Obviously, the reverberations of the news of Landmark’s closure continue to be seen across the MMO community, including in our own comments sections. The MMO blogosphere was alight with discussion and opinions about this event, with many using this as an opportunity to get in a last word about the lamentable EverQuest Next.
In today’s special edition of Global Chat, we’ll take a survey of gaming blogs to see what they have to say about the Landmark sunset and what it means for Daybreak, MMOs, and the community it affects.
“I think this game had so much potential. I had hoped that EQN would be a real thing, instead we were left with a skeleton of a game that felt not even half finished. Just really sad to see all this work go down the drain like so many others. The game has not even officially been launched for a year. Truly sad to see all that wasted potential.”
“Now if you peruse the comments section of a site such as Massively OP, then you’ll find statements such as ‘LOTRO is fine’ and there’s nothing to be concerned about because DGC is just the publisher for Standing Stone Games. However, I don’t think the situation is as binary as that, and it would be wise to scrutinise the business relationship between DGC and SSG more closely. Because I and others suspect that DGC may well have underwritten SSG costs when they acquired both DDO and LOTRO from Turbine and Warner Bros. If that is the case, then such financial involvement give DGC far more leverage with SSG than merely publishing their gaming catalogue.”
“Landmark was a very bare-bones game, but the potential of what you could create was always exciting, the beautiful works of fellow players always inspiring […] One person on my server bought up builds all along one coastline and built themselves an entire kingdom, with castles and towns and outposts. Another constructed a huge hollow tree with an incredibly beautiful and detailed home amongst the branches. I’ve seen screen-accurate replicas of the Enterprise and the Serenity, functioning Stargates, and even a Tim Horton’s.”
“It was a bad game, a bad building playground, and not even close to being an MMO. It was broken, buggy mess that was poorly designed and managed and should never have been released in such a unfinished state. But I guess that is Daybreak’s new business plan after all: release early access husks.”
“What stuns me is that this game had so much potential to be a strong sandbox contender. They did a lot of things I haven’t seen in other building games, and I know that those who love it will deeply miss it. If this game had been released towards a building/sandbox audience, rather than being linked to the failed EQNext, it may have been a small success. I still have those dreams of riding a flying mount across the inter-connected islands of wonderful player creativity… that was touted to be the future of Landmark that we never got. But I guess at this point, that’s moot. All we’ll have are our memories.”
“I bought one of the $99 Founder’s packs. I don’t exactly remember why, but I remember seeing that video showing them digging holes in the ground and thought that was pretty dern cool. It turned out to be the most ill-advised game purchase decision of my entire life to date. To this day it informs my Early Access buying decisions. Thanks to Landmark, I made a rule that I won’t take a chance on an unknown Early Access game unless it sells for $10 or less.”
“But then EverQuest Next Landmark, as it was initially known, started to gain a life of its own. In what felt to me like something of a cash grab (successful by all accounts), with maybe a side goal of extracting some of the Station Cash that players had been hoarding, Landmark launched into what I called real estate speculation. While some were enthusiastic about the idea, others cast a more jaundiced eye on the whole thing.”
Every day there are tons of terrific, insightful, and unusual articles posted across the MMO gaming blogosphere — and every day, Justin reads as many as he can. Global Chat is a sampling of noteworthy essays, rants, and guides from the past few weeks of MMO discourse.
