Free Realms buys the farm, offers it to players

Belive it or not.. this is actually an awsome concept in a RPG game.

Many WOW players would love to have their own house for their characters (1 in each room) and they can see each other and even interact with them abit.

And what would be more enjoyable than to allow you to grow your own garden - and then expand to it - raise Livestock or farm flowers. It would give the game so much more.

But hey... Blizzard is lazy these days... Busy recycling ZG and ZA.

Housing in Dark Age of Camelot was like this. And with limited landspace the real estate market was pretty fun when the game was popular.

And yes, people spent quite a bit of time and money trying to impress their neighbors.

"....clickable cows not included."

Actually, clickable cows are in Free Realms, in the form of cow tipping. :)

Amazing how much influence Harvest Moon has had with games, isn't it?

What amazes me about SOE is they have a license to print money with FreeRealms and they will not expand it to their other games...my god I can't think of how much cash they would have made would be making if DCUO had followed that Business model...but to be fair, I heard WB interactive was the hold up there.

Ohhh... Harvest Moooon, why have you cursed me to enjoy this type of game?

Actually wait a second... I played Simfarm first.

Free Realms is more sandbox than many other games.

Mmmm... farming, this is what has me hooked on Haven and Hearth.

Although in this instance I think perhaps Free Realms want a piece of that Farmville pie.

How long before we have a full blown dedicated Farming MMO, I mean there is a Fishing MMO on the way after all.

Pity harvest Moon Online got canceled some years back.

I still say the problem with these instanced farms and homes is the simple fact that it takes players out of the world. I don't care how cool the concept is and how well executed, you're still killing the life of the game world by having every single player sitting around in their house or what have you and unaccessible to the public. That's why I think WoW has been smart enough -not- to offer player housing. Unless a game can build a community out of housing with homes in an actual interactive neighborhood then it's just going to make the game seem empty and dead.

It may not seem like it, but our MMO experience is driven by other players and even NPCs in the environment. The first thing you really notice is how bustling the world is... it may not be fair, but player population is a pretty good indicator of a game's success. I am not sure if it has changed by now since I played it in very early beta, but Gods and Heroes is a good example of this not working. It's actually a pretty decent game, I could have seen myself playing it... then I got to the first major town and it was deserted. Hardly any NPCs and no other players. It was expansive and impressive and even somewhat historically accurate, but it was dead and empty and it turned me off. I pretty much stopped playing after that.

Instanced player housing where each player has their own instance will make a lot of games feel like this. NPCs -can- fill out the cities and make them seem active, but after a while even they will just feel like another prop in the background if you never see another player around. I know people want their own little cool place to decorate and compete with the Jones' next door, but I really think it does MMOs more harm than good. After a while the cool factor will wear off when you realize nobody can really see what you've done, and then there'll just be bored players sitting in instanced areas while the world outside stagnates.