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Massively Speaking Podcast
Massively Speaking Episode 185: Bree-to-play
Latest episode: Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Reader Comments (6)
Posted: Aug 27th 2009 4:29PM aurickle said
In order for player housing to actually work, it has to be meaningful. It has to have compelling reasons to bring you and other people to it. If there's no compelling reason for you to come, then gaming gets in the way and you never make the trip home. If there's no compelling reason for others to come, then your house becomes a very solitary experience and the things that bring you to your home might as well be served by other mechanics elsewhere in the game.
So far, EQ2 has had the best implementation for housing that I have plaid. First, there are tons of decoration options, which makes it easy to truly personalize your space. Second, crafting ties into this. Third, they made houses a status symbol. Some are just not available without being rich and/or in a strong guild. Fourth, your house became an easy way to put stuff up for sale. It's also a place where you can put a crafting table if you want. All of this ties together with the other game mechanics pretty well. Plus you have the fact that you can display trophies (and there are massive numbers of them to get).
The place where EQ2 lacks is reasons for other people to come to your house. The only one that will bring strangers around is the discount that they can get for buying from you rather than from the broker board. This is pretty weak, really.
The only problem is that I can't think of many things that can be done with housing to increase the traffic or make the system more meaningful. Without that, player housing is always going to just be a cool little side note that probably takes far more effort to design, model and texture for than it is actually worth. Which is probably why Blizzard has never done it for WoW, despite the regular requests for such a feature.
Posted: Aug 27th 2009 5:01PM (Unverified) said
Posted: Aug 27th 2009 5:23PM Tom in VA said
--instanced houses/apartments in (preferably) or immediately adjacent to the major cities.
This would have given players a reason to come "home". If LotRO, for example, were to "open up" a dozen or more homes in Bree, I would have happily bought a house.
As any realtor will tell you, it's all about location, location, location. People want their homes to be close to travel hubs, inns,shops, the AH, and crafting. Doh! Why Turbine didn't factor this I have no idea.
Would it bother me to see other players "entering" my front door (but going into their own instanced dwelling)? Not at all.
Posted: Aug 27th 2009 7:34PM mysecretid said
Absolutely agree. By coincidence, Anarchy Online was the first true MMORPG I played, and they handled housing the way you describe ("instanced doorways").
My house was actually located in an apartment block in one of my faction's major cities. Everything I wanted was nearby, and I felt like my character was actually part of the game-world, part of the metropolis.
You can imagine my surprise when I left AO and discovered that no other MMORPG seemed top handle things this way.
LotRO's a great game, but -- as you say -- what I really wanted was my own doorway in Bree-Town, not life in a "suburb" half way between two major locations.
Posted: Aug 28th 2009 11:35AM aurickle said
1) In every town or city in the world, many of the doors should lead to instanced player housing/apartments. The price of the rent would be based on the desirability of the location. For example, a door facing the Prancing Pony in Bree would be more expensive than one tucked away in the slum part of town. Bree housing as a whole would be more expensive than Archett or Trestlebridge. The upshot is that there would be enough housing for everyone, and people could live anywhere they wanted.
2) Throughout the world -- in cities as well as in more remote locations -- there should be a bunch of non-instanced housing. For example, the cottages or a few of the hobbit holes just outside of Bree. The price of these would also vary by location, but would be much more expensive than an apartment. What's more, they would also require Kindred standing with the local faction. A catch here is that these houses could be lost for nonpayment of rent whereas the apartments would simply be locked. This would keep someone who quits the game from tying up the home forever.
By combining the two types of housing they would prevent the classic overcrowding problem that typically occurs with non-instanced housing. There would be enough instanced housing to accommodate everyone, while the non-instanced housing would be a great carrot for the status-seekers.
I would love to see this kind of system in SW:TOR.
Posted: Aug 28th 2009 3:10PM mysecretid said
While not explicitly stated, the other important thing your housing methods do is to ensure that player housing doesn't negatively impact the immersion aspects of the game world.
You ever play Star Wars Galaxies?
As mirilene mentions above, player housing turned huge sections of Tatooine into District 9 -style slum sprawl. Tatooine is supposed to be a planet of outpost cities surrounded by desert wastes -- and yet, when I was playing SWG, anyway -- on my server, you could travel all the way from Mos Eisely to the next nearest city and _never_ hit a significant patch of land which wasn't crowded full of player buildings.
Doorway "instanced housing", whether in cities or in the wild , not only gives the players what they want in a preferred location, it also preserves the game-world environment and "sense of place".