EQN:Landmark Beta Starts March 26th!

Totally digging the music in the caves video.

Also caves look awesome.

They can be difficult to spot but an easy trick is to turn on Claimable Land on your map. They'll show up as red splotches. As mentioned in the patch notes, the few I found dont' go down far but they're pretty damn cool anyway. Bring a light source, you run out of light pretty fast.

Caves are pretty awesome, though they still need a little work.

First one I tried out was an old forest cave and I was in there for a good 45m; they go pretty deep and have lots of spiraling resource nodes, but I didn't find any chests.

Second cave I went in was a smaller ice biome cave and looked 10x cooler than the old forest one, imo. It had a much greater contrast of dark and light sources, especially with the crystal/glowing plants. Found TWO chests in the ice cave, though neither had the new items in it they were talking about.

The ice cave definitely had different layouts than the old forest cave, too, which was unexpected. It looks like each biome has unique cave flora, textures, and tile types.

I'm pretty sure the cave layouts are random. My wife ran through one last night that had four or five branches and one "death drop".

Phase 2 of Caves is going to be awesome if this is just a taste. 3 subterranean tiers? Hell yeah.

moontayle_sl said:

I'm pretty sure the cave layouts are random. My wife ran through one last night that had four or five branches and one "death drop".

Phase 2 of Caves is going to be awesome if this is just a taste. 3 subterranean tiers? Hell yeah.

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I was glad there was no falling damage I blundered into an amazingly deep death drop last night when exploring. The cave stuff looks really nice although I did notice that after the patch I took a pretty big FPS hit but kicking my graphics down to medium fixed it pretty well. The new swimming animations and underwater look/sound are really good as well.

kaid_sl said:

/Snip... although I did notice that after the patch I took a pretty big FPS hit but kicking my graphics down to medium fixed it pretty well.

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Kaid, out of curiosity what are you basic system specs...CPU, GFx Card, Amount of RAM ? I've heard prior to the caves that many could run this game at max setting without needing a monster rig.

Mur_sl said:

Kaid, out of curiosity what are you basic system specs...CPU, GFx Card, Amount of RAM ? I've heard prior to the caves that many could run this game at max setting without needing a monster rig.

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Processor: Intel Core i7 2600K 3.40GHz
System Memory: 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Corsair Vengeance Series
Video Card(s): 1x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB

So by no means bleeding edge but prior to patch I would get solid 50 FPS running around unless I was next to come crazy intricate plot that was overloaded with props. Post patch it was holding steady at about 30 FPS on high graphic settings. I kicked it to medium and it shot back up to a stable 50 FPS.

Good info Kaid, thanks.

kaid_sl said:

Processor: Intel Core i7 2600K 3.40GHz
System Memory: 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Corsair Vengeance Series
Video Card(s): 1x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB

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For another point of reference, I'm running;

Processor: Intel Core i7 3770K (with a small overclock)
System Memory: 8GB DDR3 1866MHz
Video Card(s): 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB

And Landmark beats the piss out of my system @ High settings and 1440p (30-40fps in most open areas).
However my framerate is the same with SLI off and most settings don't alter my framerate at all; ex. dropping to Medium detail gives me maybe 2-3 frames.
Clearly some optimization and SLI support still needed. Sure is pretty, though. Looking forward to running it smoothly.

kaid_sl said:

I was glad there was no falling damage I blundered into an amazingly deep death drop last night when exploring. The cave stuff looks really nice although I did notice that after the patch I took a pretty big FPS hit but kicking my graphics down to medium fixed it pretty well. The new swimming animations and underwater look/sound are really good as well.

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Falling damage is coming, so don't get too comfortable.

Recorded someswimming.

Caves, with achest.

Not mine, but interesting find from a chest today. Gliding Is in,but no mention of it in patch notes.

Interesting

Zephyr belt in action.

Haha, that can hardly be called gliding. Not what I expected at all.

Reminds me of pre nerf cloud walk druids got in Vanguard. You could "glide" across entire continents with ease.

Lenas_sl said:

Haha, that can hardly be called gliding. Not what I expected at all.

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Its not flight as you cannot really gain height with it effectively but it is a lot better glide ratio than I imagined it would have.

Saw Georgeson interviewed on an E3 livestream; a lot of stuff he talked about was stuff we already knew, but he talked some about how combat's going to be added. Basically, phase 1 of combat is going to be purely pvp on claims that have been flagged for it. They'll be using that to test all the combat mechanics before adding in the additional complication of testing the AI with mobs. He also talked about showing off the dynamic AI at SOE Live, although I'm unsure if that means the presumably simpler AI that I would think would be the first pass in Landmark, or if it means the full Storybricks stuff.