It was probably inevitable that Landmark’s official launch on Friday afternoon — against the Warcraft movie and pre-E3 hoopla and following basically zero PR and a bizarre Daybreak forum announcement about launch just two weeks prior — has not gone well.
The game’s Steam reviews are abysmal, with nearly 2000 people showing up so far to give the game a “mostly negative” rating on average (as of press time). Scattered amongst the reviews angry about EverQuest Next’s cancelation and confused that their early access account doesn’t work on Steam are scathing reviews that the game is a “scam” that wasn’t ready for prime-time.
The handful of more recent positive reviews call the others trolls — and let’s not pretend ASCII art of middle fingers and pooping butts aren’t getting upvotes here — and note that hardcore players and early adopters can’t lodge their positive votes to counter the negativity as they’re not on Steam.
But as MMO Fallout’s Connor argued, the real story is in how few people are actually playing Landmark: The peak player count on Steam sits at just 125 people. It’d take a lot of early adopters off Steam to call this a rousing success.
In contrast, WildStar has racked up nearly a thousand reviews averaging to “mostly positive” since its similarly quiet launch on Valve’s platform last week, as former and current players flock to give the free-to-play positive reviews and shine a ray of hope on the beleaguered sci-fantasy MMORPG.
Massively OP’s MJ Guthrie has streamed both games in recent weeks for those who’d like to check them out before jumping in.
