At Gamescom in Cologne I sat (on furry benches, I kid you not) in a behind closed doors presentation focused mostly on the upcoming EverQuest Next spinoff, Landmark, held by Director of Development David Georgeson literally on a roll and fighting against the clock (and his PR manager) to squeeze all the info in the allocated timeframe. Guess what? It went overtime and it was worth it.
I’ve always been a big fan of games that allow players to express their creativity freely. The only one that always fails to catch my attention on the long run is Minecraft. Yes, you read it correctly. Please put down your pitchforks. I’m allergic to lynch mobs. I know very well that Minecraft is an extremely solid game, and I don’t dispute its value, but the size of the building blocks and the inability to fine tune my builds to a finer degree of detail always turned me off.
Luckily Sony Online Entertainment has something in store that seems to be designed more to my taste with EverQuest Next Landmark.
The game was conceived in a rather random way, as most good ideas: during the development of the tools used to build the assets of EverQuest Next, the development team discovered that those tools were actually quite cool and fun to play with, and started one-upping each other over nights and weekends to see who could build the best stuff. That’s when they realized that if they were having that much fun, players would probably enjoy it as well.
