While EverQuest Next, with its wandering AI and player-built cities, is still months away from release, at the earliest some time in 2015, EverQuest Next Landmark’s alpha, the Minecraft-like offshoot, is available to play now. For a fee.
Buying a $60 Founder’s Pack will net you early access to the soon-to-be free-to-play MMO.
The first release of Landmark will let you build and craft architectural creations to show off to other players but there won’t be any form of combat. That’s for a later update. It should set you back at least nine hours to gather all the materials to craft all the buildings on offer in Landmark.
Being an alpha, there will be character wipes. Though you can save your creations and redeploy them as soon as a server wipe has passed. Getting you back up to scratch with your pre-wipe state pretty quickly.
We’ll see a lot of the game in action soon as the NDA will be lifted on Monday:
The NDA is officially lifted for EQNL. Have fun. It will be Monday before we can yank it from the game
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) February 2, 2014
SOE plan to move to the next stage of Landmark’s development at the end of March.