Landmark Team Shifts Focus to EverQuest Next

It's been four months since we've wondered about the current state of EverQuest Next in our "Games Gone Missing - where are they now?" video feature. Yesterday, the game's senior producer Terry “Fairan” Michaels gave us the latest update in a Producer's Letter posted to Landmark's official site.

Landmark, a standalone game that lets players create their own buildings with a powerful creation tool, was always designed to test some systems that will be incorporated into EverQuest Next. Michaels said that after taking care of a recent character and claim wipe and issues associated with it, the team is shifting its focus to those features.

"As the team has wrapped up the various pieces related to the wipe and the bugs associated with it, we have been shifting our focus and resources over to work on the highest priority tasks and systems that will be used in EverQuest Next," Michaels said. "While we do this, we're working in areas with high amounts of creative risk. This means that while we know what we want to do, we know it will take an unknown amount of iteration, tweaking and sometimes drastic direction changes to get these in game and working the way they need to. Because of this, we simply cannot commit to any dates, because until we get much closer, even our best estimates are educated (but still fairly wild) guesses."

Michaels guaranteed that Landmark will still get updates, but on a less regular scedule than players have been used to over the past year. He also clarified that though the team is shifting its focus to EverQuest Next, that doesn't mean the game will be coming out this year.

Development on EverQuest Next and Landmark began under Sony Online Entertainment, but earlier this year the company announced that it was breaking away from Sony to operate as an independent company known as Daybreak Game Company.