Landmark

» see landmarkthegame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

landmark's alpha window sat right on top of a stretch when i was watching the mmo genre from a distance, on ttnet broadband, mostly reading patch notes for games i was not actually playing. sony online entertainment never had a foothold in my orbit. i was a ultima online private server person years earlier, running through sylveria and overdone, and by 2014 that habit was long gone. this one i knew about from press coverage, not from a client running on my desktop.

sony online entertainment announced everquest next landmark in august 2013 at soe live. the pitch was two products at once. one was an in-engine voxel building tool for players. the other was the sandbox everquest next would use to farm player-made content into its live world. the alpha opened on 31 january 2014 under a founders' pack model. by march 2014 the beta was renamed to just landmark, quietly signalling that the connection to everquest next was already loosening.

then columbus nova bought sony online entertainment in february 2015 and rebranded it as daybreak game company. everquest next was cancelled outright in march 2016. daybreak pushed landmark to a 1.0 release on 10 june 2016 as a standalone building game with no mmo parent left to feed. the servers closed on 21 february 2017, less than eight months after that launch.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pitch ~

the original pitch was clever on paper. an mmo studio would use its own player base as a factory floor. players would spend hundreds of hours building castles and dungeons inside landmark, then the best pieces would get folded into everquest next as native content. minecraft had proved by 2013 that voxel building was a real genre. sony online was betting that a professional forgelight engine version of that loop would make everquest next feel infinite in a way no scripted mmo before it had managed.

the loop broke in both directions. player content never reached the promised pipeline in any real volume. everquest next kept slipping on its own terms as the design team failed to lock down a combat model that worked at scale. landmark ended up living or dying as a standalone voxel sandbox competing directly with minecraft, without the ten dollar price point or the mod ecosystem that had built minecraft's audience over four years of head start.

~ the postmortem ~

columbus nova took over the studio in february 2015 and dropped the sony name. daybreak game company kept everquest next in development for another year before killing it in march 2016. the reason given publicly was that the smedley-era design vision had not delivered a game that felt fun. landmark was already six months into its beta at that point, with founders' packs sold, and daybreak did not want to walk away from the money.

so daybreak locked in a june 2016 1.0 release that was really the beta build with a launch label attached. the founders' pack refund window closed. reviews landed lukewarm. minecraft was still a bigger world with more mods, and landmark's building tools were more precise but harder to reach. eight months later daybreak told the remaining players the servers would go dark on 21 february 2017. players who had spent months building castles were given a two week window to export screenshots.

~ what got buried with it ~

the technical experiment was interesting on its own terms. forgelight running voxel destruction at continent scale, with a claim-based land ownership model that let players stake plots without full mmo-territory griefing. some of that tech survived at daybreak in later h1z1 iterations. everquest next itself never came back in any form. the smedley era of sony online entertainment ended with landmark's server shutdown, closing a loop that had started with ultima online's success in 1997 and run through everquest to a voxel sandbox that outlived its parent by less than a year.

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