Neighbourhoods are good in concept but in reality are an absolute mess in any MMO they’re used. In LOTRO you’ll have a nice quaint Hobbit hole in the Shire, then the guy next door has the tower of orthanc in his front yard. In FFXIV you’ll have a suitable seaside cabin in the Mists, then the guy next to you has the far eastern Kugane roof and decor… in fact everybody does the Kugane theme. Holy **** so many people use Kugane stuff it’s not even funny.
I really don’t want to have a homely tent in Mulgore sat next to a Kirin Tor mage tower.
In all my time RPing in XIV as well I can count on one hand the number of times we used the neighbourhood itself for RP rather than just one of the many zones and open locales to suit the same purpose.
Ideally with a plot. Bonus points if it’s akin to Wildstar where I can dismantle the pre-built house and build my own structures from scratch using hundreds of wall, roof and other tile assets. If it’s large enough you could end up making entire small hubs of your own making which would be insane, but that’s a far reach and I can’t think of any other MMO that managed that level of customisation.
Just copy Wildstar’s homework, not like it needs it anymore (RIP).
To give some context; EVERY character got a free plot of land in an instance after hitting lv15 or so. You could then easily build something with only a few gold to your name, as the default common pieces of decor all cost a few copper each from a vendor. You could use pre-made buildings or you could ignore the pre-fabs and choose the ‘vault door’ option, which gave you a very easy to cover up or hide door in the ground to then build on top of.
You could change the ground texture, the skybox, the music, the weather. And the options for decor items were extremely varied and extremely available, you only needed crafting or content drops for very specific things.
People made jungles, space stations, shopping malls, beach resorts, wild west saloons complete with a small portion of desert all around, city streets, and way more besides.
I was an absolute scrub when it came to using housing in W* but I still managed to make a huge apartment block, complete with a three floor apartment building, a garage, several small shops, a street, a hoverboard park, a large garden and a landing pad. And I wasn’t even at level cap! It wasn’t the prettiest but it conveyed the idea just as well.
Just please for the love of god do not copy XIVs customisation system, the building tools are @ss since you have to do weird glitches just to move things vertically and you can’t scale objects easily.
Again, copy Wildstar. Housing plots have the option of being public or private to varying degrees. If set to public people could search for your character name or the name of the plot and teleport in without an issue. They even made the API fairly open, so someone made an addon that let you tag your plots with RP themes (Such as bar, desert, resort, military, etc) which people with the addon could then use to search for things to their liking. Additionally, the addon would tell you how much activity in chat channels was going on so you could see what places were popping off.
Speaking of addons, someone made one that massively expanded the tools available while building stuff. Allowing you to copy/paste things with offsets and other modifiers which let you rapidly buy>position>place things like tiles or street lamps one after the other. Or save entire plot layouts to then copy to an alt. Etc etc.
Re: Bubble RP / “Killing” world RP
I don’t see it happening. In every MMO where housing supposedly did this there were many other factors at play that caused open RP to wither and die. Picture the issues Horde tends to have and magnify it x100. Or consider a world where many zones just aren’t very RP friendly whether because of sheer mob density or constant dynamic events disrupting anything you might be trying to do.
ESO didn’t have actual RP servers so RPers tended to be griefed where ever they tried to do their thing, so naturally people went to private instances instead. No shock there.
GW2 was by far the least RP friendly MMO I had ever played, I’d even go so far as to say the devs hated RP and seemed to make it as much of a pain in the @ss to do as possible. Off the top of my head; Layering was basically a lottery to see if you’d be on the same layer as your own party members, the constant dynamic events tearing down and rebuilding entire hubs over and over made far too many places impossible to use, the mob density rivalled a Korean MMO making it a pain to do anything off the road as you’d be killing respawning scaling mobs every few seconds, the inability to wear “wrong” armour for your class in any capacity basically drives you to spend money on microtransactions for outfits so your Guardian isn’t in full plate 24/7, again there was no dedicated RP realm and when they made realm choice meaningless by merging them all it resulted in the same griefing issues ESO had, etc etc. I am not at all shocked people bubbled up in guild halls with all those issues.
SWTOR always had a fairly small RP scene to begin with. 99% of RP was in the hub cantina and the end result was most world RP was with guilds anyway. Especially on Empire side I remember lots of issues because of edgelord Sith players that drove people to become insular and this was back when Strongholds were kind of mid and unappealing.
By contrast to all of these; WoW has and continues to have a thriving RP community, dedicated RP servers, a layering system that ONLY applies to current content (And actually works as advertised by forming parties), a LOT of zones and hubs that are suitable for and remain RP friendly and far more besides. Even if the housing is on par with Wildstar I do not see it completely killing off public RP, and even if it kills off “world” RP, more than likely that just means people are using plots in place of certain zones and locations which, so long as the plots remain easily accessible and easy to find, is not that big a deal.
However I very much doubt we will get Wildstar levels of housing customisation, realistically we can probably expect something akin to ESO where you have a building or apartment you buy and then the interior is private. In which case I very much doubt world RP will die because of housing, since you can’t reproduce most natural environments inside a house.
If nothing else, anyone who wanted to bubble RP has already been doing it in Garrisons.
