14 DAY TRIAL // Most video game developers tend to see gameplay exploits as a problem for their titles and work to quickly eliminate them, but the development team at Sony Online Entertainment working on Everquest Next Landmark says that it wants gamers to find and use as many of them as possible to make the experience better.
The big change that the title is introducing, which will also be included in the core Everquest Next experience, is that the entire world is built from voxels that are easy to shape using simple tools and can be molded into some impressive structures.
Director of Development Dave Georgeson tells Edge that even in the limited alpha stage of Landmark, testers were able to create architectural feats that surprised the development team.
Some of them were based on the use of negative space, which SOE did not take into account, but the studio has no plans to eliminate that, but it is working in order to include it in the full version of the MMO.
The developer adds, “I work all day, and then I go home and play the game learning what the players have done that day, what tricks they’ve discovered, so that I can go back to the team and make a better and better whole.”
Landmark is designed to offer an environment that gamers can use to create items and locations that can be employed in the full version of Everquest Next.
Georgeson adds, “There’s a hundred thousand of them and there’s a hundred of us. There’s so many minds percolating the game, and that’s what we’re excited about. By opening up, we have all these other minds second-guessing what we’re doing. That’ll always end up resulting in a better product.”
The core story of the full MMO and its core mechanics are at the moment under wraps because Sony Online Entertainment wants to surprise the player base when it delivers the full announcement about it.
The company explains that recruitment for the Landmark team focused on those who were almost egoless, because they need to focus on creating tools that others can use to populate a game world rather than realize their own vision for it.
Everquest Next is expected to be launched in 2015 on the PC and a PlayStation 4 version is also planned and until then, fans of the MMO series will be able to get access to a full release of Landmark before the end of the year.