« January 2014 | Main | March 2014 »
Crafted Props
Buildings completed, it was time to start decorating the interiors. Decorative items, including furniture and lighting, are called props in Landmark. Completing this part of my claim will take some time. I haven’t unlocked the highest crafting stations myself. Sorry, I don’t want to grind that much in Alpha. I am relying on the efforts of others to see the higher tier items that are available on the various crafting stations. One thing to know before you get started is that the prop recipes are metal hungry demons. Yeppers, they need lots of metals, so off to grinding I shall go.
I spent a couple of sessions harvesting like a madwoman in T1 and T2 zones. When I got tired of digging, I switched to chopping wood. When I got bored of that I went back to digging. The sun rose, the sun set, I kept running around collecting. I visited houses along the way to see what other players were building. There’s some really cool stuff out there. Unfortunately, the slow travel is a bit of a deterrent for me to see structures way off in the distance, when what I really need is right here underground. I think a fast ticket back to the portal would make me more inclined to take the long run out to see other claims, knowing I can get a quick ride back to ground zero.
The Basics
Being Alpha, there aren’t many prop recipes available at the moment. I made use of the standard items – tables, chairs, doors, lighting, etc. for my most basic needs. I put things here and there across my various buildings, filling them out in parallel as appropriate items were at hand. This part is like any other MMO that supports crafting. You feed the station the supplies and it births an item.
One disappointing aspect that I hope is only temporary, is that the station-made props are not solid objects. I can walk right through them. This a huge issue when you want to place items of top of crafted props. It’s not always as easy as let it be placed on the floor then use the move tool to change the Y axis. Sometimes what you’ve placed it under doesn’t allow you to see the dang item which means you can't select/move it. *sigh* In those cases, I had to put a big voxel where I wanted the item to go, place it on that, remove the voxel and then adjust the placement of the decorative item. Not a game breaker but definitely not idea.
Continue reading "EQN Landmark: Weekend in Review Part 2 of 2 " »
All the gaming time I had available this past weekend was spent playing EQN Landmark. Server access and general client stability have improved since the last two patches. For all the claims taken, I still don’t see nearly as much construction as I’d expect. Perhaps they’re choosing to get all of their tools and stations before starting.
Most of my time was spent completing the exterior of my compound. I was already more than 125K worth of stone thrown at it. However, I was missing a few staircases and sculptural details on the platforms. When I decided that I wanted a third building in the back that mirrored my existing above ground building, I knew it was time to obtain all of the other building tools.
I can’t tell how long it took me to acquire the necessary components. My claim location is so inconvenient that when it’s time for lower tier harvested materials, I go farm each tier until I can’t stand it anymore. The next time I play, I return to building. Travel at this point is too tedious and inconvenient for a lot of back and forth. Once in awhile is no problem but I’m not doing the trek multiple times in a play session.
Continue reading "EQN Landmark: Weekend in Review Part 1 of 2 " »
Now that the disappearing voxels issues has been resolved, I took a chance on building again. The only build tools I have at my disposal are the ones we started with – Add, Delete and Heal. There are more sophisticated tools available by crafting them but I haven’t gotten around to that part yet.
My plan was to keep it simple by hollowing out the ground on my claim – build by extraction method. I’m still gun-shy from having lost resources on half built structures previously. But you know how building goes. You get moving along, deleting here and adding there. One thing leads to another and suddenly, my plan of redoing a small dug out to see how things work flies out the portcullis. The plan was to keep it SMALL then move along to crafting the more sophisticated tools to add more elements. Before I knew it I had built a structure on top of the dugout and a companion top level building too. You can’t just leave two disjointed structures so you have to marry them with a platform, steps, yada. Small is such a subjective term anyway. *smile*
Over 105K blocks of stone later, I finally called it quits. I’ve only done the exterior. Nothing sophisticated but I’m happy with what was achievable by simply adding and removing blocks. This means that my nephews and especially my grandson, who is only 7, can play Landmark. They’re still nuts over Minecraft but enjoy MMOs too. This would be a great opportunity for us to be in the same virtual world again.
I’m questioning if it was wise of SOE to drop the NDA so quickly. Waiting another couple of weeks may end up having been a safer decision. I will preface this at the start by saying, YES, the game is in an alpha and anything can change between now and release.
First Impressions
The zones look and feel procedurally generated. They’re rather blah from a terrain perspective. Sarzan thinks they will feel more distinct once NPCs and NPC manned structures are added. To that I say, I’ve been in unpopulated zones in a game before that at least felt interesting. These don’t at all. I am making allowances for the fact that a good chunk of the landmass must be reserved for player structures which leaves wide swathes of barren landscape. Regardless, all I can say is how a game feels or doesn’t, and at this point it doesn’t feel visually inspiring.
One of the things that made MineCraft fun was the ability to quickly build as you go. You don’t have to harvest for hours before seeing the fruits of your labor. So far, the harvesting is a bit of a grind in Landmark. The number of subcomponents needed is too high in my opinion. Needing a 100 pieces of stone to build a single stone block is a bit much. Similarly, you have to gather multiple components to make your tools and unlock building skills. You end up needing 1500 pieces of this and 1000 pieces of that and 15 of this-that-and-other, to make a single tool. I do realize that this is their progression gate but in the doing, it feels like a lot for a single tool, let alone the tens of thousands of pieces needed to build a small structure.
Recent Comments