Thanks for an amazing year!

For those of you not keeping score, it’s been just about a year since I began infuriating the more simple-minded grammar-nazis with this column. To be fair, I’m simple-minded enough that the joke hasn’t worn thin for me yet, every comment along the lines of *You’re still rouses a patronizing chuckle.

What a year it’s been; I got married, travelled to Africa for the first time, attended my first SOE Live, met a multitude of amazing people in and around the EverQuest Next and Landmark community and had more interesting and enlightening conversations about games than in all my previous years combined. At this time of year in a certain part of the world it’s très à la mode to share what we’re thankful for, and this year I feel overwhelmed by how overburdened I am with options.

A quick thanks then, to all of you lovely people reading this for your part, and to the good people at ZAM who still allow me to bother you with this stuff every week.

Now, to the posturing and self-aggrandizing reserved for arbitrary milestones.

In preparation for this week I took a quick look at the first Your Next, hoping to see how far we’d come and how much I’d embarrassed myself with inaccurate predictions. To be honest, I was a little disappointed.

While I still agree with the general thrust of the piece, it’s been over a year since I wrote it and the core reasons I am excited and passionate about Landmark are still waiting in the wings. A year ago I was telling people that while the building tools were amazing (and they really are) there’s so much more coming that will elevate Landmark toward being something more, and I’m still telling people there’s more coming.

It’s also strange to see constant references to ‘EverQuest Next Landmark’.

This is the unfortunate nature of the beast; with all the positives that come with an open development strategy the players are often left feeling like they’re running in place, straining to see just past the horizon.

I don’t blame SOE for this feeling, however; Master Yoda taught me better than that -

'This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away, to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, hmm? What he was doing. Hmm. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.’

I never became a Jedi (despite my best efforts, running in circles and staring at rocks), so I do crave adventure and excitement, but keeping our minds on where we are now is good advice for anyone. So often we take for granted what’s all around us.

It’s true that Landmark isn’t yet the platform we expect it to become, and EverQuest Next still feels a long way off, but every day that Soon™ gets a little sooner. What’s more important, is that while we patiently wait for the dream to be realized, so much is happening right now.

What is happening in Landmark with the Team-Up and in the open development of EQN via the Workshop is amazing; true collaboration between players and developers has led to incredible results. The creative feedback loop I hoped for is real - the devs push the players as the players stretch the limits of the game. The established player base is becoming increasingly articulate in its understanding of what works with the artistic vision of SOE, as well as the functionality of the spaces they create.

Ultimately, the alpha and closed beta phases of Landmark have been an opportunity to create the intangible but necessary foundation both games will need to reach their potential. While some of us have bemoaned the lack of a particular feature or two, we’ve also been making friends and founding communities. We’ve been learning and planning, occasionally steering the course of development and showing SOE what works and what doesn’t.

Essentially, we’ve been doing the very things we signed up for alpha to do.

Over the next few months (hopefully) as more of the headline features find their way in, and the gates swing wide for Open Beta, I believe we’ll see the fruits of what has been achieved so far. A strong history of direct collaboration, a supportive and encouraging community and a skillful, invested playerbase are not results to be expected overnight.

The first Your Next was titled What Will Landmark Build? I am so very proud of what we have built so far, and incredibly thankful that there’s so much left for us to discover together.

LockSixTime