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EverQuest Next Landmark Alpha |OT| Settle in, Trailblazin' is afoot.

Tempy

don't ask me for codes
Man, the amount of people complaining about "not being able to build fast enough" because of having to harvest is making me sad. So many "I want an oompa loompa and I want it NOW" folks. One person in particular was complaining that it took them most of today to get enough stone to build the wall of A CASTLE. I swear people just want to consume everything as fast as they possibly can.

A good opportunity to offer a truckload of material for real cash, or a ring that doubles mats gathered!

I'm sure the numbers still need various balancing passes.
 
Yes, it's F2P. No, it is not an assumption. SOE is a F2P company, you can easily see this on their official page for EQN/EQNL.

https://www.everquestnext.com/eqn-faq
What is EverQuest Next?
EverQuest Next is a Free to Play, next-generation sandbox MMO built on the ForgeLight Engine. There has never before been a game like this.

https://www.eqnlandmark.com/landmark-faq
What is EverQuest Next Landmark?
EverQuest Next Landmark is a Free to Play, next-generation online sandbox game. Build and explore a world unlike anything you've seen before.

Cool
 
A good opportunity to offer a truckload of material for real cash, or a ring that doubles mats gathered!

I'm sure the numbers still need various balancing passes.

They probably do. I'm just getting a bit tired of the instant gratification attitude. People were complaining that 90 minutes between Legendary drops in D3:RoS was too long. 90 minutes.
 

cheststrongwell

my cake, fuck off
Played for most of the day, and it's pretty enjoyable. This game has tons of potential.

Be careful with your crafting machines. I just logged in and mine are gone.
 
Cool, no NDA?

Been building a little... Inn I guess? inside the lone desert mountain near the hub in the Narrows (Liberation server). You can see the carved out window in the mountain from the hill near the hub. There's some things I think I need the smooth tool for so its kinda lame right now, but if anyone wants to check it out you totally should :D

Also working on carving the NeoGAF symbol in the side of the mountain but I just crashed so :p

Someone built a giant jumping puzzle -ish tower at the Narrows hub earlier but it was only temporary since it wasn't a claim or anything. Was pretty awesome while it lasted though.

Also spent 45 minutes earlier trying to dig to the bottom of the map with some other guy. I gave up but we were far enough down that we weren't hearing yells from the hub anymore (we started digging right at the hub). We were digging so long the terrain started healing behind us lol. Not sure if he made it to the bottom or not but it sounds like you just crash when we get too far. Note there's nothing particularly interesting underground yet as the cave systems haven't been put in.

Game seems pretty cool so far, think it'll be amazing as an actual MMO. And when the caves are added I think resource gathering will become much more exciting. Gathering wood is pretty lame though, and don't see how they can make that more enjoyable. Oh well.
 

Trouble

Banned
Servers are toast for me :/

Yep, just got knocked out and can't get back in.

I got hit by the bug earlier where my crafting stations disappeared. Not such a huge setback, I had almost all the mats for them, just short some wood.

I highly recommend waiting until you can craft the selection tool before starting to build your claim in earnest, it makes building sooo much easier.

Really enjoying this so far. It's definitely an alpha and very rough around the edges, but the core concept is fantastic.

Gathering wood is pretty lame though, and don't see how they can make that more enjoyable. Oh well.

I just made a macro for my Naga that toggles clicking, so I can park in front a big tree and sit back while chopping.
 
Yep, just got knocked out and can't get back in.

I got hit by the bug earlier where my crafting stations disappeared. Not such a huge setback, I had almost all the mats for them, just short some wood.

I highly recommend waiting until you can craft the selection tool before starting to build your claim in earnest, it makes building sooo much easier.

Really enjoying this so far. It's definitely an alpha and very rough around the edges, but the core concept is fantastic.

Yeah the selection tool is a must
 

acksman

Member
Played for most of the day, and it's pretty enjoyable. This game has tons of potential.

Be careful with your crafting machines. I just logged in and mine are gone.

Same lost mine. Built a underground lair and put my crafting machines there. Crashed, when I came back my whole plot had been "healed'' back to original and no more crating. Ugh least I got most of my components to get a Bronze Pick.

I like this game because you have to work for things. Not instant gratification.
 

Subxero

Member
Caved and bought a Explorers Pack. Just couldn't hold out any longer. Waiting for the client to download. I'm pretty excited especially after reading through the thread.
 

Trouble

Banned

Damaniel

Banned
Cool, no NDA?

Been building a little... Inn I guess? inside the lone desert mountain near the hub in the Narrows (Liberation server). You can see the carved out window in the mountain from the hill near the hub. There's some things I think I need the smooth tool for so its kinda lame right now, but if anyone wants to check it out you totally should :D

Also working on carving the NeoGAF symbol in the side of the mountain but I just crashed so :p

Someone built a giant jumping puzzle -ish tower at the Narrows hub earlier but it was only temporary since it wasn't a claim or anything. Was pretty awesome while it lasted though.

Also spent 45 minutes earlier trying to dig to the bottom of the map with some other guy. I gave up but we were far enough down that we weren't hearing yells from the hub anymore (we started digging right at the hub). We were digging so long the terrain started healing behind us lol. Not sure if he made it to the bottom or not but it sounds like you just crash when we get too far. Note there's nothing particularly interesting underground yet as the cave systems haven't been put in.

Game seems pretty cool so far, think it'll be amazing as an actual MMO. And when the caves are added I think resource gathering will become much more exciting. Gathering wood is pretty lame though, and don't see how they can make that more enjoyable. Oh well.

I jumped into the narrows to look for some iron earlier today and saw that puzzle thing. Looks like somebody just randomly piled up columns of dirt way into the sky. At least it made it easy for me to find my way back to the portal once I found the materials I needed.
 
Now that the NDA is lifted:

What Types of Resources Are There and How Do I Get Them?

Light source : Night can be very dark. Go to a forge and craft a Lightstone!
Mining
Picks : Use a pick to mine resources out of the ground.
Pulverizers : The underground part of this world is HUGE. Moving through it requires a tool that digs big chunks, so use a pulverizer to make big holes faster than you can do with a pick.
NOTE: Pulverizers will not gather resources for you. They just clear dirt and stone. When you uncover a resource vein by using a Pulverizer, you’ll need to switch to a Pick to pull those resources out of the ground.
Harvesting
Trees : You can chop these down with your axe. Currently, the very largest of trees cannot be chopped, but typically, if you can highlight it when your axe is equipped, then you can chop it down.
Plants – Coming Soon
Liquids – Coming Soon
Resource Types
Super Common: Dirt, sand, and stone. These things are everywhere and you’re going to get huge volumes of them. You can use a Sifter table to glean bits of resources out of the dirt, sand and stone that you collect, if you so desire.
Common: These are resources like Plain Wood, Copper, Tin, etc. These are relatively plentiful and available on the surface of the world.
NOTE: At the start of Alpha, there will be three types of islands. Starting continents are Tiers 1 & 2 only. Mid Islands are Tiers 2 & 3. High Islands are 3 & 4. (Tier 5 islands will show up later during Alpha.)
This is only for initial testing purposes. Eventually, we’ll roll out islands that have all resources intermixed.
Rare: These are harder to find resources like Silver, Cobalt, Mithril and more. These exist ONLY underground. Some of them very deep underground.
NOTE: Initially during Alpha, resources will not be deeper than 100 meters below ground. That’ll change soon.

resource-chart-alpha-faq.jpg
 
More of the Alpha FAQ:
How Do I Build?

To learn how to USE the building tools, please watch the tutorial videos. We include all the best tips there.

But as to how you gain building tools, you start the game with ADD, DELETE, and HEAL.

Only the ADD tool starts on your hotbar. Why? Because you can’t use DELETE or HEAL until after you place a claim.

The ADD tool can be used anywhere in the world *except* other peoples’ claims (unless they give you permission first). The ADD tool can be very useful for making a quick land bridge over a chasm, or creating stairs to get out of a hole you dug for yourself.
NOTE: Blocks added to the world anywhere except on a claim will eventually disappear. They are only temporary when used outside a claim.
After you place a claim, you can then drag the DELETE and HEAL tools from your inventory onto your hotbar and use them there.

You can also craft the SELECTION, SMOOTH, PAINT, and LINE tools at crafting stations. Once they’re in your inventory, just drag to your hotbar to activate and use them.

A few building tips:
The Selection tool is your friend. Before you master the Selection tool, you’re basically just stacking blocks. Play with this tool a bit. Drag the faces around, use the corner handles, get used to clicking on a selection with other tools (like ADD or DELETE) to do major amounts of work in a single click. It’s extremely useful.
Want to make stairs? Easiest possible way to do it is use SELECTION to select a one-voxel wide area. Click it with ADD to fill it. Then choose SELECTION again and drag the corner over one voxel and down one voxel. Now ADD again. Lather, rinse, repeat to make stairs incredibly fast.
Want to make round things? Approximate a rounded surface with voxels first. Try to make it as round as you can. THEN use the smoothing tool to round it all at once by Selecting that area first and clicking on the selection with the smoothing brush.
Don’t have the rare materials you want to create that Rubicite Tower yet? Build it out of stone. Then, after you finally get all the Rubicite you want, come back and PAINT the tower to the material you desire. You don’t have to wait before you build!
There are lots of tricks like this that you’ll discover as you go.

Can I Trade? How?

You can trade things you’ve found and crafted with other players. Find a person to trade with and right click on them.

Click the option to Start Trade and the other player can accept or deny your trade request. Once they’ve accepted, it opens up a trade window.

At that point, just drag and drop the items you want to trade and hit ACCEPT. Once the other person also chooses ACCEPT, the trade occurs.

What Is Salvaging?

You can salvage items that you’ve collected or created that you no longer need. Salvaging will break it down in to component resources that you can then use to either build with or to craft something else. To salvage an item, simply drag it on to the salvage icon located in the upper right of the inventory window.

You only get about 25-30% of the resources back when you salvage an item, and you only get the raw materials and some of the Elemental resources back. (Never any refined materials, like ingots or planks.)

How Do I Delete Items?

You can delete items by simply dragging them from any inventory, vault or chest and moving your mouse over any part of the open world and then left clicking. You will be presented with a confirmation to delete the item. Be careful though! During Alpha, you may be sad if you delete items accidentally.

How Do I Access the Map?

You can access the map by pressing the M button or by clicking the map icon on the mini-menu. On the map, you can toggle on/off claims so that you can find areas to claim or to find areas that other people have already claimed. You will also be able to search for claims that are tagged with things you are interested in.

This will allow you to more easily find things of a given category, genre or theme.

Tags are not useful yet. But they will be soon. They’re a very important part of this game and we’ll explain them further when we get a bit more done. Essentially, they are the way that you can show people what you have on your claim so they know where to go to find something cool. They’ll also be very important in Player Studio.


What Do I Need to Know About Claims?


Placing a Claim
To place a claim, just right-click the claim flag in your inventory. The screen then switches to an extreme overhead view and you can place your claim.

The claim position starts centered on your player position, but you can move it around within some reasonable constraints around that location.

When you’re happy with the location, just left-click to place it, and then confirm the decision on the Claim window when it appears.

Some quick tips:
You can raise/lower your claim placement while placing it. To do this, hold down SHIFT and move your mouse forward and backward. (Yes, we know this is awkward. We’ll fix soon.)
You can also rotate your camera while placing a claim. Right-click-and-hold and then drag your mouse to rotate the camera. This can greatly help you see your boundaries. (Later, we’ll also allow you to toggle the trees and plants off so you can see more easily, but that work isn’t done yet.)
Deleting/Recovering a Claim
Let’s say you no longer like where your claim is located. You CAN move it. To do so, click the Claim Management button (in the lower, left of the screen) and find the claim you want to recover on that list. Then hit the DELETE button.

WARNING!!! When you hit the DELETE button, you’ll get a dialog confirming the decision, but if you say yes, then the following happens:
The claim flag is returned to your inventory.
Your entire claim is reset back to the way it was before you started changing things. (Back to the way it was when the island was initially created.)
So make sure you template the stuff on your claim before you Recover it. Or you’ll be a sad panda.

You can also edit the name of your claim and its description by clicking that same Claim Management button. Then select the claim you want to edit and just change the name and description. There is no SAVE button. The edits are real-time. Just close that window when you’re done making changes.

Resource Storage
Your personal inventory can only hold so much stuff. So there are other ways of holding onto things.

Chests: These are craftable objects (what isn’t?) and you place them on a claim. You can then put stuff in them. Simple, eh? You can only access the contents of a chest by being near that chest. So don’t confuse it with Vaults!

Vault: A vault is like a chest BUT…you can access this Vault storage from ANY claim…where you have placed a Vault item. In other words, think of them like virtual portals to a storage space in another universe. You can store a ton of stuff there, but it’s not really on any particular claim. The vault items are access points to get to that space.

COMING SOON:
What Isn’t Here Yet? What’s Coming Soon?

Our intention is to get all of this stuff working before we go into Closed Beta. (Closed Beta is the next stage of our testing where we hand-invite people to join you Alpha folks. Open Beta beyond that is where we just open the game to anyone that wants to play.)
Combat (vs. Hazard NPCs) – Yup! Monsters. Danger. Risk. Beware!
Health & Endurance – Right now, you can’t die. Don’t get used to it!
Damage, Death and the Death Penalty – See? Not kidding. Weesa gonna die!
Underground Biomes – Underground is pretty much undeveloped right now. The caverns aren’t in and we haven’t separated the resources out into tiers of depth. That’s all coming soon and is in-progress.
Guilds – Self-explanatory.
Groups – Self-explanatory.
Friends/Contact window
Marketplace Offerings- We’re doing our Free-to-Play strategy a lot different this time around. We intend to very much be the good guys in our industry. Nearly everything that we sell for Station Cash will also be earnable within the game. And we’re putting a lot of faith into Player Studio also. We’ll define our strategy to you in a lot more detail as Alpha progresses.
Tool progression – A bunch of this is in the game already, but we’re going to be changing it pretty constantly as we test and get feedback from you. Don’t expect this to be complete. It’s not. It will change often, but we’ll work hard to keep you informed of how and why.
Map – The map is the backbone of Landmark and it’s going to be getting a ton of features. It’s how you find friends, locations that interest you, communities that want to build what you want to build and more. We’re going to put MAJOR effort into it soon.
Buff UI – We don’t yet have any way to show you a unified vision of the various stat bonuses and abilities that you gain through progression and gear. Coming soon.
In-game Mail
Notification display and tray (mail, time, fps)
Item linking (add to chat)
Collaborations – This is a structure we’re creating to allow easy and simple co-op building between players. Right now, you can set permissions for other players to join you and work on your claim together, but it’s not what we’d call streamlined or intuitive. We’ll be working on that soon.
Player merchants – This is how you turn resources (which can be awkward to barter) into coin that’s easily traded. NOTE: Merchants do not SELL anything. If you want to buy something, then buy it from a player in the Stalls at the Hub. (NOTE: Market Stalls are coming soon in Alpha.)
VOIP support – Right now, you’re constrained to text chat. VOIP will be coming soon.
SOEmote – The code support is done, but not the interface for using it. That’ll be added soon also.
Social Networking Connections (Youtubes, Facebooks)
Configurable Keybindings – Sorry that you can’t edit your keys right now. Soon!
 

Effect

Member
Enjoying this so far for what it is but thinking I might take them up on the refund. Mainly because certain things have come up and I might not be able to play at all in the coming weeks and might very well need the money. So if refunds are being offered I should take advantage. Only problem being is that I bought the $20 pack with a gift card I got as a gift. Then paid for the upgrade to Trailblazer myself. So chances are I might only get that back. I said I'm enjoying it but not $80 to $100 enjoying it.
 

Iadien

Guarantee I'm going to screw up this post? Yeah.
Thank goodness, it was silly having an NDA. Smedley mentioned it was never intended to be up for long, they wanted to make sure the launch wasn't a complete disaster first.
 
Now that the NDA is down where are the hi res screenshots? The youtube alpha gameplay footage? The streams?

We need infodumps people, infodumps!
 
they should also add animation when you're gliding up the mountain lol.

Now that the NDA is down where are the hi res screenshots? The youtube alpha gameplay footage? The streams?

We need infodumps people, infodumps!

i had an image during a sunset. it was beautiful but everytime i took a picture it would capture a windowed image showing my desktop (Windows 8)
 

Cragvis

Member
Graphics are awesome.

Animations are top notch (dat sliding down hills mmm)

terraforming is sooo addicting. mining away at the ground creating tunnels, so much fun.

This game has MASSIVE potential to be the best mmo to date, it has the aesthetics and animation quality of world of warcraft, with the interactive bits of minecraft and the dynamic AI that is unseen (from the dev briefings)

Seriously...wow
 

Kintaro

Worships the porcelain goddess
Now, keep in mind. "This game" isn't the main MMO. This is basically the minecraft version using the engine. It will certainly serve as a nice preview of the engine used for Next. Which is what I really want.
 

LowParry

Member
Ugh. Knowing that EQN it won't be out till next year is kind of bleh. But hey, FFXIV has been treating me good so far. Can't complain about my MMO gaming.
 
I think I'd be more willing to jump in if I knew I'd be getting access to EverQuest Next's Alpha/Beta as well, when that time comes. I'd hate myself for spending money to access both.
 

Vilam

Maxis Redwood
Awesome that they lifted the NDA!

This game has so much f'ing potential. It's so rough right now and so obviously early, but you can tell they've got something special going on at the core of the game. Excited to get to chat about and share stuff as I start building.
 
There's a few issues with it right now, but the models look wonderful, it must be the lighting. I love the art style and it is surprising how addictive it is. BUT this is very alpha for anyone thinking of coming in. I've already lost one plot - but luckily found a better one on a server that hasn't been completed covered - which you'll find out soon enough when trying to find a plot.

I really want the camera to zoom out more, and for any multi-monitor users - the game is Vert- :( So at the moment I'm playing of a single screen (in a window to be precise).

Hopefully with the good launch we'll see steady updates and make the bugs/crashes extra more manageable.
 

Vilam

Maxis Redwood
Oh by the way, my in-game name is Semedi. Is there a GAF guild going? Are there even guilds in the game right now?

Gotta say, random mining and digging tunnels is so much fun... Heh, I worked on Red Faction Guerrilla and recall one of the leads saying publicly that they weren't allowing digging tunnels (aka terrain deformation) because it screwed up design and there was essentially nothing "fun" about it. After playing the original Red Faction I thought he was completely wrong then... and now after Minecraft and now this, I know he was wrong for modern games as well.

To be fair though, I don't know if he personally held that opinion... that game was already pushing the tech in those consoles ridiculously far. In all likelihood it was just the PR answer he had to give to explain away its absence.
 
it's like starbound/minecraft but then it will be fused with what hopes to be amazing combat and then hopefully animal taming/butchering/animal migration/farming (this is my list of wishful thinking)
 

FiraB

Banned
Got it working before the server melted, closed my refund ticket. Since it's working I don't need a refund now, I'll be damned if a bug will beat me but thank god the servers are down, now I can actually sleep...six hours of bliss.
 

Iadien

Guarantee I'm going to screw up this post? Yeah.
Holy crap that is a massive list by beta. What timeframe will that arrive?

Closed beta is supposed to come out no later than March 31. It may be sooner, as Alpha was supposed to come no later than February 28, and we're already in Alpha.
 

terrisus

Member
Oh man, I really wish I had $100 to get in on this. It's tempting me so badly. Absolutely adored EverQuest 1 (played from launch through Luclin)
 
Oh man, I really wish I had $100 to get in on this. It's tempting me so badly. Absolutely adored EverQuest 1 (played from launch through Luclin)

$60 would also get you into the alpha too.

also if you bought the xplorer and then upgraded you get double the items (got 2 of the pickaxe and clothes) lol.
 
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