From the outside, it appeared an odd decision that development on Landmark — the interactive creation tool for EverQuest Next — would continue once the game it was built for was cancelled. Whether this was a good decision wasn’t immediately clear, but with Landmark‘s official release on Steam, we now have a better picture. And it’s not good.
Landmark made its debut on Valve’s online store yesterday and rather than bathing in digital accolades, it was instead drowned in a torrent of negative reviews.
It’s currently labelled with the red-hued “Mixed”; only 40 per cent of reviews are positive. Delving into the reviews themselves, a few points become clear:
- Those that previously had access to Landmark during pre-release (and paid for it before Everquest Next was cancelled) feel they’ve been “locked out” now that the game requires a $US10 purchase to play.
- It plays like an “unfinished alpha” and is otherwise “incomplete”.
- Related to the above point, it doesn’t feel like a “game”, which makes sense as it was meant to be a companion to an actual game and not by itself.
The first gripe appears to be the source of the majority of negative reviews and hey, fair enough. Being asked to pay twice to play a game that you were already on the fence about is terrible idea.
As for the other arguments — I think it was always going to be a struggle to bolt more gameplay onto Landmark. OK, sure, following through with EverQuest Next and everything involved in running an MMO might have been out of the question, but sadly, the alternative doesn’t seem to have worked out much better.
Landmark [Steam]
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5 responses to “EverQuest Next’s ‘Landmark’ Debuts Solo On Steam To An Onslaught Of Bad Reviews”
Fatality!
day broken
In the ’10s it would be good news to finally have a worthy mmoRPG to invest some time on it.
It’s not really a MMO. Landmark’s more of a… hm. Minecraft in a limited Creative Mode Only, no survival mode. No real ‘game’ as such. It’s just a pretty 3D landscape creation kit.
Log into the Daybreak site. Download the launcher. Run it. These people are obvious failures.
To provide some clarification:
Landmark was set to be a game on it’s own from the very start of it’s alpha. Look at this official “What’s Landmark Video”, released in December 2013, before the start of Landmark’s alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjvYIV4B5jg
Notice how EQN doesn’t get mentioned until the very end of the video. “We’ll bring in assets from EQN into Landmark” and “playing one game while building another”. Add the Landmark’s FAQ and forum stating the two were separate games and several Landmark Live shows as well after alpha had started…
But alas… SEO heavily marketed Landmark as ‘the tool to help us build EQN’, because doing so was pretty smart. Seemed to be, anyway. EQN fans joining Landmark meant more money for SEO. Also, more players joining the EQN Workshops in Landmark meant SEO had more developers for nearly no cost at all. Who’d pass up on a golden deal like that?
But because Landmark was called EverQuest Next Landmark at the start of alpha and because of the dual marketing… people misunderstood. Badly. SEO, and later Daybreak, did far too little to clear up that misunderstanding.
When doom strikes:
Fast forward. Development of both EQN and Landmark is floundering. Perhaps because the idea of “developing 2 games for the price of 1.5 was never realistic to begin with, especially when you consider the plans for both games were very ambitious. So the EQN fans aren’t happy. Landmark fans aren’t happy. And I’m guessing the DEVs weren’t happy by that time either.
Then, dreaded fear for many becomes reality: EQN gets cancelled. The EQN fans are furious. EQN fans who joined Landmark for the sake of EQN, especially those who poured dozens if not hundreds of hours into the EQN workshops within Landmark, are even more so.
Landmark gets the green light, but Landmark fan’s aren’t particularly happy either because development of Landmark had been pretty much frozen for a full year in favour for EQN. And will Landmark truly fulfill it’s potential, or will it be released with the bare minimum of development needed to make it ‘passable’?
And now…
From the ‘mostly negative’ reviews so far, it should be obvious Daybreak opted for the latter solution. The game Landmark is nowhere near what it could have been.
On the up-side though, if you like building and are new to the game (and don’t have two years of hope, frustration and disappointment to deal with), Landmark’s probably a very solid buy for the going price of just ten bucks. And I’m not saying this to coddle Landmark. No, my point is that if this had been a different dimension and Landmark had gotten released in exactly the same state, but without suffering from the EQN debacle and all the negative publicity that went with it… Landmark’s reviews would probably have been be overwhelmingly positive as a simplistic but groundbreaking game.
Unfortunately for Landmark, that’s just not the way the world works…