Not to beat the drum of ESO housing too much, but I could see them mimic their style. The houses are existing locations in-game that are strewn about the game world specifically to be player owned houses — but they’re instanced. Everyone can have a home at the shore of Lake Halcyon at the Stormhaven-Bangkorai border, but as you enter it, you’re instanced to your own version of it.
That way the game world isn’t suddenly populated with 17 elven towers in a row in the middle of Ashenvale, but instead a single tower that might look more like it belongs there.
But Telaryn, Ashenvale should be populated by dozens of sin’dorei towers.
I have very limited experience with ESO’s housing (I think a received a free one-room spot at the inn, so long as my vampiric necromancer pinky-swore that she wasn’t into dark magic), but it does sound like an interesting way of circumventing the neighbourhood situation. It would certainly go a long way to keep me invested in the feature.
from whats currently available (yes i know wildstars the best we ALL know it.) its one of the best models rn to actually follow. Racial styles for each of the games races that itself splinters into the various different cultural styles. you have dunmer homes sure but you also have homes styled after house dres, house redoran, house hlaalu and house telvanni each belonging to the one race but each culturally distinct. and not just the housing styles but the decoration styles too. applying that to…i’ll use dwarves as an example. having dwarven themed homes but each has distinctions unique to the bronzebeard, wildhammer and dark iron would be a massive system win and is my own personal hope.
I’m pretty sure all the cool people running active RP guilds, communities and collectives won’t stop creating roleplaying content for themselves and their friends out in the world just because everyone will get a cool little house to do more localised stuff in.
Player housing will never have the accessibility and ease of casual RP places such as Stormwind provide, and player housing will never provide a cool backdrop for an epic skirmish or an insane fight against Lord Evilbossman, High Emperor Badass of all NPCs.
Nothing will change except you might see adventure guild A and B retreating to a player house for beers and nachos whenever the local tavern / market / war camp rp out in the open has died down for the night.
If Blizzard do it right and well and with (preferably) zero monetisation or player power of any magnitude involved, it will be a 100% net positive for roleplayers because people can finally actually portray their characters having a home physically in the world.
Adelais will enter my DM’s and say “I told you so” 15 times for biting the bullet on this but even as someone considerably wary of the introduction of housing and the potential harm it could do to wide-scope communities and public RP I. . .do somewhat agree with him and Telaryn that there’s already been a fundamental shift in this direction for several years now. Even I no longer have the free-time to gamble on random or public RP, I have a handful of free hours a week to spare and if I’m using them for RP I will want a guarantee that its:
Roleplay that I want
Roleplay that matches my standard of quality
Neither of which are a gaurantee when referring to Random/Public RP (I think you could even make a solid argument that you have a high risk of incompatible and low-quality RP when engaging in Random/Public RP).
If housing is to come I would like to see a hybrid FFXIV/ESO-style housing system with the neighbourhood system (without the risk of mismatching neighbourhoods) and ESO’s sheer customisability for the sake of RP event-building.
Im starting to think i lucked out with my neighbourhood in XIV because every house in my line of sight at least keeps to a relatively alpine or at least fittingly ishgardian theme.
Theres always that one Paissa house lurking nearby…
This is a genuinely fair issue to have tho. A lot of familiar names i knew in wow rp are now older, with jobs, some married or with kids. If your free times limited it’s well within your right to curate the quality of that free time.
To add anecdotally, one of my guilds is currently travelling across zones, running into friendly NPCs and enemies as we go. There’s a chance to bump into prople, though in old zones its not super likely.
You… just can’t replicate that with housing. So people already inclined to do that aren’t going to drop it all of a sudden.
Edit: Personally I think so much of the old world looking like 2004 is still a big reason people don’t spread from the ‘popular hubs’, but maybe that’s just my bias heh.
Would be content with the Garrison concept, it’s not perfect but you get to keep the fantasy and still play with your friend, unlike FFX where everything is a messy nabourhood. Give more customisations for the building and land around it, however!
Make it default for everyone, free, so we don’t end up like FFX, you have to work up a ton of in game money and wait forever till a plot of land opens up.
And even then, someone might come by and snap it right before your eyes!
I don’t belive having it ‘open world’ is a good idea either, as it will be clutter and lagg far too much!
I do see, how having an instance based housing might isolate people, take from open world roleplay as the garrison did, but that will eventually fade as the hype dies down.
I would like to make a better post, but alas I’m out of time for now.
I get why people think neighbourhoods might be a good idea, but there are a number of races for which that makes little sense, I think. The world is huge, and many of the cultures of playable races don’t really scream centralised living. I think of Tauren, Night elves & Trolls, for example. But also the Vulpera, who’s whole thing is being nomadic.
I’m going to take a guess and say they’ll link housing to racial capitals, in which case there are plenty of races that don’t have one, which means they’d be shoved on a pile.
I’d prefer it if they just give us a plot in 1 or 2 zones that are thematic for a race (Ashenvale and Amirdrassil for a Night Elf theme, Azuremyst and Shattrath for a Draenei theme, Mulgore or the Barrens for a Tauren theme, etc.), and allow you to just choose between all these (divided by faction or not, depending on the available plots).
I’m a little bemused hearing people talk about a housing system “killing” public RP and citing several games that either didn’t have an RP community prior to housing being introduced, and also having multiple other factors that play into the why RP isn’t nearly as good as it is on World of Warcraft.
I don’t think public RP will die because party’ing up and going to the garrison isn’t where you meet people today. It wasn’t during WoD either.
The sort of RP you would do inside of a home, depending on the form it takes, isn’t the sort you’d do with public participation either. Things like quiet, vulnerable character development, meetings, etc.
Me, I mostly yearn to build. I built in ESO and I built in SWTOR. I went to Epsilon purely for that reason. I don’t even RP there — I just like building projects, and the moment I get to make these projects in WoW I’ll be happy. I maxed out my garrison because it gave me something to build.
There has to be some instancing since obviously they don’t have room for a million houses. So what I imagine is a neighborhood of houses ( think a street with houses on both sides ) that is behind one loading screen.
If you’re not in a party/guild you get say your house and 15 others which are randomised and could either be ‘‘npc’’ or random player houses.
I’m hoping that if you’re in a party/guild that street of 16 houses will become party/guild members instead.
Invite/party based, I imagine. Wouldn’t be much of a system if 10 randoms could come inside your house uninvited.
The more the better. Private servers have been doing it with limited tools like spawning and turning game objects around for ages. I have high expectations from Blizzard based on what we were doing 10 years ago.
Party based, or maybe there’s even a ‘knock’ function where you get a popup that player X wants to come inside.
I’m hoping they let loose and let you customise a garden, fence, exterior, all that, but I’m not holding my breath.
I don’t think there’s any chance of neighbourhoods being a thing, nor placing housing in the open world. The world is simply too small for open world housing, and people would purposefully disrupt others with it. I think it’s better to look at what we have now in terms of customisation; the rostrum and garrisons.
I imagine housing will be a single instance; just your house and a small plot of surrounding land. You start out with a little human house or horde hut in a small plot that looks like either Elwynn or Durotar depending on the faction. It could be that it becomes part of the Ethereal thematic that a lot of our costumisation systems have, so the housing phase is essentially our own personal eco-dome (the things they have in Netherstorm).
The instance will have a rostrum where you might be able to customise what type of house you have, but I would be surprised, since I imagine all the decorations have to have pre-programmed positions (I would be extremely surprised if they let us build/place decorations ourselves). Different housing models might have different interior themes; so you might have a Night Elf house with an Alliance-themed interior for example; human furniture, some Alliance flags on the wall, that sorta thing. I’m thinking it would be ideal to have some sort of progression system here, where you can upgrade your human house to a two-story building like in Stormwind. The problem is there’s no equivalent for this sort of linear progression for other faction aesthetics, so I’m not sure on that.
It might be that you could customise your phase with different themes for the skybox or the environment, similar to the date simulator. Maybe you can have the grass different colours or something, but again, that would surprise me.
I think it’ll be alright, but I still think there will be significant limitations to just how custom the environment and the house itself is. Knowing how finicky building can be in certain other WoW roleplaying platforms, I cannot envision that players will have that kind of freedom. They’ll want it to be streamlined, and I very much think the list-layout of different things in pre-placed positions seen in the rostrum will be the core mechanic for it.
Who knows though. I myself can really only be positively surprised frankly.
Oh boi here we go.
I will keep my DO´s and DONT´s simple:
DO:
-A neighbourhood or for your friends/guildmates to get houses next to your own
-Maybe a Guildhall that can be customisable from the outside and inside (for example, my Pir- erm Privateers need a den i mean hideout)
-HIGHLY racial variety. The horde alone has way different races with their own unique styles. If everyone just goes Orc, then we have basicly Garrisons 2.0…
DONT’S
-Do not make it “One Style only”
-No “One House per Account” my Vulpera will not be happy with my Kultiran as a room mate.
BONUS
-Make a new Profession like one said, carpenter that would allow us to make our own furnitures. I can see Tailoring including some things like Pillows, Blankets, Drapes.
But we also need Tables, Doors, Doorframes, Mugs etc.
Well I am 100% sure housing will be its own dimension with a loading screen. But it would feel kinda off if it’s a lone house in the middle of nowhere.
It would be really cool to have say a street with houses on each side, and if you’re in a guild you see your guild mates’ houses, or maybe your Bnet Friends’.
I guess they could use NPC houses, but if they’re going to add customisation to this thing it seems better to have player houses on this hypothetical street to show off the many options of the system
How about this for a feature: You know how we can save looks on the in-game barber shop now? - How about a feature that lets us save different layouts of furniture/wallpaper/misc
That way, even if I end up having to share an apartment between my whole warband, I can at least easily swap between a theme that fits my Night Elf character and a theme that fits my Dracthyr character, and so on - Or even just to easily swap between a wintry and a summery layout.
