Landmark – Now With Inversion

Last Wednesday, SOE patched Landmark with a pretty significant list of bug fixes. The only part that mattered to me, of course, was the addition of an invert mouse option. Yay! I can play!

I’m still not going to build anything complicated, though, because … well, it’s going to get wiped. Either accidentally or intentionally. So there’s no point in wasting the effort.

So basically all I’ve done so far is run around and chop down trees or dig holes in the dirt.

That sounds intensely boring when you write it, but I have always liked gathering in MMOs, so running around chopping on trees and digging holes is actually kind of fun for me. Well, maybe “fun” isn’t the right word. It’s more like relaxing. In Landmark, there is this nice ambient music playing in the background, and a nice landscape all around you, and it’s just kind of pleasant and stress-free just to be there.

The animations in the game are very nice, too. Your character does a lot of interesting moves based on the landscape you’re on. Like if you’re going downhill, he’ll start to “slide.” They’re completely meaningless in terms of gameplay, but it’s cool to watch. I also like the way resources fly out in chunks and then get vaccuumed up.

I’m a bit confused about the mining, though. I thought the Founder’s Pick was supposed to be a good pick, but so far I can only mine Dirt, Stone, and Agate. I keep running to places that look like veins of something cool, but I always get ‘your tool isn’t good enough to mine this material.’

I guess I’m supposed to craft a better pick, but how am I supposed to craft anything with Dirt and Stone? :) I once went to the crafting station and looked through recipes, but they all seemed to require materials that I hadn’t seen yet.

(I later discovered that I had somehow gotten into a Tier 2 zone, where there was no copper to mine.)

The bottom line is that I like it, but it’s going to need more stuff to do and more stability before I see myself playing it for hours on end. Right now it’s just fun to pop in and mess around for fifteen minutes here and there. (Similar to Trove, which is a more developed game, but looks and feels totally different.)