Not sure if you knew about this, but Everquest Next Landmark entered Alpha about one month ago. During that month players were introduced for the first time to the voxel world and tools we have jointly developed with Sony Online Entertainment.
We still have a lot of work to do. The game just now entered Beta. Still I am marveled by the incredible creations made by the players in such a short time and with such early versions of the tools.
Have a look:
I do not know about you, but it seems to me player-generated-content does come close to what game studios can do. Hopefully very soon we will be able to completely blur that line.
Probably the biggest surprise was to see all the emergent techniques devised by the players. We knew our voxels were able to encode all sort of funny things, however the specifics of how they could be achieved was a purely player-driven development. Players even had to name these things, so they gave us "microvoxels", "antivoxels", "zero-volume voxels" and other similar things that actually make a big difference on how you can create in the game.
Someone once told me the best software you can write is one that won't have any users. You can relax and have a life. Users (or players in this case) are that reality check developers secretly fear so much. Now I realize this software cannot exist in isolation from the builder community. Thanks to our players we continue to learn and understand about all the emerging properties of the platform we have created.
Keep up the amazing work guys!
