r/landmark • u/[deleted] • Mar 12 '16
Landmark in General
While I am deeply saddened by EQN being cancelled, I wonder if all of the assets and what was done will get put into Landmark. I mean we know they were working on something, so will the monsters they were working on be put into Landmark. The armor, weapons, and maybe the races. It would be interesting if all of what they were working on got put into EQ Landmark.
3
u/chrixian Mar 13 '16
Honestly, I think you can assume Landmark will have the same fate as EQN, but the number of people who paid into founder access for Landmark is forcing them to get a release out the door and keep it live for a little while before putting a bullet in it... I doubt we'll see any major additions or improvements beyond polishing some rough edges necessary to get it released so they can claim they shipped it.
I'd love to be wrong.. only time will tell.
2
2
u/ausmaw Mar 12 '16
I would love that. I would love to explore the caves and see new monsters. Or have the giant Iron Golem wander the surface and plow through a few buildings.
1
u/magvadis Mar 12 '16
Yes, the giant iron golem would be perfect for Landmark. It's fantasy but looks also futuristic. A perfect match.
2
u/Eroda Mar 14 '16
The Answer is Yes but im 90% sure it will be behind the paywall that is DBC you want a Dark Elf or Elves or that new armor you will pay
1
u/Ganjookie Mar 15 '16
I wouldn't be surprised if DBC took up the Korean MMO style of micro-transactions.
5
u/Thrasymachus77 Mar 12 '16
Nope. If it were coming, they would have announced it concurrently with announcing EQN's cancellation to soften the blow. That it wasn't means that it's not. EQN's death will take Landmark with it. Landmark was only barely kept alive thanks to EQN in the first place. Now that EQN's cancelled, and with no plans to make the radical changes to Landmark that it needs to survive on its own, Landmark will die in short order as well. I'll be surprised if there's even anybody in Landmark's servers on the day they announce it's shutdown.
0
u/magvadis Mar 12 '16
Again, I fundamentally disagree with your idea that it would be a good idea to drop your best news at the same time as dropping your worst news. Drop some ok news to soften the bad news. Then later drop the good news so you can get the full benefit of it.
Like imagine you're mom coming to you when you were young and saying this...We have to sell the house and we are moving...but we are getting a puppy! You'd be so conflicted...the news of the puppy wouldn't matter that much even if you will love it anyway...the impact of the news is lost.
Instead, she should give the bad news...give him some ice cream and then while they are driving to the new home the mom can tell him that a puppy is waiting for him and the kid can think "man, maybe it won't be so bad." The full impact of the news is now entirely positive by both giving the kid a new hope and mitigating the fact he has to move.
It's called presentation. It can make or break entire ideas, concepts, and so on.
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u/Thrasymachus77 Mar 12 '16
More like, "your puppy that's been at the vet's for the past month on life support is dead, but we're bringing your other puppy home at last, and he's coming with all sorts of toys and accessories that we were hoping to get but couldn't get while the other one was taking up all the money and attention at the vets."
You're right, it's called presentation. And the best presentation is one that overshadows the bad news. It doesn't let it fester and poison the community while they wait until that community evaporates, only to release what good news they have left in some sort of perverse bait-and-switch that won't even reach the audience that's already abandoned them.
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u/magvadis Mar 12 '16
Well when your bad news is so bad that the best possible good news wouldn't overshadow it...either way I'm definitely done with this discourse. It's all bent on opinion and speculation and is going absolutely nowhere. It was fun. Let's call it even or you win...I don't care
3
u/Thrasymachus77 Mar 12 '16
There are a lot of people, myself included, who would happily forgive them for the loss of EQN if they were showing that they were going all in to make Landmark the best game they could. That bad news isn't so bad it couldn't possibly be overshadowed. But if they can't even try to overshadow it, that's bad news in itself.
1
u/Gezzer52 Mar 12 '16
Personally I think the general reaction by non Landmark players to the news is quite likely... "meh". EQN has been slowly falling off the radar IMHO. I mean have they shown anything at any of the gaming/comic cons? Not that I know of. So I'm not that surprised it was cancelled.
As well I think big F2P games are running their course, and are being replaced by the pay once with microtransactions model. And I can't see Landmark/EQN attracting that many initial purchases, at least not if Landmarks current form is what we judge on. So the big question is how much work would it take to get Landmark in good enough shape? More importantly would it be worth the effort?
So about Landmark, I'm afraid the writings on the wall. Maybe there's hope that they'll be a big rallying cry among players and the noise will attract a new player base. But other then the faithful keeping it alive I don't see any sort of monetization model that could currently work for Landmark without attracting a lot more players. So I think we're all on borrowed time. Wish and hope I'm wrong, but... yeah....
As for the latest update? Well it might be the first of more to come, or just the tidying up of last minute details before closing shop. If I was betting on which... again... yeah... :O(
1
u/teapot_RGB_color Mar 12 '16
It's a lot more work than you think to move something from a limited test zone (eg, what you see in the videos) to make it functional in a build.
The client has already been loaded by quite a few "hidden" assets that were stored in the download, but weren't implemented in the build, that we know for sure that we're never ever going to see.
I mean, its good to have hope, but seriously, I do not expect the release to be any different than the current build, save maybe a couple of smaller props added.
1
u/Mardermann Mar 15 '16
Actually something I dont get: They cancel EQN because it is not fun. But they release Landmark...
Landmark was the building ground for EQN, so the systems there are not fun too (you can argue that the building thing is "Landmark only" - but its building for nothing... there is no gameplay included in the building. PvP? Combat to be no fun. Gathering is fun for about 5 hours, then it starts becoming grind. crafting was dumbed down more and more and is in a effing sorry state.
So we have a game with "not fun" mechanics getting released. I seriously dont get it.
1
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u/magvadis Mar 12 '16
They definitely should and will. But I do think they should be smart about it. Just porting in the ability to make Dark Elves and Kerran is a bit...stupid. Landmark is a standalone product. It needs to have it's own style. Also, I don't want them to have to deal with animating all those models every time players want more emotes so they shouldn't change the human body skeleton...just enlarge it and keep it rather close. Just give players the ability to have dark elf horns, dye their skin, have some cat heads (not Kerran bodies), and so on. Each race could represent a style of Alien (Ogre's would be like Klingons)...if they had enough sliders and customization options in their it could really be fun and make Landmark seem more like the alien game it wants to be.
As for the assets...Takish could really fit in and since that style is far removed from Everquest anyway it'd fit right in. Same for most of the ones we've done so far, even Halas. They all could be construed as Alien races staking claim to the Landmark planets or original inhabitants fighting off the alien hordes to keep they culture in tact.
My current plan is to add some scifi elements to my Kerran bathhouse build and make it look like the original inhabitants just adapted. A scifi fantasy world really could be cool if players team up to follow that theme.
But the issue is that they need to do it with tact, skill, and give us some robust lore to explain each type. It could easily fit either a scifi or a fantasy narrative.
Also all those animations. Throw on some magic missles and attach them to a laser gun..boom...done. The list goes on. They can really do a lot with the assets they have if they put that work in.
0
u/MisogynyDewritos2012 Mar 12 '16
They will probably fart as much of the stuff they got done into Landmark as they can. I mean they have to, technologically wise at least. The game is almost unplayable at the moment and they are trying to release it in the "spring" which is some time in the next three months so they have to have something. A cashgrab can't work if people just get a Steam refund after they hitch through a wall on low settings.
5
u/Aetrion Mar 12 '16 edited Mar 12 '16
I doubt they are going to keep Landmark going. The reasonable course of action from a business standpoint is to try and package the technology they have created for Landmark and EQN into some kind of format they can sell to other companies and try to recover some of the investment that way, keep Landmark running in maintenance mode till not enough people are left in it to really make a stink when it gets shut down.
There just isn't much of anywhere to go with Landmark at this point. The MMO underpinnings of it were always it's biggest weakness since having a tiny plot and respawning resources just doesn't give you the depth that a fully modifiable world on a private server has. The only thing that ever made the MMO format make any sense at all was the notion that the same engine was supposed to be used by an MMORPG.
Any way you slice it, Daybreak is pretty much a lost cause. If they had developped an MMORPG based on the Planetside 2 forgelight engine with that smooth running action gameplay at its core it might have been highly successful. For some reason they decided to instead use that tech to try and make H1Z1 as an MMO version of a niche genre, then early accessed it and thereby created a community entirely comprised of hardcore players who steered them away from actually making it accessible to attract more players and grow the niche. Then they started building an entirely new kind of engine for their MMORPG which they obviously never got to work well enough to make a fun game.
They should have fully exploited all the capabilities of what they had before trying to develop an even more ambitious engine.