What Is EQLandmark?

I read on Inventory Full (still an awesome blog name) about this thing coming out called EQLandmark. I do not know what it is, but it sounds like some kind of new game in the EQ universe.

Bhagpuss then mentioned something about making a Heroic character in EQ2, and I got sidetracked. Because I have some EQ2 characters too, and I figured I’d better log in and make my own Heroic characters, too. Because everyone’s doing it apparently. Well, one person is. I don’t know why I needed one, because I haven’t played EQ2 in years, and found it only a fair game while playing it, and I don’t even know what a Heroic character even is, but if somebody else is doing something in an MMO, obviously there must be something cool going on there that needs to be checked out. MMO players have a herd mentality, and they are perpetually looking for “the next new thing.”

So I went to click on the EQ2 icon and get patched up, except I hadn’t played it in so long I didn’t even have it installed. A couple of hours later, I was looking at my character selection screen.

I saw where I could make a Heroic level 85 character from scratch or “upgrade” any of my existing characters to 85, at a cost of a bunch of SoE currency. I didn’t have nearly enough. (I probably still have the default amount you that you got at the beginning.) It was not at all clear why I would want to have a Heroic character, except I assume to get right to the level 85 content. Seeing as how I haven’t seen anything above around 40, I don’t see why I need to zoom ahead to 85.

Then I looked closer at my characters. What happened to them?

I do not remember Dohashio looking so weird in the face. I never would have picked that face. Did somebody punch my dude? Did he fall in an acid vat like the Joker? Is it a mask? Did the game models change? I have no idea. Anyway. While I was there, I logged in, and found myself standing in a wooded area that was completely unfamiliar to me.

I mean, I remember spending a lot of time in a wooded area similar to that, but not that exact place. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I had some stuff in my quest log, but I didn’t feel comfortable risking death just then. Besides, I had to invert my mouse again-who knows what other input challenges I would have had to face to beat a monster.

So instead of moving, I marveled at how bad EQ2 looked. Sorry. Maybe I need to adjust my settings, but it was like logging into the year 2000 again. I was never keen on EQ2’s sort of washed-out watercolor look to begin with, but at least it was tolerable. But now, having just come from FFXIV, it looked awful. The ground looked like a pixelated 8-bit Minecraft thing.

So I logged back out.

Then I got back to that EQLandmark thing, which I probably should have done first instead of wasting all that time logging into EQ2. I see what it is now. It’s a way for SOE to crowdsource building their EQNext game world. :) It sounds a bit like Minecraft, except you build pieces for an MMO game world. Some people are probably drooling about the prospect of doing that, but to me it just sounds like a ploy to exploit gamers for free labor.

Naturally, I signed up for the beta.

I’ve thought for a long time that any MMO that finds a way to allow players to add things to the world will be wildly successful, because most games that allow gameplay mods or addons usually have a lot of longevity (like, say, Counterstrike). And MMO players are always ravenous for new content. Neverwinter made an attempt to do this with their player-made modules, but I thought it fell a bit flat. EQNext looks to be trying to do something along the lines of a player-alterable world, and EQLandmark looks to be their first step in that process.