All I know is I spent 100 bucks on the Landmark trailblazer set. I got robbed. I still have gift keys Ill never use. This was a great franchise, and concept, Huge disappointment.
@@MrSp0iler after landmark i bought a real gun and get fun firing in the printed landmark name... okay, i not do the last part, but the gun is reall more reliable hobby, at least until leftists ban it... good the world is full of dictators and they want to put that title in others head
If you think SOE would have ever been able to deliver on anything they promised with EQN, you're naive. The people in charge had no idea how to manage their games. They ran nearly every title they released into the dirt.
I gave years of my life to this game. I had my work included in the game, I was there from the beginning. Then Columbus Nova comes in, buys everything up, promises nothing will change, fires the main staff, stops updating, stops communicating, then announces the game would be shutting down and everything you did will be gone, everything you bought will be gone and they will not allow you to host any of it on your end.
Well at least EG7 owns Daybreak now. I'm sorry for what happened to you. It looked like an amazing game. What are your thoughts on Free Realms? When Free Realms closed we were going to migrate to Landmark until they suddenly shut it down as well. It's a shame that we can't find a home in the Daybreak community as every game they make gets shut down in the end.. :(
They spent more than 3 years, actually. Due to their decision, I'll NEVER support any title where Daybreak is involved. They totally SCREWED a lot of fans over this. I have no qualms in steering people towards the screw-over which was EQNext. EQ was near/dear to my heart. They screwed with many people's hopes/dreams about the NEXT EQ. Sell EQ to a game-maker who ACTUALLY CARES.
One thing I neglected to mention in this video was the idea of charging for alpha/beta access to Landmark for what's meant to be a sister game under the idea that the money would go into funding Everquest Next, just to have the EQ name ripped off of it and Next cancelled. This is one of many reasons why people feel slighted by Daybreak, and rightly so.
I can say, as a long time player of Everquest 2 after the Tears of Veeshan expansion during the transition... EQ2 took a nose dive. The raiders and long timers I talked to all informed me of how much the game quality tanked. Quick super easy to make recycled content as an "expansion" mini-packs and tons of little free incentives to keep playing. It's really sad that Everquest is likely going to die as an Intellectual Property which is a shame because of how crucial Everquest was to MMOs.
I just gotta say... after being royally fucked over by John Smedley not once, but multiple times... how can anyone be surprised when he fucks over gamers and fails to make good on promises? How can anyone be surprised that he okays charging money for something he knows 6 months in advance isn't going to be coming out, but decides to keep charging people anyway? How can anyone be surprised when the CEO of the company is the same person that destroys Star Wars Galaxies by steamrolling ahead with the NGE without giving it proper testing or hearing out any player input by saying "I know gamers. I know what you want. I know we'll lose players, but the new players we get will far exceed any of you that quit."... And *after* 70% of the players quit because they either hate the game, or the giant douchebag in the leader's seat of the company, he thinks an apology is saying he'll "never make that mistake again" when the company has a decade's long reputation for ignoring their playerbase? Yeah... sure...
RolnOrangeClvrs Was one of those who was a builder in Landmark. Left before this whole debacle (those packs... damn them) but had full hopes to come back with Next. Maybe see a buddy's build in there. Maybe see my own "pseudo-elven" builds. Had the same hopes for Cube World. Now I got nothing but tears and a sizable hole in my life and my wallet. I'd be happy to hear that second point, repetitive as it may sound.
Forgive me for being so crass. I was one of those people who bought a trailblazer pack. I bought into the whole "Your part of the developement of this game" and spent allot of money on micro-transactions. I loved the building aspect of it.Everquest is the standard, so i feel if your going to throw that name out there, you better bring the A game, and hey, had they tried and failed i could have lived with that. They didn't , rather they layoff 2/3 of the staff outsouce it, and cobble together what I call shitty Mine-WoW. If you ever watched any of the weekly pod-casts it was just sunshine and unicorns, they should have been more forthcoming. Then to top it off, they claim thier love for Everquest was why they canceled the project, insulting! So yeah.......FUCK DAYBREAK.
landmark was a great game i loved it payed for the 100$ edition. they ruined it for me with the million and one wipes i literally had an entire city with a sprawling castle that me and a group of 30 people inhabited. however they also introduced some game changing features thatwere less than great and it just slowly declined. the game was actually quite revolutionary creation wise. i never had such a detail oriented creafting and building system. like you could make very detailed structures like i saw someone make a tank with every detail you could imagine from the controls inside and all that it was a great game and hopefully it can be revived one day
Another issue with landmark is the same thing as why nobody's tried this since: a massive player-generated world is going to look like garbage. Like sure you and your friends will have a nice time making a city with a castle but over in the horizon you've got 20 dick-towers made by memelords.
the discontinuation of landmark really got me because I loved it as a concept but I too was not at all surprised given the cancellation of next and the fact that no one seemed to play it afterwards. I'm sad to see something like this go but I can't say I didn't see it coming from the start of the whole ordeal, one of the first things I thought to myself when SoE became daybreak was that next was going to fail as a result and the lay-offs just sealed it. hopefully we will see a new title under the name some time In the future when ambitious projects like next can be done but the scale of landmark really made optimization seem like some distant future technical problem that wasn't going to be addressed without a huge number of highly skilled people working on it, something that daybreak just didn't have access to, and that leads me to the sad conclusion that the cancellation of next was probably a good thing, for the teams working on it and the hype-train surrounding it.
I remember being really hyped for Landmark and EQ Next. One of my friends bought the $100 pack and we were so pumped to get in and start building. To my friend, $100 didn't mean a whole lot, but to this day I'm still sorry I ever talked them into it. I think any game's survival depends on three things: Performance, Control, and Gameplay. Unfortunately this game broke all three right out of the gate. The game was so horribly un-optimized for me that I could barely get more than 10fps at a time. Which made control of my character a sluggish nightmare. Add on top of that the annoy 'gamification' where they restricted neccessary tools like the grappling hook until you completed some really minor things was really annoying. It's really too bad though, when I sat down and got into the game and the tools, the amount of control it gave you was second-to-none. But the entire time I was trying to interface with the game, I kept thinking 'Why not just boot up Minecraft instead?' and that thought alone made me give up after a few hours. Even though I don't like modern minecraft, it still has decent performance, good control and decent gameplay. Which made me ultimately switch back and forget this thing ever existed. When I heard the news that EQ Next was cancelled, I wasn't thinking "Oh, that's horrible!", it was "Oh, that was a thing, right".
I was in on the Alpha and loved everything about this game. You could create amazing structures made of whatever you could mine (I had a White Marble Castle, with a diamond roof, Onyx floors with gold running through it)...the idea was that you had to be careful what you built your home out of...or you might find a dragon taking up residence in your castle lol. I hated that they let it go.
I didn't play EverQuest but I tried dozens of MMOs and tried to find a place to call my home. I never stayed too much in a MMO always looking for that perfect MMORPG and when EQ Next was announced and I've seen the game my heart grew 10 times and I finally found my home. But when this game died it's not just my hope that died, it was my heart as well. It supposed to be the true next generation MMORPG, the one we've been waiting for...such a pity.
Nothing pulls at my heartstrings more than Everquest. Even if you play it today, despite the game looking so dated, you can tell the individual touch given to the different cities walking through the deserted lands today. No game was given so much care by the art teams as this one was, and it's sad. We've taken a step back that we'll never get back from MMOs. Everything is about minmaxing stats and build paths, and people forget that the heart of these games in roleplaying. RPing in Everquest was so fun and easy to do because of the world you were in, and the world felt very hostile without having someone explain how to get around inside of it. Everything hit the perfect fantasy touch from the spell effects to the settings, lighting, lore. Everything was so perfect until it was ruined, partly by Sony wanting to make a buck, partly by World of Warcraft and its super polished leveling system. In WoW, we went into something we thought we wanted, and probably did want for a while, but we traded the long term satisfaction of truly becoming your character for a better gameplay curve that felt much better to level up in, but felt less satisfying to truly be part of the world.
Fortunately, D&D has seen a resurgence and explosion in popularity in the past few years. It's no computer-based MMO, but it can scratch some of that itch you miss.
Its not a troll message i mean really. The games not even in beta yet graphic wise it will be way better. But if you are looking for a eqoa/classic everquest game like most of us are then this game is going to be amazing if they pull it off
I loved mining in Landmark. you keep picking away and would mine out this entire vein of ore making a big hole. EQNext had potential. Daybreak was an abomination
EverQuest was the very first online game I ever played. The very first MMORPG I ever played. I grew up in the era when people played RPGs with pen, paper, dice rolls, and a fuck ton of imagination. EQ, for me, brought to life those worlds that I could see in my imagination. EQ II was a decent game too, but I gravitated between it and WoW. When I heard about Sony (finally) beginning to work on the third installment of the EQ franchise. my heart leapt for joy. I MISSED the world of Norath. I read all the new lore (via e-books that had been published on the website) and was very eager to see how the Teir'Dal story continued from a band of elite soldiers being exiled to who knows where (I presumed Lavastorm mountains) into an entirely new race, and what changed them into Dark Elves, what shaped the culture of their new society, etc. The game-play, from the previews of it I saw with various classes, looked fantastic. I loved the idea that the game would be fully constructible and destructible. When I heard of a tentative release date, I anticipated being one of the first to purchase the game. I love Norath and wanted greatly to return to it. Then I heard Sony sold the company. Something told me that would end up being the death knell for EverQuest Next. I hoped otherwise, but, in my heart, I knew then. When I heard about the layoffs, that only confirmed it for me. Still, I felt my heart break when the official cancellation was announced. Likewise, I do not believe that it was canceled due to being "not fun." I think that is malarkey they tried to feed the public to cover up for the fact that they purchased a game in development they had no financial way to continue. Daybreak was far too small a company for EverQuest. Who do I blame? Well, I could say I blame Daybreak, because they should never have purchased something they had no means to complete development of. Not EQ, anyway. Not the biggest name in MMORPGs. Not one of, if not THEoriginal MMORPG. But who I truly blame is Sony for pulling out mid-development, and selling, because "reasons." Sony should never have raised the hopes of all EQ fans by beginning to work on a new installment if they could not or would not finish it. Seriously.
Great video man. Deybreak Shames took a giant shit all over the fans with this one. Once SoE was acquired by Columbus Nova it was over. I expect they will bleed all their current IP's dry before they close up shop forever.
Thanks! I actually ended up on some of your videos for my research. And yeah, it definitely seems to be trending that way. I theorize a slow, eventual death of the studio, just based on the active games they have in their library. I hope the EQ IP gets licensed to someone else eventually.
I REALLY loved EQ1. It was huge, fun and faction mattered. What I didn't like were the necessity of raids for gear. But from the very first creating the character, using skills to outfit noob gear was all great fun. Each zone had something. What I would love to see is a re-do of EQ1 with a modern engine but not like EQ2.
I believed in Landmark and still do even though it is gone I still believe in what it could have been. Loved the game it was fun except for all the wipes. I agree with you on the Landmark was there to finance EQNext. I seriously believe that SOE Games had cut the funding to EQNext and Devs wanted to build it anyway. I think they ran into issues with their dreams of EQNext: (1.) Voxels were to hard on Videocards I replaced 2 from Alpha to game over. (2.) In EQNext how were they going to keep players from building the wrong stuff in the wrong places. (3.) What was not going to be fun was spending months to a mob that you need for a quest and ending up with 50 more quests in the process that you can not find the mobs for. (4.) The process of trying to kill a one group mob that has learned how counter all your moves and is now unbeatable by 2 full groups is frustrating. (5.) I remember Public Quests in EQ2 Building the Island Guild Halls, Building and Repairing wizard Spires. If they were put into EQNext they should be much more realistic because as they were they were not that much fun. So I get his Not Fun remark. (6.) Landmark could have continued to build for all of Sony/Daybreak Games except they were to greedy they wanted all the intellectual properties locked down tight. And you can't blame them we signed the agreement. And we all paid the price. They paid because they would not let us take out creations out of the game to a 3D rendering program to make props out of them. And the Devs were stuck making the tons of props we demanded and needed. We could have made those props and they would not have had to work so hard and we could have then had a game that could sustain itself and build for all of the other games they had. What idiots!
Eq next was ahead of its time. If I was announced last year or this year I think people would be so hyped up about it and it would've gone well. But they were roughly a decade early
I love old MMORPG's because of the community the long leveling would get you, because it took so long you really had no choice but to make friendships through the journey to level cap, with todays games getting max level in a day or so way to fast and no one ever builds a connection to the game, or anyone inside the game, no one feels attached to it and so will leave it just as fast as it took to hit max level. That's my two bits on new games, they aren't worth a damn to play because the communities are shit.
I was one of those that took the gamble and bought a founders pack. To be fair I really enjoyed Landmark for what it was. Building things to kill some time and seeing some of the fantastic things other folk had built was fun. They kept hammering it into the ground though. They kept trying to turn it into a game like you said but never sorted out the issues we'd been reporting since it first let us in. To see Everquext Next cancelled surprised absolutely no one. Whether it existed or not I have no idea but that many lay offs after a huge move didn't exactly announce great things from the company that bought them. To see Landmark get the shut down order doesn't surprise me either. That "heartfelt" letter is the same as every other statement they have spouted since becoming Daybreak, PR bullshit.
What happened? Daybreak Games happened. EQ's original dev team set out to create something that had never been done before, Daybreak's original ideology has, very blatantly, been to shut down that which doesn't make money (Planetside 1) and expound on that which does. It's a matter of motivation. Money only gets you so far, but the desire to create something unimaginable has much more potential. Daybreak was just a cancer that unfortunately managed to infect a pretty solid franchise, and almost immediately, from day 1 announcements about simplified religion to constant changing environments, they killed it.
Their treatment of Planetside is disgusting. The game was amazing, literally unparalleled, and they killed it. Then they did the same to it's successor.
I was a huge fan of Everquest and couldn't wait for everquest next to come out. When I heard the news we are no longer making everquest next because its not fun. I was so pissed. The website was taken down the exact day they said it was no longer in production so you couldn't even share your anger / point of view on the matter. I keep hoping another Company picks this game up and we do get the revolutionary game we all deserve.
Ever Quest Next (+Landmark) looked like a dream come true... if it had come true. I was totally looking forward to it. Sucks that it didn't work out, but I also thought that it seemed really weird that things played out as they did... I wouldn't be surprised if these theories were exactly what happened.
Firstly, let me state that I was in this almost from the beginning. As soon as it came out of the Closed Alpha I was in Landmark. I helped invent/perfect some minor building techniques with voxel manipulation that others took and made into masterpieces. TL;DR: New company couldn't afford/didn't want to wait for the tech needed to actually make the game and fired the guy who wanted it to happen. What killed EverQuest Next? They laid off David Georgeson, THE idea guy for EverQuest Next, almost immediately after buying the company. That is what killed it. Without David, there could be no EverQuest Next. David was the entire reason it existed at all, he was the soul of the game and the team. David was the driving force, the charismatic leader who inspired people to achieve the impossible, . . . and to reach beyond their grasp. Personally, I think David was reaching too far himself. He was relying too much on 'perspective' technologies promised by other companies who couldn't deliver on his vision (one of the core companies behind his AI plans even folded). The game he envisioned might have eventually been possible, and I think it would have made an excellent addition to the lore of Norrath. But we just don't have the technology to do what he wanted yet, and as that became more and more apparent they kept having to make compromises that diminished the project as a whole. Landmark did push the technology forward, they managed to make HUGE strides and pushed their partner companies to do the same. But that's not where the new owners could make money quick. Due to other market factors and legal issues, Sony wanted to divorce itself from software, so they scrambled to sell off their software assets quickly, and that meant rather cheap to almost anyone. The company who bought Sony Online Entertainment is not from the gaming industry, they aren't in it for the players or the game. They purchased SOE for its existing games and their steady income stream, not for future titles. Planetside 2, DC Universe Online, EverQuest 1 & 2, as well as other games I don't know, all make a good chunk of money every month. Games SOE was able to make because they had such a powerful backer in Sony who could easily absorb any losses from games that didn't do so well. So SOE was able to take bigger risks to satisfy the gaming community and build from what worked. The new owners, can't. That's not who they are, not what they are. They are just in it for the money, not the community, not the art, not in it for the game. The new owners were completely within their rights to do what they did with their new property. But not knowing the industry they ended up alienating a LOT of their players and they cut features and plans and entire projects that the community was there for. By the terms in which they purchased SOE they couldn't instantly shut down all new game projects because those projects had contracts of their own, but they did quickly render those projects pointless/ineffectual to justify eventual shutdown. Anyway, I think I'm ranting a bit. I'll write up a TL;DR near the top.
I used to follow the development of the streaming voxel engine that the technology was built upon and it really was an amazing piece of work the lone developer had a regular blog on his progress with years of incremental advancements. Then we saw this pop up in 2013 as Sony were debuting their PS4 console, at first I was very interested but soon began to wonder if it was anything more than this very clever piece of software bundled with some sparkly assets and packaged into a tech demo for the PS4 launch. Other than the engine that had been developed previously none of the other big ideas seemed to materialize and I wonder if they had the team, the plan or the intent to make it happen.
It is interesting that no one mentions the fact that you were supposed to be able to make real life money selling the things you made in Landmark in the store in EQNext. I started in Landmark because I hoped to be able to make a little money creating things people would buy in EQNext. When they announced that Landmark would be a stand alone game and nothing made in Landmark would be sold in EQNext, I quit. There was no reason to spend time on it anymore because Landmark would never be as big as EQNext since it was only supposed to revolve around development. I was upset they had lied to us and walked away to never look back.
"We know you have high standards when it comes to Norrath and we do too." Really? Is that why you tried to get free labor for EQ Next with landmark AND still make money off it? Is that why the last 4 or so EQ1 expansions have been shit? And the only way they make money on EQ1 is releasing TLP servers. Please. Just sell the IP to a company that actually wants to see it succeed.
I agree, I'd love to see the IP shift hands at this point. I don't see Daybreak doing anything good with it at this point, especially given the way their game lineup looks.
Sonalan Honestly, DGC actually does have high standards when it comes to Norrath. It was SOE and its parent company Sony who had no standards for Norrath, and so they (Sony) did just what you suggested and sold the IP (all of SOE in fact) to a company that actually wants to see it succeed. Sony was who choose the Landmark path and the constant pushing of new games instead of maintaining and improving anything in the existing one(s). By the time Daybreak came into being Landmark was already separated from EQ Next and pushed as its own thing. Also, you're mistaken on EQ1 only making money from the Progression servers, there are far far more All Access EQ players who do not play the TLP servers than do. It is just that those players at spread out over several more servers so it is not as apparent. Anthony M Brad wouldn't be good for EQ anymore, his view on what a game should be has drastically changed since he created EQ. He wants a different game now.
Maybe they should have kept some elements of Everquest I & II that worked well and added the new features like the whole building process and land ownership, and add farming the private land, hunting for pelts and meat, a trade system with trade routes, and seamanship, with boats for fighting and moving cargo to and from port cities on the maps with water. After all if your going to carry on the name, there must be some things that feel similar to the older versions to some extent. For example no need to revamp the combat system, its a lot of work and may not be welcomed by some. Maybe some PvP zones that can be traveled for increased danger but with a possibility of gaining greater wealth.
I never bought into Everquest Next or Landmark. I have a couple of friends that played Landmark and both said it was not worth the price that payed for the founders packs, plus they had all kinds of weird glitching issues. I was waiting for Everquest Next to come out so I could play it, it had great hype and i was hooked. I am sorry that they couldn't pull it off.
For Daybreak to say EverQuest was not fun but is near and dear to our hearts is a slap in the face to the players. Sad that my game EQOA had to become the first casualty in all this mess of bad management.
Daybreak was created to keep everquest & everquest 2 and planetside & Planetside 2 going in terms of content and maintenance. Anything new that was impacting that cost wise got dropped. Anything new that could be useful could be plugged into those 4 existing games as expansions. Some of the newer content in all four games is higher resolution. One of the innovations coming out of minecraft modding allows higher resolution stuff to be done in lower resolution engines like everquest. That will kick in soon. Their zombie game may remain because it's using very cheap stock items, building and guns. And the DC game is everquest spells and stuff with a lot of different art. DC can't let its game project die. Those that have left have ended up in some very interesting projects.
Well one thing that really suprise me is that nobody did make a privat server for landmark right? Actually really sad for all the people that actually loved to play / build in there. For myself I played just for fun was not now the best builder but had fun with that too, farmed some mats(even that was kinda fun and was hoping that this type of farming would come then to EQN) , test pvp/pve came out late (and that actually look very promising too) and watch how people build amazing stuff.
I wish they would at the very least release Jeremy Soule soundtrack. THis was THE game for me, one that was supposed to delvier on every single front that Guild Wars 2 failed to deliver. It even had music by the same composer, which happens to be my favorite in the entire gaming industry. Ah, its a real shame EQN was cancelled.
I all but forgot these projects existed and I bought one of those said founder packs that gave access to Landmark (I got it for Landmark). I tried to play the game once and got frustrated cause I had so many dropped frames that I couldn't even move. I figured the game just needed more time, now it's looking like it needed more than just that. I always hate seeing companies fail cause they get over ambitious on their projects. At least they knew when to call it quits though. I think people would be more upset if they wound up releasing a very incomplete and crappy version of Everquest Next.
anyone that misses the brutal difficulty of eq1 should try out EVE Online. wild west space ship mmo with player driven marketplace, where everything is player built, space is fought for and claimed by huge alliances and corporations. be an engineer, a general, a CEO, a pirate, a fighter, an industrialist, a space trucker, a convoy defender, a merc, a trader, a scammer, a spy, a merc, a bounty hunter, a miner. scamming is legal as long as you can deal with the consequences. infiltrate player corporations, gain their trust, rob them, and disappear. destroy someones ship and take all of their cargo. destroy their capsule as they eject and you can keep their corpse. wave it in their face, or sell it if they're a space celebrity.
Heeeell no, if there's massive layoffs at my company after we got sold, and I somehow survived the reap, you best believe I'm immediately looking for a new job and peace out before I'm a goner too when the studio eventually fails. It's a sign of huge mismanagement either before the sale, or after. Both situations will likely result in the game getting axed.
I will never buy to alpha and beta test games, for just this very reason. You buy to help develop and then the game is cancelled, you are out that money and never had a chance to truly play the game. Land mark why the hell would any one pay to be a game developer? This make no sense and takes jobs out of the market on top of it.
A thing you didn’t mention was player numbers, while true daybreak’s games are available outside of steam, on steam most of 2016 had less than 10 concurrent players. Even if doubled outside of steam it would of barely had 15 average, it’s pretty hard to maintain a game with that few players.
Look into Ashes of Creation. A good portion of the Dev team worked on EQ Next and Landmark and are building a full MMORPG Sandbox game with structure building. Probably the closest thing you'll come across compared to EQN.
I'm not a "I hate wow because it's a baby game" person but I'm definitely resentful toward wow for how it absolutely stunted the MMO genre which was my absolute favorite genre of game up until around 2010. But, by that point I had played so many slight modifications of the wow formula and be so utterly disappointed by promises from so many games it was clear there was pressure coming down from every MMO studio to make a game that was at least SOMEWHAT like WoW. Keep in mind EQ, UO and AC the 3 original big MMO titles played almost nothing alike.
6:52 And the answer is.... Activision. I remember all those "The wow killer" notes, each month a new "wow killer" appeared in gaming websites and in wow community, and players placed their bets every time. wow haters vs fans. In the end it wasn't a 3rd game, it was their own company who killed themselves. lol
i really hate wow right now and this game marked 2 relation ship a breath in my school time and even my first paychek money... soo i like a lot wow in the pass, but even against others mmorpg as runescape it got trash to me... well the lore is too heroic drived shit and every player is a hero of the world, not of they own history soo no matter how strong you are, they always put a stronger npc to fight and you looks so tine that is just stupid... plus, you only can level up one craft it forces you to trade shit with others players... mvp and pvp are trash, this bring back heroic and lore troubles again... and plus i love to play alone, but guilds are too much powerfull it make me feel odd to not join one and lossing xp and others goods soo i quit and back to others games
Landmark was fun, i had the starter pack for £19.99 and played it for about 6 months and loved it. the voxel tech was incredible and the potential of landmark was astronomical. if it had been stabilised it could have replaced minecraft.
Whenever I see videos of EQ, like clips in this video, I don't even recognize it. I don't remember the graphics being that bad, which is odd because when I see other old games like the original Tomb Raider they are exactly how I remember them. It's odd because I'm not sure if they are running low gfx/texture settings or what because a quick search and I can often find other videos that just look better and more like what I remember.
After investing in the Landmark with purchasing of the founder pack hoping it would have carry-over benefits for EQNext...I wouldn't lift a pixel in any game with EQ stamp on it. Fawk their new game Pantheon Rise of the Fallen, it isn't EQ, it isn't the world we love. May it Rest in Peace.
"It wasn't fun" is the go-to reason for why any game was canceled these days. The reason is because it makes the developers or publisher look like the good guys. Hey, they aren't canning an awesome game because they don't have the resources to continue! They were looking out for you and decided the game sucked too much so they didn't want you to be upset!! Man, what a great bunch of guys! Seriously, though, you will not see many game cancelation notices these days that don't have something to do with "not being fun".
I still have that hope for PS4 EQ:Next. It would've brought together so many players for EQ PC/PS2. Still hurts that its gone every time i look at ESO I think man EQ:N would be so great right now.
it's funny all the conspiracy theories so many people have about this. they were actually very straightforward with the public, and had a sensible plan for Landmark and how it would tie in with EQN *AND* other games that utilize it (like a sci-fi game). THAT was the only reason for removing EQ from the name. the gameplay of Landmark was them actually prototyping EQN gameplay. NOT some other unrelated game. prototypes and technology demos don't always work out as expected. they probably found that the VoxelFarm team wasn't able to make the engine as performant as they wanted for the type of content that users were building with it. combined with finding out the gameplay wasn't fun...... there was no conspiracy or intentional misleading.
IMO, I was hoping what they would've just made EQN just a reboot of the original with up-to-date technology and mechanics instead of trying to make something 100% new. Probably would've worked out better for them and then they could've added the Landmark mechanics in an expansion or something in the future. Either way, RIP EQN.
i've never played EQ.. I played EQ2 for a few hours just to see what it was like but obviously just went back to my main mmos. But i realize what EQ has done for gaming and hearing about what happened to the franchise is still disheartening. I have some experience with SOE/daybreak. I played planetside 2 about a year after it came out, and I loved that game. I bought a brand new desktop just to play it. The battles were massive and I found myself a pretty good outfit. Every so often I would join teamspeak and we would work as a team and use strategies etc.. It was actually probably one of the most immersive experiences in an fps type game I've ever had. and I actually got up to a relatively high rank in my outfit. I loved it. After it started to get old as games do, i stopped playing as much but still dabbled. But things seemed to be... declining. Once daybreak was a thing I noticed how much the game was changing. Now it's pretty much pay to win, it's buggy, and the community is awful. Everything is so conviluted with power ups and micro transactions.. And in the last few times I've played, I haven't seen a single battle even close to the scale I saw back in the day. it's nothing how it used to be. And I never play it anymore. Another game I threw money at that I'll never get back.
WOW is way past it's prime. I think people dump money into it more for nostalgia or lack of options in the mmo realm. My biggest gripe with their success is that it stifled innovation from other mmo's. And what happened to landmark and Next is tragic. Stupid corporations!
I was looking forward to this game so much, all the ideas sounded so good (although I did wonder whether they could pull them off) pinning my hopes on Pantheon (hopefully late this year?) Ashes of Creation (2018) looks to be in a similar vein to EQ:N if anyone is interested.
Sony are notorious for pushing online games into early launch. That's what happened here. Landmark was good but nowhere near what it should have been when they launched it. The building tools were powerful but unrefined. Eg. to make a round tower you couldn't just plonk down a cylinder. You had to make a sphere, hollow it, chop off the top and bottom to make a ring, then copy and paste (with meticulous care) enough rings to make your tower. Any but the most keen of builders would have regarded that degree of complexity and effort to make a simple cylinder to be bonkers. Such complexities were common in the building tools. That's why it bombed. And yeah, with them planning to use player made assets from Landmark to build EQN, that necessarily meant the death of that game too.
The real story (or as best as we'll ever get) of what actually happened behind the scenes on EQNext and Landmark. eq2wire.com/2017/01/05/closing-the-book-on-everquest-next-and-landmark/
I used to enjoy playing Landmark but yeah, it was a taster for EQ:N. When the franchise got sold to Dey Break Games though, I knew it was the end. Sad to hear they're closing the Landmark servers too but I can't say I'm surprised, after all, my opinion of the company really couldn't get much lower.
I hate to by the cynic, but when I saw EQ: Next shown I was initially excited, but it quickly turned to despair as they showed the voxel engine and talked about Landmark. That's when I knew it would be a failure like Vanguard with an engine that simply wouldn't work as advertised. Which is is a shame as they had a good thing going on the human characters with their Disney-esqe art direction (not so much for Tony the Lion). In my perfect world EQ:N would have been a relatively faithful remake of the original EQ but with a fresh lick of paint. No major changes, just polish some rough edges. It would have been a niche game, but there would have been a loyal audience there for it, something new MMOs struggle to build.
Maybe I'll get booed for this but I think someone should buy landmark and fix the bugs so it can be a minecraft 2.0 i can see people making big castles with monsters and all while having players going in and exploring it. I can see if you can have the physics done right you might have people making there own world with there own quest there own towns there own community. All the dev team needs to do is to make sure the tools work and the world does not break. Then link a donation system to the game for people to give to builders (while the dev team take 3--5%). A second life game but more interactive.
It's really hard to make a triple A game in these new engines. We are maxing out making these games. Even Nintendo had to redo the new Metroid from scratch, because they thought it wasn't good enough (that's a lot of years down the drain).
Aww. I never got into EQ1 because I was unable to pay the monthly fee at the time my friend was trying to get me to play it so I picked up Guild Wars. Eventually I got into Wow and when EQ2 came out I tried to get into it but I was corrupted by WoW and my friend could not get into it because of all the time and RP he put into EQ1. I think EverQuest Next would have been something we both would have at least tried. Tried WildStar and I kind of liked it but again with already having a maxed out raid ready character on WoW it was easier to just keep playing WoW. I did get the FireFall top tier founders pack and was really looking forward to that and then when nothing really happened with it and all I was doing was exploring I stopped playing and then found out the servers were shut down, but hey I got a poster and a hat. Played a little Rift, SWG (after JtLS), GW2, EvE, SW:TOR (this game suffered the to many people did everything too fast, and in the first month me and all of my friends already had all of the raids on farm. At least when they were not glitched to all hell), FFXI, and FFXIV. But again all of these I only played for a month or two because I had WoW right there already with my character that was not level one. I have on my priest alone over 4 years logged into the game. At least now most MMORPGs just start out as FTP games so I can try them out but too many of them also are PTW because they have to get their money some how.
I'm really disappointed that project EQ Next was closed. The game was really interesting and very promising. I don't really understand why Deybreak shut it down, in my opinion even in the alpha/beta state it was very popular. I would like to see "reanimate" of project, maybe by som other company.
Some people were hyped, but I was never anything but pessimistic when it came to EQN. SOE had an absolutely shit track record with their titles and they promised way more than they could have ever delivered. Daybreak may have buried it, but the game was fucking stillborn right from the start.
I was REALLY excited for this game. Everything about it just seemed so amazing. I couldn't give a fuck about Landmark, but it was cool to watch videos and stay up to date with development and stuff. What got me was the slow realization that any/all EQN news and gameplay/development updates were nonexistant. No new concept art, gameplay trailers, races/classes previews, nothing. It was all Landmark. You'd see EQN "devs" running around Landmark talking about what players were creating. For Months. Nothing else. Personally, I think the moment Daybreak laid off all those initial devs, they cancelled EQN development but kept leading players on for many months afterwards, maybe because they hoped someday to pick development back up or something until they finally officially pulled the plug. But it's obvious that NO development was done for EQN in the months leading up to the official cancellation.
xplicitmike They should have refunded all of the early access purchases as those were bought because players assumed the packages would lead to EQN. It was not a Kickstarter where folks donate money fully knowing it may not be funded. Players expected a game from a long-time, established franchise, not a money grab.
I've never played EQ, but landmark was the next minecraft game for me. It was a game of my dreams and they took it away from me and other creative people like me, after taking our money!!!!!!
At first I was thinking "isn't this video two years too late?" until you mentioned Landmark was being shut down. I doubt they created Landmark as an end unto itself, just doesn't make sense, I think it's what it was represented to be, a way for them to get their players to provide them free content -- smart! When I saw that video of Grigson talking about what EQ Next was supposed to be, I was stoked. I instanly thought, as I'm sure many did, that if they could pull that off, every other MMOPRG was dead. It'd be like pressing the reset button on a whole industry. Being a programmer, I also wondered "but how are they going to DO that?" Maybe they figured out they couldn't? Maybe they were having to cut back on the scope and decided they didn't want to realese some No Man's Sky-esque pile of junk? But they still support the other EQ games, and I still play EQ2 from time-to-time, so there's that. If they could've realized their vision, it would've been to the MMORPG market what the Dreadnaught was to battleships, something so advanced that everything else was instanly obsolete. It's unfortunate it didn't happen. But you know there's people who worked on it that'll want to make it happen somewhere else at another time.
The way you worded everything makes it sound like perhaps the project got Molyneux'd. That is, the lead designer got in front of everyone and overpromised to the point where it would be ultimately impossible to create given current tech. The difference here is that these things were shown off in a video as part of the announcement so if it did get Molyneux'd, it was probably closer to the point of pitching it to the higher-ups rather than the media. And yeah this video isn't exactly "timely", but this "series" is more or less a nostalgic look back on what could have been and what may still be (in some cases).
ingeniousclown Gaming We saw some videos of combat that was supposed to be real combat -- I think; long time ago. Destructable world was to eventually self-heal (we saw that in Landmark), but there were other things, remember how he said that if an Orc village was raiding a trade route and adventureres attacked them too many times for raiding that trade route they'd move? How's the AI do that? No matter what MMORPG, the mobs never are 'smart', you aggro them, they attack, they die. No matter how many times Hogger died, he never moved his band to another location. That kind of logic might've proven very difficult to implement. Or maybe they really did have some clever bits of technology worked out but the actual game didn't work when they bolted it all together. Maybe it was too linear, maybe it was not linear at all, maybe it was more mine-craftlike and testers felt they lacked enough direction to get going? Maybe the story was a dull retread. Without inside information, one can't say definitively. But I'd bet $100 it was because they were WAY over-budget and some accountants decided that it was going to turn into a money black-hole, a game where if it didn't supplant WoW as the king of the hill would be a financial disaster.
I loved this game, played for hours and hours. At a minimum I would have liked a single player mode or private server thing. I thought they did great with the tools and even the quest mob tools. I could have played Landmark for years and years... made all kinds of great things. I would have been happy for it to stay just as is... or "was".
Was so hyped for Everquest next. Looked so promising and revolutionary. Imo WoW doesn't need to die, it has it's own mechanics, playerbase and gigantic world. Everquest Next was going to be something totally different for me :) As you explained the moves towards the alpha founder packs for Landmark... That's actually a brilliant but disguting marketing move. But it worked..! O.o" This is why I always wait with stuff to release and someone to make a gameplay video about it before i buy something.
I really thought EQN would be the one to save the mmo genre back when they did that first presentation. Like I really thought star citizen would be out by now...
I want my $20 back from Landmark. I purchased the settler's pack on the premise that it was going to enrich EQ Next. I believe the conspiracy that EQ Next was never real or serious from the beginning. It was all a scam to sell Landmark packages, and this is why I have never bought early access games since.
I feel completely ripped off. I paid to be a part of the Landmark Alpha and wasn't reimbursed in any form or fashion when Daybreak acquired the IP and killed it. Also, all the "assets" I helped create in the game world are literal vaporware now. All that work, all that effort and all I have to show for it is the bruise from the five-finger dick punch Daybreak gave me.
I agree with a lot of what you said/speculated. I was a founder merely sold on the hype of Next. I also agree that they closed development because the financial aspect was failing.
Landmark has the BEST building system I have ever seen. It allows for amazing detail. I built a house and even went so far as to put molding along the floor and ceiling. Created lattice around the deck as well, which was awesome. It is an unforgivable sin that this awesome creation system is stuck in this sorry excuse for a game.....
Just make a game with the name "everquest" in it. let the community pay for excess and let the community test and develop ingame stuff. Then sell the Company. After the Company was sold, the new owners realized that they had been ripped off, and that Landmark will never be a real game. in Sports we call that "selling wolf tickets"
All I know is I spent 100 bucks on the Landmark trailblazer set. I got robbed. I still have gift keys Ill never use. This was a great franchise, and concept, Huge disappointment.
Gray Knight wait what happened? You bought it but couldn't use it?
me too brother. me too, I want my 100 bucks back.
100 dollars? Omg a german harmonica costs 30 dollars and you can play it whole life. Time to roll out anti-scam panzerkanones.
@@MrSp0iler after landmark i bought a real gun and get fun firing in the printed landmark name... okay, i not do the last part, but the gun is reall more reliable hobby, at least until leftists ban it... good the world is full of dictators and they want to put that title in others head
You, me, and many others. I blame don't for being sellouts. Nry had no reason or need to sell SOE
i really hate daybreak for what they did.
and a bit of this hate goes to sony for giving this up
If you think SOE would have ever been able to deliver on anything they promised with EQN, you're naive. The people in charge had no idea how to manage their games. They ran nearly every title they released into the dirt.
I gave years of my life to this game. I had my work included in the game, I was there from the beginning. Then Columbus Nova comes in, buys everything up, promises nothing will change, fires the main staff, stops updating, stops communicating, then announces the game would be shutting down and everything you did will be gone, everything you bought will be gone and they will not allow you to host any of it on your end.
MMO in a nutshell
Well at least EG7 owns Daybreak now. I'm sorry for what happened to you. It looked like an amazing game. What are your thoughts on Free Realms? When Free Realms closed we were going to migrate to Landmark until they suddenly shut it down as well. It's a shame that we can't find a home in the Daybreak community as every game they make gets shut down in the end.. :(
@@abc-ug5ym You spelled capitalism wrong
They spent more than 3 years, actually.
Due to their decision, I'll NEVER support any title where Daybreak is involved. They totally SCREWED a lot of fans over this.
I have no qualms in steering people towards the screw-over which was EQNext. EQ was near/dear to my heart. They screwed with many people's hopes/dreams about the NEXT EQ.
Sell EQ to a game-maker who ACTUALLY CARES.
Well said!
me either fuck Daybreak i will never again give them a dime!
So what happened with SOE and Daybreak? I stopped playing EQ2 for a long time then I came back to see that they split
you should be thanking them the game looked like absolute dog shit.
One thing I neglected to mention in this video was the idea of charging for alpha/beta access to Landmark for what's meant to be a sister game under the idea that the money would go into funding Everquest Next, just to have the EQ name ripped off of it and Next cancelled. This is one of many reasons why people feel slighted by Daybreak, and rightly so.
k
Make a video about overwatch vs global agenda plz cuz alot of copies from global agenda
I can say, as a long time player of Everquest 2 after the Tears of Veeshan expansion during the transition... EQ2 took a nose dive. The raiders and long timers I talked to all informed me of how much the game quality tanked. Quick super easy to make recycled content as an "expansion" mini-packs and tons of little free incentives to keep playing.
It's really sad that Everquest is likely going to die as an Intellectual Property which is a shame because of how crucial Everquest was to MMOs.
LMFAO @Daniel Faruk Overwatch and Global Agenda are nothing alike.
I just gotta say... after being royally fucked over by John Smedley not once, but multiple times... how can anyone be surprised when he fucks over gamers and fails to make good on promises? How can anyone be surprised that he okays charging money for something he knows 6 months in advance isn't going to be coming out, but decides to keep charging people anyway? How can anyone be surprised when the CEO of the company is the same person that destroys Star Wars Galaxies by steamrolling ahead with the NGE without giving it proper testing or hearing out any player input by saying "I know gamers. I know what you want. I know we'll lose players, but the new players we get will far exceed any of you that quit."... And *after* 70% of the players quit because they either hate the game, or the giant douchebag in the leader's seat of the company, he thinks an apology is saying he'll "never make that mistake again" when the company has a decade's long reputation for ignoring their playerbase? Yeah... sure...
First of all.....FUCK DAYBREAK!
+RolnOrangeClvrs Is there a second of all?
Yeah, but it would be repetitive.
RolnOrangeClvrs Was one of those who was a builder in Landmark. Left before this whole debacle (those packs... damn them) but had full hopes to come back with Next. Maybe see a buddy's build in there. Maybe see my own "pseudo-elven" builds.
Had the same hopes for Cube World.
Now I got nothing but tears and a sizable hole in my life and my wallet.
I'd be happy to hear that second point, repetitive as it may sound.
Forgive me for being so crass. I was one of those people who bought a trailblazer pack. I bought into the whole "Your part of the developement of this game" and spent allot of money on micro-transactions. I loved the building aspect of it.Everquest is the standard, so i feel if your going to throw that name out there, you better bring the A game, and hey, had they tried and failed i could have lived with that. They didn't , rather they layoff 2/3 of the staff outsouce it, and cobble together what I call shitty Mine-WoW. If you ever watched any of the weekly pod-casts it was just sunshine and unicorns, they should have been more forthcoming. Then to top it off, they claim thier love for Everquest was why they canceled the project, insulting! So yeah.......FUCK DAYBREAK.
I agree
" it wasn't fun" means that they couldn't think of anything else to say to get it shut down
omg the framerates tho lol
It reminds me of when i was a kid playing minecraft on a tiny old laptop
cinematic 4fps experience
I never had frames like that. 😑
Thought it was me, had to look in the comments for confirmation it wasnt me. Thank you
landmark was a great game i loved it payed for the 100$ edition. they ruined it for me with the million and one wipes i literally had an entire city with a sprawling castle that me and a group of 30 people inhabited.
however they also introduced some game changing features thatwere less than great and it just slowly declined.
the game was actually quite revolutionary creation wise. i never had such a detail oriented creafting and building system. like you could make very detailed structures like i saw someone make a tank with every detail you could imagine from the controls inside and all that
it was a great game and hopefully it can be revived one day
landmark was basically Minecraft without gameplay lmao you got scammed paying $100
..... And far far far better graphics
Another issue with landmark is the same thing as why nobody's tried this since: a massive player-generated world is going to look like garbage. Like sure you and your friends will have a nice time making a city with a castle but over in the horizon you've got 20 dick-towers made by memelords.
the discontinuation of landmark really got me because I loved it as a concept but I too was not at all surprised given the cancellation of next and the fact that no one seemed to play it afterwards. I'm sad to see something like this go but I can't say I didn't see it coming from the start of the whole ordeal, one of the first things I thought to myself when SoE became daybreak was that next was going to fail as a result and the lay-offs just sealed it. hopefully we will see a new title under the name some time In the future when ambitious projects like next can be done but the scale of landmark really made optimization seem like some distant future technical problem that wasn't going to be addressed without a huge number of highly skilled people working on it, something that daybreak just didn't have access to, and that leads me to the sad conclusion that the cancellation of next was probably a good thing, for the teams working on it and the hype-train surrounding it.
I remember being really hyped for Landmark and EQ Next. One of my friends bought the $100 pack and we were so pumped to get in and start building. To my friend, $100 didn't mean a whole lot, but to this day I'm still sorry I ever talked them into it.
I think any game's survival depends on three things: Performance, Control, and Gameplay. Unfortunately this game broke all three right out of the gate. The game was so horribly un-optimized for me that I could barely get more than 10fps at a time. Which made control of my character a sluggish nightmare. Add on top of that the annoy 'gamification' where they restricted neccessary tools like the grappling hook until you completed some really minor things was really annoying.
It's really too bad though, when I sat down and got into the game and the tools, the amount of control it gave you was second-to-none. But the entire time I was trying to interface with the game, I kept thinking 'Why not just boot up Minecraft instead?' and that thought alone made me give up after a few hours. Even though I don't like modern minecraft, it still has decent performance, good control and decent gameplay. Which made me ultimately switch back and forget this thing ever existed. When I heard the news that EQ Next was cancelled, I wasn't thinking "Oh, that's horrible!", it was "Oh, that was a thing, right".
I was in on the Alpha and loved everything about this game. You could create amazing structures made of whatever you could mine (I had a White Marble Castle, with a diamond roof, Onyx floors with gold running through it)...the idea was that you had to be careful what you built your home out of...or you might find a dragon taking up residence in your castle lol. I hated that they let it go.
I didn't play EverQuest but I tried dozens of MMOs and tried to find a place to call my home. I never stayed too much in a MMO always looking for that perfect MMORPG and when EQ Next was announced and I've seen the game my heart grew 10 times and I finally found my home.
But when this game died it's not just my hope that died, it was my heart as well.
It supposed to be the true next generation MMORPG, the one we've been waiting for...such a pity.
Nothing pulls at my heartstrings more than Everquest. Even if you play it today, despite the game looking so dated, you can tell the individual touch given to the different cities walking through the deserted lands today. No game was given so much care by the art teams as this one was, and it's sad.
We've taken a step back that we'll never get back from MMOs. Everything is about minmaxing stats and build paths, and people forget that the heart of these games in roleplaying. RPing in Everquest was so fun and easy to do because of the world you were in, and the world felt very hostile without having someone explain how to get around inside of it. Everything hit the perfect fantasy touch from the spell effects to the settings, lighting, lore. Everything was so perfect until it was ruined, partly by Sony wanting to make a buck, partly by World of Warcraft and its super polished leveling system. In WoW, we went into something we thought we wanted, and probably did want for a while, but we traded the long term satisfaction of truly becoming your character for a better gameplay curve that felt much better to level up in, but felt less satisfying to truly be part of the world.
Fortunately, D&D has seen a resurgence and explosion in popularity in the past few years. It's no computer-based MMO, but it can scratch some of that itch you miss.
Everquest fans look up pantheon rise of fallen
ya looks good
wayne cook it looks terrible
Then your not a everuquest fan are you ?
I cant wait its not even in beta yet but it should be just like classic eqoa im hoping and then some if all goes well
Its not a troll message i mean really. The games not even in beta yet graphic wise it will be way better. But if you are looking for a eqoa/classic everquest game like most of us are then this game is going to be amazing if they pull it off
You do a very good job of drawing this video out as painfully as possible
I started to get old World of Warcraft lag PTSD watching this. The Horror!!
Have you seen Worlds Adrift, they are doing something similar. They have a Island builder that is meant to link in to the final release.
I've seen a little bit of it. The exploration aspect seems really cool, but it seems like it's still got a whoooole lot of work left.
I loved mining in Landmark. you keep picking away and would mine out this entire vein of ore making a big hole. EQNext had potential. Daybreak was an abomination
EverQuest was the very first online game I ever played. The very first MMORPG I ever played. I grew up in the era when people played RPGs with pen, paper, dice rolls, and a fuck ton of imagination. EQ, for me, brought to life those worlds that I could see in my imagination. EQ II was a decent game too, but I gravitated between it and WoW.
When I heard about Sony (finally) beginning to work on the third installment of the EQ franchise. my heart leapt for joy. I MISSED the world of Norath. I read all the new lore (via e-books that had been published on the website) and was very eager to see how the Teir'Dal story continued from a band of elite soldiers being exiled to who knows where (I presumed Lavastorm mountains) into an entirely new race, and what changed them into Dark Elves, what shaped the culture of their new society, etc.
The game-play, from the previews of it I saw with various classes, looked fantastic. I loved the idea that the game would be fully constructible and destructible. When I heard of a tentative release date, I anticipated being one of the first to purchase the game. I love Norath and wanted greatly to return to it.
Then I heard Sony sold the company. Something told me that would end up being the death knell for EverQuest Next. I hoped otherwise, but, in my heart, I knew then. When I heard about the layoffs, that only confirmed it for me. Still, I felt my heart break when the official cancellation was announced. Likewise, I do not believe that it was canceled due to being "not fun." I think that is malarkey they tried to feed the public to cover up for the fact that they purchased a game in development they had no financial way to continue. Daybreak was far too small a company for EverQuest.
Who do I blame? Well, I could say I blame Daybreak, because they should never have purchased something they had no means to complete development of. Not EQ, anyway. Not the biggest name in MMORPGs. Not one of, if not THEoriginal MMORPG. But who I truly blame is Sony for pulling out mid-development, and selling, because "reasons." Sony should never have raised the hopes of all EQ fans by beginning to work on a new installment if they could not or would not finish it. Seriously.
Great video man. Deybreak Shames took a giant shit all over the fans with this one. Once SoE was acquired by Columbus Nova it was over. I expect they will bleed all their current IP's dry before they close up shop forever.
Thanks! I actually ended up on some of your videos for my research. And yeah, it definitely seems to be trending that way. I theorize a slow, eventual death of the studio, just based on the active games they have in their library. I hope the EQ IP gets licensed to someone else eventually.
I REALLY loved EQ1. It was huge, fun and faction mattered. What I didn't like were the necessity of raids for gear. But from the very first creating the character, using skills to outfit noob gear was all great fun. Each zone had something. What I would love to see is a re-do of EQ1 with a modern engine but not like EQ2.
I remember playing landmark. My rotten ex bf got me interested. It goes without saying that I miss making things in the game more than his sorry ass
I believed in Landmark and still do even though it is gone I still believe in what it could have been. Loved the game it was fun except for all the wipes. I agree with you on the Landmark was there to finance EQNext. I seriously believe that SOE Games had cut the funding to EQNext and Devs wanted to build it anyway. I think they ran into issues with their dreams of EQNext:
(1.) Voxels were to hard on Videocards I replaced 2 from Alpha to game over.
(2.) In EQNext how were they going to keep players from building the wrong stuff in the wrong places.
(3.) What was not going to be fun was spending months to a mob that you need for a quest and ending up with 50 more quests in the process that you can not find the mobs for.
(4.) The process of trying to kill a one group mob that has learned how counter all your moves and is now unbeatable by 2 full groups is frustrating.
(5.) I remember Public Quests in EQ2 Building the Island Guild Halls, Building and Repairing wizard Spires. If they were put into EQNext they should be much more realistic because as they were they were not that much fun. So I get his Not Fun remark.
(6.) Landmark could have continued to build for all of Sony/Daybreak Games except they were to greedy they wanted all the intellectual properties locked down tight. And you can't blame them we signed the agreement. And we all paid the price. They paid because they would not let us take out creations out of the game to a 3D rendering program to make props out of them. And the Devs were stuck making the tons of props we demanded and needed. We could have made those props and they would not have had to work so hard and we could have then had a game that could sustain itself and build for all of the other games they had. What idiots!
Eq next was ahead of its time. If I was announced last year or this year I think people would be so hyped up about it and it would've gone well. But they were roughly a decade early
I love old MMORPG's because of the community the long leveling would get you, because it took so long you really had no choice but to make friendships through the journey to level cap, with todays games getting max level in a day or so way to fast and no one ever builds a connection to the game, or anyone inside the game, no one feels attached to it and so will leave it just as fast as it took to hit max level. That's my two bits on new games, they aren't worth a damn to play because the communities are shit.
I've seen what they have been doing to EQ1, I can't say that they still consider it a labor of love.
I was one of those that took the gamble and bought a founders pack.
To be fair I really enjoyed Landmark for what it was. Building things to kill some time and seeing some of the fantastic things other folk had built was fun.
They kept hammering it into the ground though.
They kept trying to turn it into a game like you said but never sorted out the issues we'd been reporting since it first let us in.
To see Everquext Next cancelled surprised absolutely no one. Whether it existed or not I have no idea but that many lay offs after a huge move didn't exactly announce great things from the company that bought them.
To see Landmark get the shut down order doesn't surprise me either.
That "heartfelt" letter is the same as every other statement they have spouted since becoming Daybreak, PR bullshit.
What happened? Daybreak Games happened. EQ's original dev team set out to create something that had never been done before, Daybreak's original ideology has, very blatantly, been to shut down that which doesn't make money (Planetside 1) and expound on that which does.
It's a matter of motivation. Money only gets you so far, but the desire to create something unimaginable has much more potential. Daybreak was just a cancer that unfortunately managed to infect a pretty solid franchise, and almost immediately, from day 1 announcements about simplified religion to constant changing environments, they killed it.
Their treatment of Planetside is disgusting. The game was amazing, literally unparalleled, and they killed it. Then they did the same to it's successor.
If they remade EQ itself but with action combat, fluid animations, physics, sick graphics and no zone walls, that would be perfect.
I was a huge fan of Everquest and couldn't wait for everquest next to come out. When I heard the news we are no longer making everquest next because its not fun. I was so pissed. The website was taken down the exact day they said it was no longer in production so you couldn't even share your anger / point of view on the matter. I keep hoping another Company picks this game up and we do get the revolutionary game we all deserve.
Ever Quest Next (+Landmark) looked like a dream come true... if it had come true. I was totally looking forward to it. Sucks that it didn't work out, but I also thought that it seemed really weird that things played out as they did... I wouldn't be surprised if these theories were exactly what happened.
Firstly, let me state that I was in this almost from the beginning. As soon as it came out of the Closed Alpha I was in Landmark. I helped invent/perfect some minor building techniques with voxel manipulation that others took and made into masterpieces.
TL;DR: New company couldn't afford/didn't want to wait for the tech needed to actually make the game and fired the guy who wanted it to happen.
What killed EverQuest Next?
They laid off David Georgeson, THE idea guy for EverQuest Next, almost immediately after buying the company. That is what killed it. Without David, there could be no EverQuest Next. David was the entire reason it existed at all, he was the soul of the game and the team. David was the driving force, the charismatic leader who inspired people to achieve the impossible, . . . and to reach beyond their grasp.
Personally, I think David was reaching too far himself. He was relying too much on 'perspective' technologies promised by other companies who couldn't deliver on his vision (one of the core companies behind his AI plans even folded). The game he envisioned might have eventually been possible, and I think it would have made an excellent addition to the lore of Norrath. But we just don't have the technology to do what he wanted yet, and as that became more and more apparent they kept having to make compromises that diminished the project as a whole.
Landmark did push the technology forward, they managed to make HUGE strides and pushed their partner companies to do the same. But that's not where the new owners could make money quick.
Due to other market factors and legal issues, Sony wanted to divorce itself from software, so they scrambled to sell off their software assets quickly, and that meant rather cheap to almost anyone. The company who bought Sony Online Entertainment is not from the gaming industry, they aren't in it for the players or the game. They purchased SOE for its existing games and their steady income stream, not for future titles. Planetside 2, DC Universe Online, EverQuest 1 & 2, as well as other games I don't know, all make a good chunk of money every month. Games SOE was able to make because they had such a powerful backer in Sony who could easily absorb any losses from games that didn't do so well. So SOE was able to take bigger risks to satisfy the gaming community and build from what worked. The new owners, can't. That's not who they are, not what they are. They are just in it for the money, not the community, not the art, not in it for the game.
The new owners were completely within their rights to do what they did with their new property. But not knowing the industry they ended up alienating a LOT of their players and they cut features and plans and entire projects that the community was there for. By the terms in which they purchased SOE they couldn't instantly shut down all new game projects because those projects had contracts of their own, but they did quickly render those projects pointless/ineffectual to justify eventual shutdown.
Anyway, I think I'm ranting a bit. I'll write up a TL;DR near the top.
As I stated above EQ Next was dead long before Columbus Nova took over. Sony simply was not willing to announce it.
I used to follow the development of the streaming voxel engine that the technology was built upon and it really was an amazing piece of work the lone developer had a regular blog on his progress with years of incremental advancements. Then we saw this pop up in 2013 as Sony were debuting their PS4 console, at first I was very interested but soon began to wonder if it was anything more than this very clever piece of software bundled with some sparkly assets and packaged into a tech demo for the PS4 launch. Other than the engine that had been developed previously none of the other big ideas seemed to materialize and I wonder if they had the team, the plan or the intent to make it happen.
It is interesting that no one mentions the fact that you were supposed to be able to make real life money selling the things you made in Landmark in the store in EQNext. I started in Landmark because I hoped to be able to make a little money creating things people would buy in EQNext. When they announced that Landmark would be a stand alone game and nothing made in Landmark would be sold in EQNext, I quit. There was no reason to spend time on it anymore because Landmark would never be as big as EQNext since it was only supposed to revolve around development. I was upset they had lied to us and walked away to never look back.
"We know you have high standards when it comes to Norrath and we do too."
Really? Is that why you tried to get free labor for EQ Next with landmark AND still make money off it? Is that why the last 4 or so EQ1 expansions have been shit? And the only way they make money on EQ1 is releasing TLP servers. Please. Just sell the IP to a company that actually wants to see it succeed.
I agree, I'd love to see the IP shift hands at this point. I don't see Daybreak doing anything good with it at this point, especially given the way their game lineup looks.
Yeah they need to sell the IP back to Brad McQuaid and the guys on the Pantheon team = )
Sonalan
Honestly, DGC actually does have high standards when it comes to Norrath. It was SOE and its parent company Sony who had no standards for Norrath, and so they (Sony) did just what you suggested and sold the IP (all of SOE in fact) to a company that actually wants to see it succeed. Sony was who choose the Landmark path and the constant pushing of new games instead of maintaining and improving anything in the existing one(s). By the time Daybreak came into being Landmark was already separated from EQ Next and pushed as its own thing.
Also, you're mistaken on EQ1 only making money from the Progression servers, there are far far more All Access EQ players who do not play the TLP servers than do. It is just that those players at spread out over several more servers so it is not as apparent.
Anthony M
Brad wouldn't be good for EQ anymore, his view on what a game should be has drastically changed since he created EQ. He wants a different game now.
Check out Ashes Of Creations. Some of the team from EQ/2/N is building that.
Maybe they should have kept some elements of Everquest I & II that worked well and added the new features like the whole building process and land ownership, and add farming the private land, hunting for pelts and meat, a trade system with trade routes, and seamanship, with boats for fighting and moving cargo to and from port cities on the maps with water. After all if your going to carry on the name, there must be some things that feel similar to the older versions to some extent. For example no need to revamp the combat system, its a lot of work and may not be welcomed by some. Maybe some PvP zones that can be traveled for increased danger but with a possibility of gaining greater wealth.
As cool as EQN looked, you're right, it really had no recognizable features or elements of Everquest.
I never bought into Everquest Next or Landmark. I have a couple of friends that played Landmark and both said it was not worth the price that payed for the founders packs, plus they had all kinds of weird glitching issues. I was waiting for Everquest Next to come out so I could play it, it had great hype and i was hooked. I am sorry that they couldn't pull it off.
For Daybreak to say EverQuest was not fun but is near and dear to our hearts is a slap in the face to the players. Sad that my game EQOA had to become the first casualty in all this mess of bad management.
To this day I’m burnt by being a Trailblazer
Daybreak was created to keep everquest & everquest 2 and planetside & Planetside 2 going in terms of content and maintenance. Anything new that was impacting that cost wise got dropped. Anything new that could be useful could be plugged into those 4 existing games as expansions. Some of the newer content in all four games is higher resolution. One of the innovations coming out of minecraft modding allows higher resolution stuff to be done in lower resolution engines like everquest. That will kick in soon. Their zombie game may remain because it's using very cheap stock items, building and guns. And the DC game is everquest spells and stuff with a lot of different art. DC can't let its game project die. Those that have left have ended up in some very interesting projects.
Well one thing that really suprise me is that nobody did make a privat server for landmark right? Actually really sad for all the people that actually loved to play / build in there. For myself I played just for fun was not now the best builder but had fun with that too, farmed some mats(even that was kinda fun and was hoping that this type of farming would come then to EQN) , test pvp/pve came out late (and that actually look very promising too) and watch how people build amazing stuff.
Check out the Ashes of Creation kickstarter if you want to know what REALLY happened in the end with EQ Next.
I wish they would at the very least release Jeremy Soule soundtrack. THis was THE game for me, one that was supposed to delvier on every single front that Guild Wars 2 failed to deliver. It even had music by the same composer, which happens to be my favorite in the entire gaming industry. Ah, its a real shame EQN was cancelled.
I played Everquest since Ruins of Kunark. I miss the corpse runs.
Every damn mmo has that action fighting system these days.
I all but forgot these projects existed and I bought one of those said founder packs that gave access to Landmark (I got it for Landmark). I tried to play the game once and got frustrated cause I had so many dropped frames that I couldn't even move. I figured the game just needed more time, now it's looking like it needed more than just that.
I always hate seeing companies fail cause they get over ambitious on their projects. At least they knew when to call it quits though. I think people would be more upset if they wound up releasing a very incomplete and crappy version of Everquest Next.
Landmark should have been run on minimal staff, as you said in the vid... it only needed to be a building tool, not an actual game.
anyone that misses the brutal difficulty of eq1 should try out EVE Online. wild west space ship mmo with player driven marketplace, where everything is player built, space is fought for and claimed by huge alliances and corporations. be an engineer, a general, a CEO, a pirate, a fighter, an industrialist, a space trucker, a convoy defender, a merc, a trader, a scammer, a spy, a merc, a bounty hunter, a miner. scamming is legal as long as you can deal with the consequences. infiltrate player corporations, gain their trust, rob them, and disappear. destroy someones ship and take all of their cargo. destroy their capsule as they eject and you can keep their corpse. wave it in their face, or sell it if they're a space celebrity.
Heeeell no, if there's massive layoffs at my company after we got sold, and I somehow survived the reap, you best believe I'm immediately looking for a new job and peace out before I'm a goner too when the studio eventually fails. It's a sign of huge mismanagement either before the sale, or after. Both situations will likely result in the game getting axed.
I will never buy to alpha and beta test games, for just this very reason. You buy to help develop and then the game is cancelled, you are out that money and never had a chance to truly play the game. Land mark why the hell would any one pay to be a game developer? This make no sense and takes jobs out of the market on top of it.
Originally they claimed that the player creations made in Landmark would be added into EQ Next...
A thing you didn’t mention was player numbers, while true daybreak’s games are available outside of steam, on steam most of 2016 had less than 10 concurrent players. Even if doubled outside of steam it would of barely had 15 average, it’s pretty hard to maintain a game with that few players.
Look into Ashes of Creation. A good portion of the Dev team worked on EQ Next and Landmark and are building a full MMORPG Sandbox game with structure building. Probably the closest thing you'll come across compared to EQN.
I'm not a "I hate wow because it's a baby game" person but I'm definitely resentful toward wow for how it absolutely stunted the MMO genre which was my absolute favorite genre of game up until around 2010. But, by that point I had played so many slight modifications of the wow formula and be so utterly disappointed by promises from so many games it was clear there was pressure coming down from every MMO studio to make a game that was at least SOMEWHAT like WoW. Keep in mind EQ, UO and AC the 3 original big MMO titles played almost nothing alike.
6:52 And the answer is.... Activision. I remember all those "The wow killer" notes, each month a new "wow killer" appeared in gaming websites and in wow community, and players placed their bets every time. wow haters vs fans. In the end it wasn't a 3rd game, it was their own company who killed themselves. lol
i really hate wow right now and this game marked 2 relation ship a breath in my school time and even my first paychek money... soo i like a lot wow in the pass, but even against others mmorpg as runescape it got trash to me... well the lore is too heroic drived shit and every player is a hero of the world, not of they own history soo no matter how strong you are, they always put a stronger npc to fight and you looks so tine that is just stupid... plus, you only can level up one craft it forces you to trade shit with others players... mvp and pvp are trash, this bring back heroic and lore troubles again... and plus i love to play alone, but guilds are too much powerfull it make me feel odd to not join one and lossing xp and others goods soo i quit and back to others games
I remember being so excited for eqn. It's cancellation still hurts. The dynamic ai sounded so cool - that software still exists somewhere!
Landmark was fun, i had the starter pack for £19.99 and played it for about 6 months and loved it. the voxel tech was incredible and the potential of landmark was astronomical. if it had been stabilised it could have replaced minecraft.
Whenever I see videos of EQ, like clips in this video, I don't even recognize it. I don't remember the graphics being that bad, which is odd because when I see other old games like the original Tomb Raider they are exactly how I remember them. It's odd because I'm not sure if they are running low gfx/texture settings or what because a quick search and I can often find other videos that just look better and more like what I remember.
After investing in the Landmark with purchasing of the founder pack hoping it would have carry-over benefits for EQNext...I wouldn't lift a pixel in any game with EQ stamp on it. Fawk their new game Pantheon Rise of the Fallen, it isn't EQ, it isn't the world we love. May it Rest in Peace.
"It wasn't fun" is the go-to reason for why any game was canceled these days. The reason is because it makes the developers or publisher look like the good guys. Hey, they aren't canning an awesome game because they don't have the resources to continue! They were looking out for you and decided the game sucked too much so they didn't want you to be upset!! Man, what a great bunch of guys! Seriously, though, you will not see many game cancelation notices these days that don't have something to do with "not being fun".
I still have that hope for PS4 EQ:Next. It would've brought together so many players for EQ PC/PS2. Still hurts that its gone every time i look at ESO I think man EQ:N would be so great right now.
Now we have Intrepid Studios to finish what they started in Ashes of Creation, kind of.
it's funny all the conspiracy theories so many people have about this.
they were actually very straightforward with the public, and had a sensible plan for Landmark and how it would tie in with EQN *AND* other games that utilize it (like a sci-fi game). THAT was the only reason for removing EQ from the name. the gameplay of Landmark was them actually prototyping EQN gameplay. NOT some other unrelated game. prototypes and technology demos don't always work out as expected. they probably found that the VoxelFarm team wasn't able to make the engine as performant as they wanted for the type of content that users were building with it. combined with finding out the gameplay wasn't fun...... there was no conspiracy or intentional misleading.
I didn't even know about everquest games before. I just knew Landmark and loved it. rip
This was a kick to the left nut and the cancelling of World of Darkness was a kick to the right.
IMO, I was hoping what they would've just made EQN just a reboot of the original with up-to-date technology and mechanics instead of trying to make something 100% new. Probably would've worked out better for them and then they could've added the Landmark mechanics in an expansion or something in the future. Either way, RIP EQN.
I never forget playing a bard too. THOSE WERE THE DAYS!
i've never played EQ.. I played EQ2 for a few hours just to see what it was like but obviously just went back to my main mmos. But i realize what EQ has done for gaming and hearing about what happened to the franchise is still disheartening.
I have some experience with SOE/daybreak. I played planetside 2 about a year after it came out, and I loved that game. I bought a brand new desktop just to play it. The battles were massive and I found myself a pretty good outfit. Every so often I would join teamspeak and we would work as a team and use strategies etc.. It was actually probably one of the most immersive experiences in an fps type game I've ever had. and I actually got up to a relatively high rank in my outfit. I loved it. After it started to get old as games do, i stopped playing as much but still dabbled. But things seemed to be... declining. Once daybreak was a thing I noticed how much the game was changing. Now it's pretty much pay to win, it's buggy, and the community is awful. Everything is so conviluted with power ups and micro transactions.. And in the last few times I've played, I haven't seen a single battle even close to the scale I saw back in the day. it's nothing how it used to be. And I never play it anymore. Another game I threw money at that I'll never get back.
I never played any EverQuest game, and even I'm on the edge of tears. we all know EverQuest was a huge leap for gaming.
WOW is way past it's prime. I think people dump money into it more for nostalgia or lack of options in the mmo realm. My biggest gripe with their success is that it stifled innovation from other mmo's. And what happened to landmark and Next is tragic. Stupid corporations!
I was looking forward to this game so much, all the ideas sounded so good (although I did wonder whether they could pull them off)
pinning my hopes on Pantheon (hopefully late this year?)
Ashes of Creation (2018) looks to be in a similar vein to EQ:N if anyone is interested.
Sony are notorious for pushing online games into early launch. That's what happened here.
Landmark was good but nowhere near what it should have been when they launched it. The building tools were powerful but unrefined. Eg. to make a round tower you couldn't just plonk down a cylinder. You had to make a sphere, hollow it, chop off the top and bottom to make a ring, then copy and paste (with meticulous care) enough rings to make your tower.
Any but the most keen of builders would have regarded that degree of complexity and effort to make a simple cylinder to be bonkers. Such complexities were common in the building tools. That's why it bombed.
And yeah, with them planning to use player made assets from Landmark to build EQN, that necessarily meant the death of that game too.
The real story (or as best as we'll ever get) of what actually happened behind the scenes on EQNext and Landmark.
eq2wire.com/2017/01/05/closing-the-book-on-everquest-next-and-landmark/
I used to enjoy playing Landmark but yeah, it was a taster for EQ:N. When the franchise got sold to Dey Break Games though, I knew it was the end. Sad to hear they're closing the Landmark servers too but I can't say I'm surprised, after all, my opinion of the company really couldn't get much lower.
I hate to by the cynic, but when I saw EQ: Next shown I was initially excited, but it quickly turned to despair as they showed the voxel engine and talked about Landmark. That's when I knew it would be a failure like Vanguard with an engine that simply wouldn't work as advertised. Which is is a shame as they had a good thing going on the human characters with their Disney-esqe art direction (not so much for Tony the Lion).
In my perfect world EQ:N would have been a relatively faithful remake of the original EQ but with a fresh lick of paint. No major changes, just polish some rough edges. It would have been a niche game, but there would have been a loyal audience there for it, something new MMOs struggle to build.
EQN was vapor ware. It was never going to come out in the first place. It was a nice idea but that is all that it ever was.
Maybe I'll get booed for this but I think someone should buy landmark and fix the bugs so it can be a minecraft 2.0 i can see people making big castles with monsters and all while having players going in and exploring it. I can see if you can have the physics done right you might have people making there own world with there own quest there own towns there own community. All the dev team needs to do is to make sure the tools work and the world does not break. Then link a donation system to the game for people to give to builders (while the dev team take 3--5%). A second life game but more interactive.
"Let's make a WoW killer!" Boots half of the crew
It's really hard to make a triple A game in these new engines. We are maxing out making these games. Even Nintendo had to redo the new Metroid from scratch, because they thought it wasn't good enough (that's a lot of years down the drain).
Aww. I never got into EQ1 because I was unable to pay the monthly fee at the time my friend was trying to get me to play it so I picked up Guild Wars. Eventually I got into Wow and when EQ2 came out I tried to get into it but I was corrupted by WoW and my friend could not get into it because of all the time and RP he put into EQ1. I think EverQuest Next would have been something we both would have at least tried. Tried WildStar and I kind of liked it but again with already having a maxed out raid ready character on WoW it was easier to just keep playing WoW. I did get the FireFall top tier founders pack and was really looking forward to that and then when nothing really happened with it and all I was doing was exploring I stopped playing and then found out the servers were shut down, but hey I got a poster and a hat. Played a little Rift, SWG (after JtLS), GW2, EvE, SW:TOR (this game suffered the to many people did everything too fast, and in the first month me and all of my friends already had all of the raids on farm. At least when they were not glitched to all hell), FFXI, and FFXIV. But again all of these I only played for a month or two because I had WoW right there already with my character that was not level one. I have on my priest alone over 4 years logged into the game. At least now most MMORPGs just start out as FTP games so I can try them out but too many of them also are PTW because they have to get their money some how.
I'm really disappointed that project EQ Next was closed. The game was really interesting and very promising. I don't really understand why Deybreak shut it down, in my opinion even in the alpha/beta state it was very popular. I would like to see "reanimate" of project, maybe by som other company.
Some people were hyped, but I was never anything but pessimistic when it came to EQN. SOE had an absolutely shit track record with their titles and they promised way more than they could have ever delivered. Daybreak may have buried it, but the game was fucking stillborn right from the start.
I bought the Pathfinder edition, but got REALLY tired of my land and work getting deleted every work week.
I was REALLY excited for this game. Everything about it just seemed so amazing. I couldn't give a fuck about Landmark, but it was cool to watch videos and stay up to date with development and stuff. What got me was the slow realization that any/all EQN news and gameplay/development updates were nonexistant. No new concept art, gameplay trailers, races/classes previews, nothing. It was all Landmark. You'd see EQN "devs" running around Landmark talking about what players were creating. For Months. Nothing else. Personally, I think the moment Daybreak laid off all those initial devs, they cancelled EQN development but kept leading players on for many months afterwards, maybe because they hoped someday to pick development back up or something until they finally officially pulled the plug. But it's obvious that NO development was done for EQN in the months leading up to the official cancellation.
xplicitmike They should have refunded all of the early access purchases as those were bought because players assumed the packages would lead to EQN. It was not a Kickstarter where folks donate money fully knowing it may not be funded. Players expected a game from a long-time, established franchise, not a money grab.
I've never played EQ, but landmark was the next minecraft game for me. It was a game of my dreams and they took it away from me and other creative people like me, after taking our money!!!!!!
At first I was thinking "isn't this video two years too late?" until you mentioned Landmark was being shut down. I doubt they created Landmark as an end unto itself, just doesn't make sense, I think it's what it was represented to be, a way for them to get their players to provide them free content -- smart! When I saw that video of Grigson talking about what EQ Next was supposed to be, I was stoked. I instanly thought, as I'm sure many did, that if they could pull that off, every other MMOPRG was dead. It'd be like pressing the reset button on a whole industry. Being a programmer, I also wondered "but how are they going to DO that?" Maybe they figured out they couldn't? Maybe they were having to cut back on the scope and decided they didn't want to realese some No Man's Sky-esque pile of junk? But they still support the other EQ games, and I still play EQ2 from time-to-time, so there's that. If they could've realized their vision, it would've been to the MMORPG market what the Dreadnaught was to battleships, something so advanced that everything else was instanly obsolete. It's unfortunate it didn't happen. But you know there's people who worked on it that'll want to make it happen somewhere else at another time.
The way you worded everything makes it sound like perhaps the project got Molyneux'd. That is, the lead designer got in front of everyone and overpromised to the point where it would be ultimately impossible to create given current tech. The difference here is that these things were shown off in a video as part of the announcement so if it did get Molyneux'd, it was probably closer to the point of pitching it to the higher-ups rather than the media.
And yeah this video isn't exactly "timely", but this "series" is more or less a nostalgic look back on what could have been and what may still be (in some cases).
ingeniousclown Gaming We saw some videos of combat that was supposed to be real combat -- I think; long time ago. Destructable world was to eventually self-heal (we saw that in Landmark), but there were other things, remember how he said that if an Orc village was raiding a trade route and adventureres attacked them too many times for raiding that trade route they'd move? How's the AI do that? No matter what MMORPG, the mobs never are 'smart', you aggro them, they attack, they die. No matter how many times Hogger died, he never moved his band to another location. That kind of logic might've proven very difficult to implement. Or maybe they really did have some clever bits of technology worked out but the actual game didn't work when they bolted it all together. Maybe it was too linear, maybe it was not linear at all, maybe it was more mine-craftlike and testers felt they lacked enough direction to get going? Maybe the story was a dull retread. Without inside information, one can't say definitively. But I'd bet $100 it was because they were WAY over-budget and some accountants decided that it was going to turn into a money black-hole, a game where if it didn't supplant WoW as the king of the hill would be a financial disaster.
I loved this game, played for hours and hours. At a minimum I would have liked a single player mode or private server thing. I thought they did great with the tools and even the quest mob tools. I could have played Landmark for years and years... made all kinds of great things. I would have been happy for it to stay just as is... or "was".
Was so hyped for Everquest next. Looked so promising and revolutionary. Imo WoW doesn't need to die, it has it's own mechanics, playerbase and gigantic world. Everquest Next was going to be something totally different for me :)
As you explained the moves towards the alpha founder packs for Landmark... That's actually a brilliant but disguting marketing move. But it worked..! O.o" This is why I always wait with stuff to release and someone to make a gameplay video about it before i buy something.
Praying that Pantheon can save old skool mmo's!!
I do wonder IF EQN was never more than hype. Landmark had a niche. Sony really messed this up.
I really thought EQN would be the one to save the mmo genre back when they did that first presentation. Like I really thought star citizen would be out by now...
Then shortly after Daybreak turned EQ & EQ2 into soulless cash shops.
I want my $20 back from Landmark. I purchased the settler's pack on the premise that it was going to enrich EQ Next. I believe the conspiracy that EQ Next was never real or serious from the beginning. It was all a scam to sell Landmark packages, and this is why I have never bought early access games since.
I feel completely ripped off. I paid to be a part of the Landmark Alpha and wasn't reimbursed in any form or fashion when Daybreak acquired the IP and killed it. Also, all the "assets" I helped create in the game world are literal vaporware now. All that work, all that effort and all I have to show for it is the bruise from the five-finger dick punch Daybreak gave me.
I agree with a lot of what you said/speculated. I was a founder merely sold on the hype of Next. I also agree that they closed development because the financial aspect was failing.
Landmark has the BEST building system I have ever seen. It allows for amazing detail. I built a house and even went so far as to put molding along the floor and ceiling. Created lattice around the deck as well, which was awesome. It is an unforgivable sin that this awesome creation system is stuck in this sorry excuse for a game.....
+Rich Greiner No kidding. It sucks to know that this versatile building system and all of its creations are now gone...
Just make a game with the name "everquest" in it. let the community pay for excess and let the community test and develop ingame stuff. Then sell the Company. After the Company was sold, the new owners realized that they had been ripped off, and that Landmark will never be a real game. in Sports we call that "selling wolf tickets"