Despite my best efforts, I find myself to be a horrible builder. I can craft wonderful ideas in my head, describe them with epic scale in an essay, but end up making balls of dirt on my claim. Luckily, the February 18 Everquest Next Round Table Response gave me hope that I can actually play the game in a way that seems to make sense to me as someone who's horrible at free-form creation: getting other people to help me!
The situation is simple. My ability to mind gaps and spaces between items in this game is atrocious. Building complex structures becomes mind-numbing or difficult as a result of my inability to mind these spacial gaps. I enjoy the gathering of resources and the crafting of set items, but I just have trouble mastering architecture.
Allow me to offer an excellent visual of the things I can't accomplish in any way, shape or form. Kodi Mynatt, or TonicMan26 on Twitter, has the following image below, which I can't even imagine how to build at all.
)
To get around the slump of being a horrible builder, it seems convincing others to develop something awesome on my claim may be the more fitting challenge for me.
Group Endeavors
The latest Round Table, which discussed what I feel is one potential community-wide endgame for a landmass in Everquest Next Landmark, delved into the concept of group building efforts. According to the video, Dave Georgeson and Omeed Dariani revealed that Sony Online Entertainment wanted to see if there was a strong existing demand for group endeavors.
According to the poll, most people were game for all sorts of building, but at the current stage of the game, around a quarter of the people who responded were basically trying to build stuff for themselves to progress in the game.
As Georgeson explains, however, while solo is likely the early and mid-game for everyone as they try to get better tools and implements for building, “once they have those things, then the cooperative stuff starts to become more attractive because it takes a long time to do stuff by yourself.”
Dariani then noted one potential means by which communities can come together: livestreamers organizing and streaming group efforts. Imagine: convincing an entire community to work on terraforming their entire landmass into a giant city? If someone was livestreaming the building process, this would not only a world-first event, but also a strong source of community pride, where everyone who chipped in can be glad that they were a part of a grand, world-spanning achievement.
Of course, I simply want to start small. After getting enough materials to build the best tools to support building endeavors, I could befriend others and then convince my new comrades into using my claim to build something epic while I provide support by gathering materials and providing items to decorate the base structure. Call me spoiled by Lord of the Rings Online, Everquest II, and RIFT's store for buildings, but I have a much easier time decorating a home than building it.
)
One of the other nice tidbits from the Round Table Response was Georgeson mentioning plans to integrate social media and social network connectivity into Landmark, meaning sharing creations would be far easier to do across a wider range of online avenues and finding friends who are playing Landmark is also easier.
That said, I'd like to propose something. If you have any video guides, written tutorials, or creations you've made within Landmark that you'd like to share, feel free to comment below with a link and a brief description of what you're sharing. I'll compile them, pick out some stellar works, and include them in a roundup every month or so in addition to the regular column. Cheers!
