Landmark Beta

Haven’t updated in a while. Real life things have been happening, like decorating the entire house to make it more attractive to a buyer, as we’re hoping to move. I’ve been without internet for about six weeks on my PC so been unable to play games. However, I managed to plug it back in this week, just in time for Marvel Heroes Omega Event, which I am actually trying to participate in (I want the Agent Coulson team-up) and of course, the point of this post – Landmark.

Now I’d thought that I’d written a post on Landmark already but I think perhaps I just intended too. I forget now how I discovered Landmark but I thought the ability to build, using real game graphics, was incredibly cool. I followed all the devs on twitter, was amazed by the screenshots they shared, I watched all the YouTube videos and tried to wait till release day. Well I failed, release day is so far away so several months back now I got a pack, dived into the game and promptly stopped. Why? Because it’s beta.

I know why beta exists, it’s to test the game, to find bugs and squash them before release so the game when launched works properly. I eagerly report any bugs when I find them but I don’t purposely try and break the game, to be honest I don’t know how to do that. I just do what I do normally and so for the most part I don’t find that many bugs. Then there’s the fact that it’s beta, everything that happens in it doesn’t exist. When the game is launched it’s back to the beginning time. It feels like a gigantic waste of time. As interested as I was in the game, and as much as I loved checking it out myself, I didn’t let myself play as I didn’t want to waste my time.

However, this week that changed. I haven’t been new to a game in some time. I vaguely remember the blur of not understanding when I started playing Warcraft. I had the friend that recruited me to pester with questions and it’s been a few years now, I’m very comfortable with the systems. Swtor works on the same principles and I just ignore every aspect of Marvel Heroes that I don’t understand. With Landmark, everything was different and I didn’t know where to begin – cue lightbulb moment. Beta isn’t a waste of time if I’m learning what to do so when it goes live I can get a good start. Yes I realise that’s a selfish way to look at beta but at least I’m being honest.

Things I’ve learned so far
1) First thing to do is upgrade the pick to the best one, makes gathering a lot faster.
2) Check the filter for claimable land on the map, the red blobs are caves.
3) Caves are probably the best place to find gems.
4) You can use the grapple to mine in the ceiling so long as you don’t mine where you’ve grappled onto (I just mined above me and kept falling and thought it didn’t work at first).
5) When making a big structure don’t use all the claim as otherwise you won’t be able to terraform the landscape to make an entrance.
6) The paint tool replaces your selection. So you get the material back that you are painting.
7) If you can’t find any of the tree/node within an area around the gate swap areas and servers if necessary.
8) To save running back to the portal, logout and login again on a different server.
9) You can ‘Evac to safety’ so you don’t have to climb back out of caves as it teleports you to the surface.
10) Set an alarm as once you start playing you will lose all sense of time and suddenly it’ll be several hours later.
11) Don’t start making a gigantic complex. It might seem exciting but it would make more sense to start small, aka don’t do what I did, even I regret it but having now started I don’t want to delete. It’s the old “I’m going to lose the last several hours” problem.
12) Build everything in dirt first and then replace afterwards.
13) There are multiple dirt colours, go for contrast rather than do what I did and build everything in Stucco and then struggle with seeing where the wall in front of me is, compared to the wall behind.
14) The selection tool is the best thing ever. Makes building/deleting so much faster as it can be done in bulk.
15) Getting things in place seems hard till you use the scroll wheel to move it one voxel at a time, tab to change axis and the ‘mount up’ button (or at least that’s what I know it as 🙂 it’s the squiggle above tab) to move to rotate mode. So much easier than moving the mouse and swearing.

I’m just getting started. I already feel like I’ve learned a lot. I’m tabbing out quite frequently to google with a question. I miss my second screen as I’m already plotting gathering in the future by watching TV on the other monitor, plus it would be easier to pull up YouTube tutorials and follow the directions. I’m still not looking forward to the resource wipe but I’m no longer unwilling to spend time in game. The potential this game has is incredible. I can’t wait to see what the devs throw out next.