EQN Landmark Alpha launches!

Well, as many know I'm signed up for the EQN Landmark Alpha! Friday night, after the end of the Aniiversary event at SOE HQ in San Diego, Alpha launched! And last night, in a very weird move, SOE lifted the NDA....so here's some info for those who give a Shiite.

Immediately the servers were flooded with downloads, even though it was after midnight for half of the US. Regardless, wife and I both downloaded the game and had it up and running in less than 30 minutes. A LOT of people had issues (my wife included) but most I spoke to had an answer from SOE to resolve within an hour or two (wife had two tickets open at the same time, both answered within 90 minutes). All throughout devs and execs from Sony kept a running dialogue about the issues, what was happening and how they were being fixed. The open manner in which they handled things was really a far cry from the way Sony dealt with issues over the last 15 years.

Playing the game...SOE has stated that at first Landmark would be very limited in what you could do, and the game showed that. All we can do ATM is harvest, explore and build (no mobs or combat YET...coming soon). But even that was amazing, and immersive. When you're mining you really get the impression that you're changing the world you are in (watching another player fall into a hole you dug drives this home...and I imagine the plans to be able to mine your way into a hidden dungeon will do more). Movement is fluid, even with slight lag at times (FAR more people in the Alpha than they anticipated, so they had to beef up servers...which they did within hours). Finding rare resources for building recipes is fun and engaging. Building is amazing....the level of control you have when creating is high and detailed, and the controls are easy to use....although right now SOE admits a lot of the controls are raw and not what they want for the finished product (improvements being worked on even after the first round of player feedback). If they are this detailed and attentive to just the non combat aspect of this game I honestly cannot wait to see what they have planned for encounters and quests!

Last night they had a planned update for the evening to address a lot of issues they discovered....but they got more than they bargained for. Not to go into too much detail, but the game builds islands on the fly for increased player capacity. When it did so a memory leak caused them to not properly connect to the world, so some of them were left in the "void" and therefore deleted. People lost claims (you claim land) and created structures on that claim. SOE could have just said, "Hey, its an alpha, sorry, it gone" but they spent hours trying to unravel dozens of lost islands and thousands of built structures so testers wouldnt lose what they'd built. Finally this morning they found a way to let players keep their claims and the crafted objects they'd placed (a lot of work) but they had to reset the land and claims to default to do so (people lost built structures). They also said it taught them a way to in the future make sure objects built are retained so it wont happen again.

Does it sound as if I am impressed? Well, I am. The game itself is good, and I see HUGE potential in what it can be.....but the thing that really shocked and impressed me is how SOE is treating it and treating players. The open manner in which they keep players apprised of updates and whats going on....the attention to detail....the level of care they seem to have for the gamers experience....well, if you played Live EQ before or other Sony games you know this is a very different Sony. And I like it!

As I said, NDA is lifted. Will be making some videos and posting to a web page...will link here when I get it set up, if people wanna see whats what.

Chunka

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