Quite the contrary, I think Brad's clear love of fantasy can be seen in his body of work, and I trust his judgement to create an interesting and engaging world more than anyone else.
Yeah, think of all the various sandbox and indie games that have become cult hits compared to the regurgitated shit a lot of "big names" put out
You kind of gave me a yes and no here.
I'm looking forward to Landmark mostly. As a big Minecraft junkie I really want to see if they can pull off properly splicing Minecraft with an MMO.
My concern with landmark is it is going to be cash shop dependent to really do anything in it.
The are monetizing the actual land, so I'm guessing you are right. Anything beyond a very simple house will probably cost either a small amount of money or a huge amount of time. Just budget $60 for it like a normal game purchase if you enjoy it and I'm sure you'll be fine.
That is a concern. SoE definitely does not have a good history of intelligently designed FtP plans. One of my worries is if they restrict what people can do or not in terms of Mobs. If they leave it free form enough then I could see some really awesome dungeon type stuff coming from the community. On the other hand if they lean more towards the EQ2 dungeon builder type stuff where it's fairly restrictive then they could wind up choking quite a bit of creativity.
I guess that's why they have the Minecraft/Terraria/whatever style of tiered tool progression and the combat. Perhaps there will be some sort of placeable furnishing progression as well (furnaces etc.) but there really is no incentive to make your house look better (at least in the aforementioned games). That's really just your problem if you don't want to make your home pretty.
Why do you care to grind that dungeon for the +2 betterer armor?
If it keeps as much depth as Minecraft (which isn't very much IIRC; the depth is pretty much in the variety of materials and literal depth) and adds some combat that is actually interesting, then they game could have a rather large player base. We'll see though. At this point, much of it is in the execution.
south park did a pretty awesome job making fun of minecraft in last week's episode. i'll echo the words of the immortal randy marsh: "i don't get it."
I tried watching it but something in my browser cuts the show off at the first break period on their website. Minecraft is definitely one of those games that some people just won't like. Lots of people like clear goals and structure for their play time. MC is very much a game where you make your own fun. I'm hoping SoE manages to emulate that to some extent. But as Mellent pointed out above, there's still just too many unknowns about Landmark for a good guess yet.
The autism spectrum maybe. If I give you a pencil and a blank piece of paper do you see the infinite possibilities for creation where the average person might doodle a penis and then move on?
I don't think that's really a fair comparison. The survival and crafting aspect of the game is decently entertaining (and challenges are fantastic), and it's sold like 40 million copies for a reason. I know dozens of people on my steam list who are not at all the creative types, but can find fun stuff to do in minecraft. Like, one challenge map I did recently was basically a 28-floor dungeon crawl, and another was a treasure hunt in a huge world. There's just a lot of cool stuff you can do with it. Comparing it to MSpaint or a scratch pad is a bit unfair. I do get that it doesn't appeal to some people, but it's pretty cool for what it is.
