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Why did housing in MMOs degenerate after SWG ?
Kruul
Member UncommonPosts: 482
It's still the best housing system in MMOs and one of the oldest.
/discuss
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Comments
I miss my house.....
I miss the old SWG.....
Please someone - give me my game back....
Nuff said
I spent many hours decorating my house and visiting others, it was a good way to take a break from the game while still being in the game which was cool. I felt it really played into the whole living in the star wars universe, but i guess people don't much care for living in the games they play anymore. must be an old school thing idk.
EQ2 has a very respectable housing system, the only difference being that they are contained in instanced pre-made city buildings rather than placed in the game world by players.
Aside from that, there is a huge gap in player housing. I personally think it's due to the majority of the genre steering the opposite direction of sandbox gameplay.
EQ2 had one of the better ones but like you mentioned its the STO of housing.
i think it was excellent, but the reason you wont see anything like that anymore is because mmos have become to simple. noone else will put that much effort into something fluff. I think developers dont realize what made the last generation of games so strong. You have to have something strong for everyone. not everyone wants to do combat all day, not everyone wants to craft all day. You have to give them something else to do as well. All games(excluding WOW) that have done this have prospered well (ffxi, eq, swg at one point).
I'm gunna agree to that...
But sadly it seems it's put on the backburner by most developers.
Its not a feature of WoW, so the suits don't think its important to an MMO's success, therefore they wont allow a budget for it.
Suits are all analysing wow as the most successful MMO ever (at least using western subscription types) and want a piece of the pie, they forget that a wow clone will never succeed while wow still exists, has a better budget and has been polished over the years.
I am not a fan of WoW gameplay btw.
F2P/P2P excellent thread.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/282517/F2P-An-Engineers-perspective.html
I am. And if i have to choose, i would much rather blizzard spends their resources to make a few new 5-man dungeons than to enable player housing. I am probably not alone and Blizzard prob knows it.
Housing comes with side effects, such as how housing in AC1 ruined the once crowded towns, and how it ruined PvP on Darktide.
Housing in DAOC emptied the cities, and separated the once tight playerbase.
Housing in EQ2 were kinda cool but they were instanced doors that you click on. Which in my opinion, if you can't decorate the outside of your housing, what's the point?
Vanguard's housing were kinda cool, open world housing but they didn't quite finish it. You couldn't decorate outside of the houses so every house looked the same. They also caused lag.
I think developers tend to stay away from housing due to the possible side effects of thinning out places and causing tons more lag. Personally I'm in favor of housing in games. But I know we probably won't see housing in MMO's until they are on decline. Housing seems to be the sort of fluff they add into the game later on, when content doesn't mean as much anymore. But I'm a huge support of player housing in MMO's, and wish to see them in more games in the future.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
I agree 10000%, you think some developer out there would see how many of us want the old-SWG back and would create a game with some of it's systems. *sighs*
TBH WoW would have a terrible housing system. I don't even want to go there lol. I'm a fan of the gameplay just not the PVP/Arena grind, but thats another topic.
I haven't played SWG but I do have my memories of the housing system in UO.
As much as this sounds horribly dumb, it seems to be what companies are thinking: "If World of Warcraft has no housing, then we don't need housing!"
As a result we have the "what's the next 5-man and 25-man dungeons for us to grind our new shiny stuff?" thoughts that degenerated the concept of end-game and the MMO genre into the simplicity of leveling and gearing up and waiting until the next patch for more leveling up and gearing up, and so on.
Because at the end of the day, devs dug through subscriber data to find that they spent maybe .02% of their gaming time in their homes, while devs spent a much larger percentage of their development time creating and supporting it.
While the homes thing wasn't too big a deal to me, I LOVED that you could outfit a YT-1300 just like you could your home. But homes will never be a MMO selling point for me. Mostly because I will deliberately spend the majority of my time away from it.
In darkfall you have housing and can decorate but its in preset places and nobody spent much time in there houses there all empty hehe.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Because it's a fluff feature. If SOE didn't have housing in SWG, perhaps it would've been a less buggy game. They could've shifted their development focus to improving quality over fluff features.
If a company can add "good" housing into their game without compromising quality, then I say go for it. But companies seem to focus more on core mechanics (which are hard enough to nail down), and rightly so.
Yeah, I'm disappointed with DFOs housing. I was hoping it would be more sandboxish like UO and SWG. It's a huge letdown compared to the rest of the game which is getting better and better.
And yet, Housing is what kept me subscribing to UO for 6 and a half years, rather than what would likely have been only 3. It added another dynamic to the game, and incentive to stick around. If your sub went inactive, your house would decay and anything inside was up for grabs, including the spot itself considering land was very hard to come by. This on it's own likely kept many people subscribing to the game much long than they otherwise would have. For me it was an excuse not to quit during the lulls where I was tempted, and it worked. I put a lot of time and effort into my housing, and I didn't want to just give it up.
Other MMOs on the other hand, particularlly ones that lack a great deal of personalization, it's so much easier to just drop the game and walk away.
Player housing is feasible to develop from a cost benefit approach, if you're not narrow minded. The more personalized you allow your users to make their experience, the less likely they are to leave, and the longer they will stay before they do. It's not just with MMOs, it's been proven for many different Internet based services as well.
I enjoyed having and fixing up a nice house in original SWG. Plus, I was involved with my guild in creating the city that house was in, which was also fun.
Why more games don't have this feature, I can't tell you. Heck, even WoW, that has a million little extras like its hundreds of pets, flight, mounts, you name it, etc. somehow has dropped the ball entirely on housing.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
So maybe make it so your house might get attacked by insects, door to door salesman, religious zealots, wear and tear and needs repairs, unscrupulous mortgage brokers, kids with baseballs, prank phone callers, taking the trash out and other things that could lead to fun!!!
To begin, I'd like to say that I would love to see housing done well in an MMO. After spending a lot of time running around the world with my character, it would be nice to tell eveyone I'm going "home" for a bit and go to my lot. Whether instanced or not, I think it feels good to have a place in the world that's "mine."
To me, housing doesn't need to be something that has every little feature. I'd like to be able to organize, decorate, maybe have some trophies here or there, but for the most part make it so my friends and I can have a private social atmosphere. I can see the same concept in play with guild halls. I had an idea a while back of having a generally non-instanced world with the exception of guild lands. These lands, separate from the rest of the world, can be customized as to terrain and keep types (depending on available funds) and could be decorated within and shared. Being instanced places also means private guild vs. guild battles which is another topic in and of itself.
If an MMO were to implement housing in the world, I would hope they would make it so that not just any person can slap down five silver and have a plot of land. If you set the bar high for having and/or maintaining a house, you can help keep the lands from getting overcluttered.
In regards to cities being empty due to housing, the bar for building/maintaining a house should help with that. Also, having features otherwise unavailable in cities, as well as proper atmsphere and/or events should keep players around. The problem with cities now (using a WoW reference) is that you can get everything available in a city somewhere else. The cities are just placeholders for story reasons and NPC convenience. Oh yeah, don't forget the auction house....
I know this off thread but it has to be said....
Isn't this the prob with WoW ??? Same Dungeon - Different Names ?
That's why I don't play it and why I miss SWG
I know this off thread but it has to be said....
Isn't this the prob with WoW ??? Same Dungeon - Different Names ?
That's why I don't play it and why I miss SWG
Lol exactly, I leveled to 65 (hunter) after BC, got so bored with the same old stuff I dropped it like a hot potato, haven't looked back since.
(And from what I've heard its about the same gameplay that it was when I quite, maybe easier)
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But in SWG we had a POPULATION !!! - We came together to have parties and chat etc.
Although - It was a pain to get everyhting in the "right" place in your house. Butt that was part of the fun !!!!
But heres the thing.....
Today why can't you just OEM / Licence / Copy (Freeware / Abandonware) the "engine" for a house?