Landmark

There's a general laugh from the room as a voice, publisher-side, pipes up from the back. We're some thirty-six minutes into a near two-hour presentation on Landmark, the Everquest side-title that's grown so far beyond its original remit that its creators have axed the Everquest Next header altogether.

Landmark was an idea to allow paying players access to the tools that were being used to build the next version of the fifteen-year old MMO, envisioned as an online world that let fans dabble on servers wholly separate from EQN. Effectively, it let them get a front row seat at what SOE were building.

Somewhere along the way, things changed, emergent gameplay flipping the roles. Player became creator, developer observer. Landmark's creators were being shown things they didn't know their tools could do.

The team talk logging in during lunch hours to watch magnificent works of art gradually being built by those populating their servers. How team heads are now running classes internally just to explain to their coders how the players are achieving what they are.

Fantasy adventure turned iconic real-world architecture: the devs have been surprised at what players have managed to create in the game.

SOE say Landmark isn't an art project. It isn't Photoshop: the Game. Yet everything they show during this presentation, a recap to journalists as the game transitions from alpha to closed beta, suggests that's exactly what it is. It just ignores the need for a multitude of tools and complex commands.

In the near future, the creators intend to drop in caves, water, as well as the initial fruits of their AI labour onto the multiple server worlds (each containing thirty islands, each a couple of miles across). Each new addition would stress-test the foundations that'll create Everquest Next. There's suggestion that instead of tinkering, the development team will drop these in then step back and watch what the players do with them.

At the moment, players get access to a character, a Claim (a square chunk of land decided by wherever they plant their Claim flag) and seven interface tools that they use to mine resources as well as build and refine structures. If it sounds like Minecraft, that's because it's meant to. The team looked closely at the content-creation phenomenon when creating Landmark, and went about chiseling their own design into the genre.

While the viewpoint is third-person, shortcut hot keys set along the screen's bottom as with any MMO, construction is main interaction with the world. Building is familiar, and easy.

[left] the day/night cycle can even make a ruined tower picturesque. [right] mansion-sized living rooms

[left to right]: from more familiar dungeons, to windmill houses and a steam train, all are created from scratch in-game.

The Mega-Claim saw multiple players plant their land grabs beside each other and work together on building a town.

You guide a transparent cube to anywhere near your character with the mouse, expand or contract its size with the mouse wheel. Clicking on your chosen spot will yield different results depending on hot key context. Delete, build, refine (which gradually wears away the cube's right angles into a more realistic, weathered look), copy, paste. You're able to move and spin your cube on a number of axis to perfect your design. You can 'paint' different material onto its surface, which will bleed into the cube's interior.

You've a square of land to dig on (and into). All players will be given the same sized claim, but there's an option to link these together. We get a snapshot during the presentation of this, billed as a Mega-Claim. It's a town carved into the earth and built by a group of players working together.

Community's an important word in Everquest. The creators mention it repeatedly, during the presentation, during the open Q&A. You can journey out of your patch of land, check out what other people are doing on the island. A social interface will see creators trend, their work pushed to the top tier of the social channels, though you can dig in through an abundance of tags to find a creation of interest.

Landmark originated from the fantasy franchise, but its creations stray from convention. We see renditions of the Eiffel Tower, Ikea-like showrooms, warplanes over crumbling cities. Quaint European townhouses. Steam engines.

Players carving more intricate designs continue to impress the creators.

There's no props (aside from the odd flame and smoke stack) in play. Just the players learning loopholes in the voxel-based graphics engine to create curves, carve mosaics. There's the thought that SOE will need to keep updating the game's tutorial to cover everything that's possible here as players' make new discoveries.

The company want to makes its player creators famous. The social channel is one way, Player Studio, where players can seek their wares in an online marketplace, is another. There'll also be competitions to recreate the best entries in Everquest Next itself.

But even when that MMO rolls out, Landmark will remain, and continue to evolve. What it'll be in six months from now, however, we're betting even its creators don't know.

We'll have GRTV interviews with key creators on the project on the site in the near future.