This evening's EverQuest Next Landmark livestream was helmed by Senior Brand Manager Omeed Dariani, Community Manager Colette "Dexella" Murphy, Senior Producer Terry Michaels and Lead Designer Darrin McPherson.

Colette encouraged those attending the EverQuest Community Event on January 31st to email communityevents@soe.sony.com to let them know where you're coming from and how many people are coming with you. Demo and on-site tour participation require an NDA, and those who are under 18 must have a parent or guardian present. 

Terry and Omeed went on to discuss the alpha, stressing that the game will be in an earnest alpha state with it estimated to only be about 65% or so complete. Alpha testers will be integral to assisting with not only finding bugs, but also helping to shape the game. A "DevTalk" feature will eventually be introduced, enhancing the dialogue between developers and community in-game.

Join SOE on Twitch TV on Wednesday, January 15 at 4pm PT (7pm ET) as they discuss claims in EverQuest Next Landmark!

It's time for the first livestream of 2014! We're excited to be back on Twitch TV, sharing Landmark news with all of you.

On Wednesday, January 15, join Colette "Dexella" Murphy (Community Manager), Omeed Dariani (Senior Brand Manager), Terry Michaels (Senior Producer), and Darrin McPherson (Lead Game Designer) as they discuss the Landmark Community Celebration on January 31 and delve into the details of CLAIMS - How big are they? How do they work? and more.

Make sure you log in and join us live in the chat room on our official Twitch channel!

Join EverQuest Next Landmark Associate Producer Eric Smith as well as Lead Building and UI Designer Jake Sones as they show off the advanced building tools in the latest developer diary!

Like over 900,000 other people around the world, I have been celebrating the New Year with the alpha release of DayZ, the zombie themed survival sim from the imagination of Dean 'Rocket' Hall.

In DayZ, players are thrown into a hostile environment with no direction or encouragement other than their own will to survive. A gaming experience like no other, DayZ forums have been full of player stories since the first days of the Arma 2 mod version.

This is exactly what sandbox games are all about, emergent experiences that come about through players interacting with the game and each other, creating pockets of narrative as spontaneous as they are unique. These are the stories we remember most vividly, even in games that weren't designed to include them.

Players are demanding ever-increasing levels of agency in their games; we want our actions to impact our environment in meaningful ways. But what if we, as players, don't know what actions we can perform? 

The winners have been selected and notified for our EverQuest Franchise Holiday Contest! Thanks again to everyone who participated and shared their wonderful stories, and congrats to all those who won!

• fcoty: Grand Prize Winner of Collector’s Editions of both the latest EverQuest and EverQuest II expansions and an EverQuest Next Landmark Trailblazer Founder’s Pack
• Tragai, Nibz and SakuBowh: Runners-up for the $10 Station Cash (1000SC) prizes
• Mugsynj, scarecrow30, Uthere, Guaria, Noodleydo, newquseio, Charisa, Xenariel, stardast1 and Kluiana: Runners-up for three months of premium on ZAM

All of the winners’ stories can be read after the jump!

There are many things that go into making a great game. Story, art, sound and mechanics come together to create wonderful backdrops and tools for us to live out great adventures in an artistic medium quite unlike any other. But as MMO gamers, we know none of that matters if you don't have Endgame.

It is Star Wars: The Old Republic's second birthday this week, and it's pretty safe to say it's not been as smooth a ride as many expected, though I will hastily add that I understand why many people like it and continue to play it.

SWTOR was sold to us with the promise of grand, fully voiced story that would lead us across the galaxy we traversed so many times in our imaginations. A grand ambition for any developer, being able to achieve this in an MMO setting pushed even Bioware's abilities to the limits. And by golly, they pulled it off. The stories were compelling, the characters were rich and the settings were well sculpted and felt authentic. Only later did we realise it was all for nothing.

In single player games, a lovingly crafted interactive experience can be an absolute joy. I could have cried at the ending of Telltale's The Walking Dead (though of course I didn't as I'm a big tough guy), and the world of Fallout has been my home for more hours than I care to think about. But MMOs are not bespoke solo adventures, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. 

Senior Producer Terry Michaels and Senior Art Director Rosie Rappaport provided a Dev Diary video explaining how the team created the world graphics of EverQuest Next Landmark.

They needed to create a different world than in the previous games: a giant world that could be explored to find new areas. But such content cannot be handmade or the content would become stale very fast.

They first created concept arts, then field guides with details of everything fitting in the environment, then created individual concept pieces based on those (mountains, trees, rocks, grass). The next step was to create a tool with procedures and rules to generate content automatically.

Five types of very different regions were created:

The staff at ZAM has spent many hours debating which of the games we’ve played over the past year were most deserving of an award. In several cases the votes were neck-and-neck while others had an overwhelming victory. We had so much love to spread around that we expanded our voting categories from six to twelve this year.

Congratulations to the final six winners and runners up of 2013!

It's been difficult to ignore YouTube's new content matching system this week, especially for those of us who enjoy watching game related content. While I respect the right of a creator to control who uses the product of their work for profit, this system has the potential to hurt both the end-user and the creator. So while publishers and content creators continue their ideological struggle, people who make games and people who play games suffer too. War, war never changes.

What does this have to do with EverQuest Next? Even if you have no interest in making or watching online content about SOE's new fantasy sandbox, this affects you. More importantly, however, it will affect the success and quality of both EverQuest Next and EverQuest Next Landmark. 

Sony Online Entertainment will be holding its second EverQuest Next Landmark livestream at 4pm Pacific on Wednesday, December 11, 2013. Tune in to the EQNext Twitch TV channel as they "dig a little deeper into mining and more in Landmark!" If you missed the first livestream you can catch up by watching the highlights.

 Ann "Cyliena" Hosler, Managing Editor

Follow me on Twitter: @Cyliena