Landmark – Thoughts on Beta

Keep in mind that these are still ramblings about a game that is in closed beta. It is not in its final state and things are constantly changing. SOE is going through what they’re calling an ‘open development’ process where they are giving players very early access to things in order to get feedback and make adjustments. Two quick things about this now, and I’ll probably do an article on this aspect of things specifically later. First it’s great, the accessibility of the team and the communication is tremendous. Also it gives a lot of insight into the development process on a project like this. The downside, however, is that a lot of the ‘testers’ involved don’t understand what they’re in the middle of. Many of them seem to think that SOE can just wave a wand and make a change, or have the new revision live.

That aside, there are still some things to talk about re: Landmark The Game. The team pushed out a huge update just before the holidays last month. Adding a lot of features that had been in the works for the better part of the year … in particular underworld layers and NPC monsters (combat had been in for a while, but was strictly PvP on designated player claims.) They also put in the first phase of a crafting overhaul, and re-worked resource gathering and equipment upgrading, fixed several bugs (and added new ones).

The problem here is that most of these changes are incomplete. I can’t tell how the new crafting and upgrading changes are going to work because the systems for upgrading aren’t in. In general I like where they’re going, but what options will I have for upgrading the gear beyond that. Nothing I can make now is comparable to the harvesting gear that I’ve already made; and I wasn’t even done upgrading that.

The PvE combat in it’s current state is fun, but a bit tedious. Mobs are very strong so frequently you can only take a few hits, and the fights (if you’re doing well) can take a good bit because even with a pretty high damage rating these things can take a beating. (Keeping in mind that this is mainly me Duo-ing with ‘The Wife’ so there’s two of us hitting these things and the fights are still long.)

The exploration aspect is great. The caverns and layers of caverns hold interesting ruins to find (that were player created in game and selected by the devs through an event, some of them are very interesting and stumbling onto one as you go through a cavern is great. There’s also, of course, more mobs in the caverns than there are over land too so keep your weapons handy. They’ve also moved the higher ‘tier’ resources down into the caverns rather than across different tier islands so there are other reasons to go down into the dark depths.

Building is amazing and is definitely still the strength of the game. Some of the player created areas are absolutely incredible, and they just added linking and triggering to the game so you can link different props so that, for example, a door will open if someone enters the area in front of it. This is just the first layer of this type of thing that they’ve put in, but people have already built crazy things including a working digital clock with it. (Someone built a count down clock for New Years and one of the Devs created a firework display using links and triggers to light up the effects and explosions at the correct times).

Well, as I said, it’s being billed as a social/building MMO, so lets look at the social aspect. I’ll start with the basics – Chat. You have the standard text chat, I haven’t checked if custom channels are working across servers yet, but other than that issue basic chat, tells, group chat, guild chat, and officer chat, are there and seem pretty stable. Local is range limited so that’s something to keep in mind if you’re chatting with folks in local while running around. They’ve also put in game voice support in, but I haven’t tried it out yet.

Next is grouping. It’s in, and all things considered pretty well handled. Loot drops for everyone in the party, and I get the same type of loot solo that I do grouped so there doesn’t seem to be any realistic downside to being grouped. In fact since harvesting items are shared there’s a lot of reason TO group, as you can essentially multiply your gathering efforts if everyone is gathering. (For example, if I harvest 100 copper while grouped with the wife, I get 100 copper and my wife gets 100 copper as well.)

Guilds are in, and have their own guild ranks and chat channels, but currently that’s about the extent of guild functionality. They have plans for more (guild owned claims, guild banks and other things), but at this point I think that the ‘guild’ aspect of the game is a few notches down on the priority list, and that’s fine. A lot of the functionality I’d want for guilds are modifications on existing systems so shouldn’t be terribly complicated to add once they get the bigger systems where they want them and polished.

In summery I am really enjoying the game, the potential is even beyond what I saw back in the early stages of Alpha, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. This is not a world that’s going to be built in a day or a month, they have some of the biggest hurdles behind them I think though. I’ll be interested to see, now that they’re back from their much deserved break, what their plans are for the coming months and how quickly they can move through them. Currently this is looking to be probably one of the best ‘family’ MMOs out there, easy and fun for those gamer parents to bring their kids into and have fun exploring and building anything that their imaginations can come up with.