![]() ![]() There’s much to be said for gating player progression-psychologically it’s a powerful motivator to keep users coming back for more. The actual Landmark Alpha is not bad by any means. What I experienced with Admin Mode is incredibly different than the Alpha you can go access right now. “You guys do realize nobody playing the real alpha will be able to do what you’re doing, right?” another employee asked towards the end of our session. Ask that seemingly silly question “Is this possible?” and then force your ridiculous dreams into existence. In other words, so large that Landmark’s systems hadn’t been programmed to even handle an object of that size.Īnd that was the theme of the day: take these systems and prod them. Nathan built an even-larger ice cream cone-so large he had to copy and paste the various portions in three different parts to avoid triggering an error. ![]() Here, high above the Landmark surface, I built a sixty-foot-tall Mountain Dew can out of emeralds. This ginormous ice cream cone was easily a quarter- to half-mile tall in the game. It was a crude structure, a patchwork of grass and copper and riveted metal and ice and obsidian that looked more like a child’s failed Lego creation than a place befitting the regal name we’d adopted, but it was home. Once again using the Select tool, we created enormous platforms in the sky, thousands of voxels long. Here amongst the clouds we founded Sky City-a new continent, far removed from the toils of life below. Once we’d reached the bottom of the world, we turned on flight/no-clip mode and ascended back towards the surface, our bodies silhouetted against the blue-gray gloom of “outside the level.” We flew high above the surface, higher even than a nearby tower someone had built by stacking a house template on top of itself dozens of times. (Mineral deposits will be added to underground areas later on in development.) This was not The Correct Way to play Landmark. ![]() “Wouldn’t you guys rather…build something?” asked one of the SOE staffers as we bored a hole into the currently-empty depths. It was painstaking and tedious work, punctuated by bursts of laughter as the floor disappeared out from under our characters millions of blocks at a time.Īnd then we started seeing discomfited faces. This was how we made our slow but steady progress to the bottom of the map. Like, to the tune of approximately 800,000,000 voxels at once. In Admin Mode, Nathan and I discovered the Select tool could seize on and delete enormous chunks of the ground. This conservative attitude was even apparent at SOE’s preview event. Now, the details of that experience are still up for debate, but the fundamentals-the “arcs” of a players experience-are set. Here are the trappings of a real MMO inside this incredible building tool. Here are the resources you have to mine to progress through the different tiers of the game. Here are these areas where you can build, and here are the places you can’t. ![]() See what happens.įor all SOE’s talk of player-driven design and enormous sandboxes, the development team seems set on giving users a fairly specific type of experience. On the other hand, Admin Mode removes the question of “Can I do this?” There are no artificial hurdles to progress through, no bounds on your creativity. The Admin Mode is exploitable, buggy, broken, crash-prone, error-prone, and-worst of all in the eyes of serious game developers making serious games-silly. Apparently you can even build snowmen, if this Sony-provided image is any indication. ![]()
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