes and when the moons come up I sometimes have to just stop and gaze at the sky. The character models are a little more subjective. I like them a lot. They feel vaguely Victorian, vaguely Steampunky. I think they’re going to be pretty polarizing but from my own selfish point of view, they rock.

Gameplay? Well for now this is just a building game. Enemies and combat aren’t in there yet (that’s how alpha it is). I spent most of my day running around the world harvesting materials.

A lot of people are calling it “Minecraft on Steroids” and sadly, I will too. Imagine if Minecraft wasn’t all giant blocks and you’ll have a good idea of what Landmark is like. When you gather rock, your pickaxe breaks up an irregular chunk of ground (and materials autoloot themselves into your backpack). Dig a tunnel and it isn’t a nice rectangular area. It’s chaotic and cluttered and rough.

One of the first things you’ll need is copper. When you see a glint of copper on the surface you start digging and you soon realize there’s a actual seam of copper. If you follow it, below it you’ll often find tin, and below that… gold? I’m not sure… a metal I can’t yet mine. But digging out these seams of metal is, for reasons I have trouble articulating, super fun for me.

In fact I spent most of my day doing just that, filling my pack with stone, copper, agate, tourmaline, and of course dirt. Oh yeah, and ogling the projects other players have been working on. One clever player staked his claim at the peak of a mountain and is sculpting the top of that mountain into a castle or a citadel or something.

Let’s talk real briefly about claims. In alpha everyone gets a flag to stake a claim with (later you’ll have to craft these flags). Angela and I found a spot pretty easily and staked our claims next to each other. But neither of us did much with them. I flattened some space and set out some torches. Then we ran off to gather and I haven’t been back since. There’ve been issues with claims disappearing, or things on claims disappearing, so SOE is looking to fix that ASAP.

Then there’s the whole area of crafting that I haven’t touched on. Your character progression is basically in the form of the progression of your tools. You gather materials and craft better tools to gather better materials and so on.

Between alpha issues and just regular Saturday chores, we only got in 3-4 hours of play so there’s still a ton to explore. I won’t admit how much time I spent just running around, sliding down hills and flipping over obstacles and sliding more. Just running around in this world is fun.

Servers are down for a fix this evening… I can’t wait to get back in. I’m having so much fun already and this is just the start. I only bought a Founder’s Pack to keep Angela company but I am SMITTEN by this game.

Next time I hope to have some screenshots or video to share!

[Angela had one! Here it is:]