MMORPG.com columnist Justin Webb writes this article about player housing.
Player housing always comes up on the list of things that players want to see in their games, and rightfully so. The concept of owning a chunk of real estate in the world you love is extremely compelling. At face value, player housing looks like it should be a slam-dunk win for every game that implements it.
My, how things have changed. It wasn't long ago that housing was seen as a horrid abomination, ruining games, being poorly designed and destroying communities.
Having played DAoC before and after housing was instituted I still believe that housing is bad for a game's community unless you somehow incorporated into the main city or enable comms that are broadcast into the cities to also be available to those in housing. Don't get me wrong, I loved my house out in Dalton but I spent all my down time there. The city of Camelot used to be a hopping place to be where everyone hung out when they weren't involved in rvr or leveling. When something changed in new frontiers, most of your population was easily accessible because they were usually in the same place. Once housing came out we had zero reason to go to town. If you were in a decent sized alliance you generally heard about it through those chat channels, but without better comms, most of your players never knew what was happening until it was too late to do anything about it. If your game is pve only I don't see where housing is going to be a problem, but if your game has a pvp system where having available players on the spot is necessary, housing should only be considered if the comms system in your game is top notch.
SWG had the best housing. You could have multiple houses per toon. You could have your own city. Your own player associaiton halls. your own harvesters. The great thing was you could move your house to virtually anywhere in the galaxy except mustifar, and well kashyyyyk. The other great thing was you could place anything in your house anywhere as long as you did not go over the item limit. Even then you could get vet rewards to double your storage apced.
The next best houseing system is in EQ2 they were really smart with the instanced housing. The only problem everybodies house was virtually the same layout in that instance. Same thing here I can place anything virtually anywhere in my house.
LOTRO ugg what can I say about its totaly lame layout. You had isntanced neighborhoods, and each house in that instance was a seperate instance. The real problem became with placing stuff. The devs at lotro had no clue of what they were doing and came up with what they called hooks, in other words a set place to place an item, and them a limited number of hooks inside your house and outside your house. Housing became your sharded bank slots.
SO sony's player housing puts everybody elses to total complete shame, with lotro comming in dead last.
Im one that dont never owned a player house and dont miss it, just need a storage/vault so i can put my weapons collection and im done, however for those who like it i can think any solution for this dilema. maybe instanced house can be the only coherent solution for a MMO, unless you allow fewer ppl per server, so all in can have an open world house. sorry, i tried =p mazel tov housing aficionados =p
You obviously never played SWG like the rest of us here in the thread. Most people *wouldn't* care about housing till you run into something as epic as what it had. Really, there is nothing else as good, and LotRO/EQ's instanced nature do not handle the situation as well. You can decorate them too, sure, but not as indepth. SWG housing is like having dev tools to place anything - anywhere.
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Its nice to see praise for one of SWG's good aspects. I always felt once players cities was introduced that a small penalty to non-city dwellings should have been introduced to encourage joining a city to help support ones owning and use of that structure. In the real world its easier to get infrastructure (power, water, comm) in a city than out in the country. This could be the factor that helps keep down the "urban sprawl" that ruins immersion. This coupled with an annual "house pack-up" event would go a long way in keeping a server clear of stray houses, depending on the penalties. Player city benefits don't seem attractive enough without some form of penalty, IMHO.
As expressed above by one member, not everyone enjoys owning and maintaining a structure in a game world. I also believe in SWG that instanced apartments should be introduced. There are ton's of high rise and low level unused buildings in the static cities. Not just the NPC's alone have to live in them. This would allow players who wish to be nomadic to continue thier pursuit without joining a community. The extension of this idea would be instanced shops in those static cities where a crafter could set up a vendor for a high fee that would warrent thier volume of business. Set static city fees high enough so player vendor shops still have viablibity.
For those who don't know about SWG, it has Static Cities which are player social hubs that provide Player 'porting (Starports and Shuttles), Markets(Bazaars), Banks, Respawn points (cloner), Vehical repair (garages) along with mission and quest starters among other neccesities. They do not allow player placed houseing within thier borders or set up vendors. The closest form of player instanced apartments in use is POB starships. Thats the larger ships that have room for players to move about in such as the YT-1300, Decimator and such. Players can also decorate thier interiors as well.
That said, SWG is great for its still surviving sandbox elements peppered liberally with themepark game mechanics in a vain attempt to capture a demographic that never came. SOE and Lucas Arts built a wonderful MMORPG with incredible potential then ruined it by chasing the "Game" dragon that WOW has fostered. The method, know as the NGE, failed and now LA is trying again with simular formula in SW: TOR and SOE seems to have apathy to the project as SWG is a low supported venture today. Hope thats simple but informitive enough.
Yes, I know. Why bother? Because as hated as SWG has become, it still has a strong roll as a MMORPG.
Houses could also be taxed. Like RL the money would go for "infrastructure and law enforcment". Close to the city more tax, bigger the house more taxes.
The farther away from cities the greater the risk from monsters/wildlife. Don't build a cheap straw house where a wolf can blow it down.
I wasn't very knowledgeable about Lotro's housing. Seeing that makes me a bit interested in seeing it in action for myself.
While LotRO, in my opinion, has the BASIC right idea for a way to have instanced and "open" type housing all at the same time....they did a SHIT job of allowing customization OF your homes. If you're going to allow me to HAVE a house, ffs at least allow me the sort of freedom we have in EQ2 of decorating it and customizing it. Don't tell me I can only have 8 items and that they have to be placed in 8 SPECIFIC spots. WTF? LotRO's housing, because of THAT.....is shit.
Now......
EQ2, although instanced, has FAR better housing. If there was a way to combine EQ2's internal customization, with LotRO's neighborhood-style instancing, and then perhaps allow 20 houses to be PLAYER BUILT within those neighborhoods on limited size lots.....
I wasn't very knowledgeable about Lotro's housing. Seeing that makes me a bit interested in seeing it in action for myself.
YOu r not missing much. There are housing neighborhoods. There are instanced zones. You get a small house for 1 gold, a delux house for 6-8 gold and guild halls for 16-18 gold.
Small houses have 1 beedroom and one small living room, they are very small and you only have about 10 hooks on the inside and 4-5 hooks outside to place items. You only get one storage chest to use as shared bank
Medium houses have 2 beddrooms and a large livingroom they have about 18-22 hooks depending on the housing type on the inside and 8 hooks outside to place items. you get 2 shared storage slots.
Guild halls you can place 30 items inside and about 10 items outside including huge yard siplays. You get 3 shared storage slots.
And unlike other games you are limited to the type of furniture/yard orniment and how and where you can place them.
You are very limitied to how you can use houses. This is one of the hotly debated items that still gets thread deleted on a daily basis. Most folks are very unhappy that lotro put in in and 2 yeas later has just about totaly forgotten about it.
It is pricy and maintenance is a huge issue. Like I said the cheapest house 1 gold and for a new player that would take a month of grinding. Also you have to be level 15 to get a house, or have a guild thats been around till rank 7 to buy a house.
SWG and Mortal online both had/have this open world housing ideas. The reasoning for both being that you can go basically anywhere that you can see, so that opens up a lot of land for houses. In Mortal online, As long as you have flat land, you can make a house way up in the mountains is you wanted. In SWG there was so much open space, towns would just form in the middle of nowhere. Ultimately housing systems in a 3-D environment usually only work out like they should in a giant exploration-type setting for a game where you can go everywhere. That's what I've noticed anyway.
I don't think "showing off" quite captures what houses mean to people (at least not to the people I've met).
Houses tap a territorial instinct which has a powerful impact on how people perceive the game world - it's like the "ownership" of equipment ... having a little territory that "belongs" to the player matters. There's the dollhouse effect - macho bravado aside, people like playing house ... there are good reasons why the sims sold over 100 million copies. Finally, in an MMO, people really like their characters to have a presence in the world, even when they themselves are offline - if the houses are somehow interactive, that's an even bigger plus.
SWG housing has 'maintenance' fees to maintain.. as well as possible 'city tax' fees that apply to certain services (shuttleport for example.
If you don't keep your housing maintenance fund up, it gets condemned and can be packed-up (stored in your character data pad).
SWG housing pack-up allows players to move houses pretty easily. They also have decorative 'copy' commands to be able to reproduce a design effect by saving & loading it back up in an identical structure/room.
The housing system alone for SWG is significantly advanced .. and even beyond NGE its has progressed to include more housing options.. WINDOWS.. larger item storage.. full item rotation (after completion of a few simple quests).
It a real wonder to my why any MMO exists that does not offer this kind of customization feature. Is it really THAT expensive to do.. its it really THAT hard to work out the details? SWG housing us unmatched from what I know.. and its fundamentally six years old.. thats ancient in MMO years.
Its funny that there isn't even a good 'copy cat' version of SWG's housing system in some ohter game.
As another poster metioned, the housing system even applies to portalized (instanced) player ships (POB)... so you can decorate your gunboat or YT-1300 (Han Solo's ship type) or even a gigantic Mining vessel.
There are also novelty houses... ATATs (attack walkers)... Jawa Crawlers... Starship Hangers (allowing you to drop starships inside)... Barns (allowing you to drop beast inside).
Players often underestimate the attraction of the roleplayer.. there are lots of potential subscriptions out there for people who want to just be social in a certain 'theme'.. that PvP and PvE simply cannot fill.
The mixture of options...the social with the combat.. the crafter with the loot drop... instances with sustained.. PvP with PvE... its uncanny what can be done if the developers use a bit more imagination than just the WoW-based default.
I hope games like STO 'matures' into this... making ships with crew quarters, captains offices, starbase housing, planetary housing... there are tons of opportunities IF they see it for what it is.. retention... expansion.. loyalty.
I really believe that the only flaw in SGW's housing system is that the houses often loaded after you were riding into an invisible wall (side of the house). I think if someone could figure out how to make them load up (world cache that trickle updates or something) then it would have been a near perfect system. (To be fair the loading problem only really happened while on a speeder. If you were on foot everything would generally load up well before you ran into it. Tho most of the time you were on a speeder, lol.) The interior design options were excellent and you could basically display any loot item plus lots of different styles of furniture, paintings, trophies, etc.
As eluded to by Justin one of the big problems with non-instanced housing is having enough real estate to actually put houses. I strongly disagree that housing needs to be in or near cities to be worthwhile but the real estate problem is still in play. Quite simply most MMO worlds are not all that big and don't have the open expanses of land needed to build housing. The zones are designed for very specific purposes and that's it.
Shadowbane's city system worked in a way that actually changed the landscape as you built your cities. Once your Tree of Life (city center) was built it flattened a certain area of land and cleared it of any obsticals. This meant that if you built it at the base of the mountain the mountain would actually be cut out so you could build your city. If you built it on the edge of a sea the sea was filled in extending the beach area outward so you could build your city. Every time your Tree of Life was upgraded your city area expanded and more of the land was flattened so you could build on it. Shadowbane had lots of problems but as I recall the city building and terrain altering features actually worked very well.
For me, housing adds a lot to feeling that you are a part of a virtual world. This is especially true when you can build your own house and not just buy a pre-built. While the article discussed a few of the different implementations, it really could have used another page of looking at the possibilities.
Here's how I see the degrees of implementation, starting with just storage and ending up with a fully designed building.
0) At the most primitive level, you have no real housing, just a storage chest or bank.
Most MMOs will provide some kind of storage where players can offload items from their inventory. The first improvement is to allow this storage to be expanded. Then you can allow a portion of this storage to be shared between characters on the same account, sometimes even with other players. Finally, you can have guild storage, hopefully with multiple divisions and different levels of access depending on a player's standing in the guild.
WoW has gone as far as full guild storage, but unfortunately never added housing.
1) Instanced appartment housing is the most basic form of housing and sometimes is little more than a walk-in bank vault.
This usually requires a monthly rental or maintenance fee, although RoM provides one for all players for free (in addition to a bank). The apartment is usually located in a town for convenient access, but adds no clutter as it is only visible in the main world as a door. The storage always has limits and some can be expanded. Most implements allow some kind of decoration, although this is often limited to using pre-defined hooks and pre-defined wall/floor textures.
Some of the better implementations like in EQ2 allow free placement of item on the floor and walls and even allow players to turn their appartment into a shop for selling things.
2) Pre-build houses, either in an instanced subburb or a remote location.
With this type of implementation, you get to see (and usually decorate to some degree) the outside of the house as well as choosing between different sizes and styles. The interiors are usually similar in features to what is found in appartments, but will include multiple rooms. Bigger houses may have multiple stories and/or a basement. Guild houses are usually also available.
LOTRO has the instanced version of this and AC1 has both the remote location version as well as the apartment version for those with limited funds. A fancy versions can include crafting facilities and a player shop.
3) Player built houses on either pre-defined lots or pre-defined regions, using pre-defined designs.
As as discovered in UO, its a bad idea to let players build in-game structures without any limits. Istaria and Vanguard both have predefined lots of various sizes where players can build, choosing from a variety of designs. Some like Istaria also allow free placement of yard decorations within the lot. SWG allows construction anywhere in whole regions, with the main restrictions being level terrain and proximity to existing structures.
As with previous categories, the interiors can allow a variety of features, with SWG having one of the most flexable positioning systems (with X-Y-Z axis controls). Letting players actually build their houses gives them even more of a sense of ownership and belonging to the world. It also enhances the crafting and player economy diveristy.
4) Player designed houses with preset or free-form components.
I'm surprised that the author didn't even mention the MMOs in this catefory, one of the most flexable. The biggest problem here is that it adds significantly the complexity of the virtual world objects. A Tale in the Desert allows players to build and expand houses in most locations in the world, limited primarily by distance from existing objects. Houses are built up in pre-defined blocks, but the blocks can be combined into just about any desired combination. Players can also create as many houses as they want, convert them into guild-owned structures and manage access lists. Most player built objects can then be placed in the house (and most of the things in-game are player built, including all crafting devices).
The ultimate in free-form player housing is Second Life, which while being an MMO, isn't actually a game. Players can create any combination of objects that they desire and then add scripts that let players interact with the objects in any desired way. This is the ultimate sandbox box, but for most game players it lacks enough built-in structure and has no pre-defined goals to achieve. It also takes a lot of work to create something that looks good. Anything a player create can also be sold and people can earn real money by selling their designs.
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I know there are many other games that I haven't mentioned, but I was just using ones that I'm familiar with to illustrate my points. For me, the ideal game would have the crafting flexibilty of ATITD, the community organization and skill based system of SWG and the rich variety of environments, quests and UI scripting found in WoW. I know that's a lot to wish for, but I think there is still hope.
There are definitely ways to implement housing where they are not in the way and where others can visit them and still have tons of other content players want. And it's pretty simple actually.
Didn't LOTRO do instanced housing neighborhoods? Perfect blend of open world as you get to have neighbors, and instanced as it doesn't clutter the world. Guilds with enough status/points/whatever can have their own neighboorhoods for their members, make their neighborhood public or private, their individual houses public/private... Seems to solve all the problems IMO. You may be the best pve/pvp guild but do you have the best neighborhood? the best house? make it public and hang your walls with rare items and trophies, put vendors in public housing districts... Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Sorry but LOTRO's housing system was the worst I've ever seen. You'd never see more than one player in any neighbourhood at any time so it actually felt even emptier than if they'd just instanced each house individually. At least in the likes of EQ2 you'd have a crowd of players gathered outside the housing entrances, in LOTRO... no one at all.
It doesn't help that the customisation options were also the worst I've ever seen... your house had 'slots' where only certain objects could be mounted, and the options were severely limited. Almost everyone's houses looked identical since the positions off everything were the same and there were only a few different wall/floor styles so the whole system was pointless.
Personally, I think guild halls would be much more immersive and more feasible to implement than player housing. Anyone that reads medieval fantasy novels can attest to how permanent one's "settlement" is in regards to where the adventurers stay. Most of the time its in some camp, empty shell of a house, keep or an inn. Plus, it'll be something a whole guild can work together towards in terms of an overall goal. I think some form of housing does add to the game though and it really shouldn't be ignored, look at well the Sims does =x
This concept is massively over-complicated. MikeB in your post you fail to point out Ultima Online (unless I missed it at the end) which did implement houses in the game world with ease. SWG also did a pretty good job of 3D player housing and cities. Darkfall also does it pretty well, although much less open. I am not sure why developers cry in the corner when they think about housing. Player housing only poses a resource problem if a player can have more than 1 or if the game world is single server. Otherwise, creating arbitrary land mass to accommodate a single house for each player/guild becomes somewhat trivial and has been done before.
Go buy a House in Wizard101 a child's game and you will see how to make housing work in a MMO environment.
You not only get a HUGE house that you can place stuff EVERYWHERE but a HUGE piece of land that you can plant trees place gazebos and other oddities in some you even have waterfalls and pools to splash around in, not only that but everyone can come and see your home inside and out by teleporting to you.
Now if a child's game can do it why not for us grown ups??
Right now I'm playing with an idea that involves instanced housing, but probably having a good viewing system that has previews or something. Additionally, players could place their instanced houses within alloted spots on the actual game world if for a fee. From a development prospective that can turn into a hell unless you either kept all houses the same of forced the ones (at least eligible ones) to follow a certain template and just load it as an x by y square of terrain. Well... depending on the engine, an object that fills a gap in the terrain. Of course, that's only one technological difficulty with it.
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This concept is massively over-complicated. MikeB in your post you fail to point out Ultima Online (unless I missed it at the end) which did implement houses in the game world with ease. SWG also did a pretty good job of 3D player housing and cities. Darkfall also does it pretty well, although much less open. I am not sure why developers cry in the corner when they think about housing. Player housing only poses a resource problem if a player can have more than 1 or if the game world is single server. Otherwise, creating arbitrary land mass to accommodate a single house for each player/guild becomes somewhat trivial and has been done before.
Do you have any proof that these system implemented them with "ease"? Or that any of the games you listed implemented them without designing their game engine around player housing from the start?
Go buy a House in Wizard101 a child's game and you will see how to make housing work in a MMO environment.
The Wizard 101 system offers a lot of ability to customize the actual houses and for that it definitely deserves some credit. However its also a fully instanced housing system. It does offer the ability for people to let guests come in but in the end it still suffers from the same problems that were brought up in regards to the fully instanced housing systems.
Hell I even will play a Sims Online game with a VERY good Graphics, VERY GOOD player driven economy and REAL GOOD shopping system (like you can own a shop, and selling your craftable stuffs).
This is THAT MUCH I want to play a game with Housing Systems !!!! I miss my Shops in SWG !!!
I think this is a good article but I'm a bit confused as to why housing is assumed to be 98% cosmetic and only 2% functional as extra storage?
I think housing should be close to major hubs and should tie in closely communities. Dadown did a great job breaking down the different types of housing however I think those need to be all tied to functional communities.
Communities could then build crafting equipment - hire vendors - (develop more things for guilds like player made guild quests for fun, can place items up for rewards - maybe even develop a faction - can make different player made quests with faction threshold so not just anyone can grab the quests) then make those communities expandable and make them about to grow upward and allow for player owned housing able to be rented out (condo/apartment type / town home style)... This eliminates the the problem of guild members running out of room to get housing next to each other.
Most in game cities have tons of wasted space. I mean how many empty pubs or buildings with 1 guy standing inside does a city need? Utilize on city space that surrounds a Keep (where all the quests n' stuff are) as player made --- give people a reason to congregate and be social. (I really dislike out of the way housing zones. who wants to go out of the way to get to a zone with a bunch of unattended houses?) Make the cities bustle!
Then there could be country side housing with more land surrounding them.. could make these expensive since they will be few and far between. On this land a large house can be built. farming can be done (LoTRO) or other crafting centers can be made... maybe have a merchant to stock up things like potions or other goodies that passing adventurers could utilize to restock...
I think the biggest problem now is not the housing itself. its the purpose behind the houses that needs to change.. make the houses be part of something more than just a house.
Players need more of a reason than just someplace to show off (not sayin' showing off isn't fun). Players need a place to call home, show off, socialize, and actually use the space they are renting for more than a bank.
I think the idea of guild housing is more complex and perhaps should be incorporated into cities and make more of a elaborate show of styles and customizing ability. These should be the true 'oooo's and ahhh's' of the city.
Country side guild housing could be used for those that would like to build their own Keeps or fortress like housing - again could be more expensive and more difficult to construct. These could come with larger land - maybe even allow guild only housing on the land.
I agree that SWG did it pretty darn good. Course, you guys (MMO makers) won't look at that system and try to improve on it for whatever reason. Ignore the player city, crafting and housing features and instead look for a quick substitute that requires minimal effort. But yeah, things like designating various areas not around npc hubs for PC development would be one way. Figuring out the acceptable amount of houses that could be set in those areas and limiting that would help. Not being afraid to make big open worlds with wide spaces (like Dereth in AC, or the planets in SWG) factors in. I never really understood why you guys were so scared to make wide open spaces. There doesn't have to be "content" every 2, 5 or 10 minutes of running around. That too is part of what has killed exploration in MMO gaming. Everything is practically in your lap.
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As Justin points out, non-instanced player housing is a complex system to build and get right. It causes a host of problems - of which UO and SWG experienced all of them - such as lack of availability of land, urban sprawl, neighbourhood relationship issues and escalating costs. Much like real estate in real life, come to think of it. Everyone wants the right location, which is usually near a hub and that adds to the server load of that area.
Player housing is a nice idea, but it is one beset with design issues and I completely understand why most MMO developers put it on the backburner.
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Read Gimme Shelter.
My, how things have changed.
It wasn't long ago that housing was seen as a horrid abomination, ruining games, being poorly designed and destroying communities.
Having played DAoC before and after housing was instituted I still believe that housing is bad for a game's community unless you somehow incorporated into the main city or enable comms that are broadcast into the cities to also be available to those in housing. Don't get me wrong, I loved my house out in Dalton but I spent all my down time there. The city of Camelot used to be a hopping place to be where everyone hung out when they weren't involved in rvr or leveling. When something changed in new frontiers, most of your population was easily accessible because they were usually in the same place. Once housing came out we had zero reason to go to town. If you were in a decent sized alliance you generally heard about it through those chat channels, but without better comms, most of your players never knew what was happening until it was too late to do anything about it. If your game is pve only I don't see where housing is going to be a problem, but if your game has a pvp system where having available players on the spot is necessary, housing should only be considered if the comms system in your game is top notch.
SWG had the best housing. You could have multiple houses per toon. You could have your own city. Your own player associaiton halls. your own harvesters. The great thing was you could move your house to virtually anywhere in the galaxy except mustifar, and well kashyyyyk. The other great thing was you could place anything in your house anywhere as long as you did not go over the item limit. Even then you could get vet rewards to double your storage apced.
The next best houseing system is in EQ2 they were really smart with the instanced housing. The only problem everybodies house was virtually the same layout in that instance. Same thing here I can place anything virtually anywhere in my house.
LOTRO ugg what can I say about its totaly lame layout. You had isntanced neighborhoods, and each house in that instance was a seperate instance. The real problem became with placing stuff. The devs at lotro had no clue of what they were doing and came up with what they called hooks, in other words a set place to place an item, and them a limited number of hooks inside your house and outside your house. Housing became your sharded bank slots.
SO sony's player housing puts everybody elses to total complete shame, with lotro comming in dead last.
You obviously never played SWG like the rest of us here in the thread. Most people *wouldn't* care about housing till you run into something as epic as what it had. Really, there is nothing else as good, and LotRO/EQ's instanced nature do not handle the situation as well. You can decorate them too, sure, but not as indepth. SWG housing is like having dev tools to place anything - anywhere.
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Its nice to see praise for one of SWG's good aspects. I always felt once players cities was introduced that a small penalty to non-city dwellings should have been introduced to encourage joining a city to help support ones owning and use of that structure. In the real world its easier to get infrastructure (power, water, comm) in a city than out in the country. This could be the factor that helps keep down the "urban sprawl" that ruins immersion. This coupled with an annual "house pack-up" event would go a long way in keeping a server clear of stray houses, depending on the penalties. Player city benefits don't seem attractive enough without some form of penalty, IMHO.
As expressed above by one member, not everyone enjoys owning and maintaining a structure in a game world. I also believe in SWG that instanced apartments should be introduced. There are ton's of high rise and low level unused buildings in the static cities. Not just the NPC's alone have to live in them. This would allow players who wish to be nomadic to continue thier pursuit without joining a community. The extension of this idea would be instanced shops in those static cities where a crafter could set up a vendor for a high fee that would warrent thier volume of business. Set static city fees high enough so player vendor shops still have viablibity.
For those who don't know about SWG, it has Static Cities which are player social hubs that provide Player 'porting (Starports and Shuttles), Markets(Bazaars), Banks, Respawn points (cloner), Vehical repair (garages) along with mission and quest starters among other neccesities. They do not allow player placed houseing within thier borders or set up vendors. The closest form of player instanced apartments in use is POB starships. Thats the larger ships that have room for players to move about in such as the YT-1300, Decimator and such. Players can also decorate thier interiors as well.
That said, SWG is great for its still surviving sandbox elements peppered liberally with themepark game mechanics in a vain attempt to capture a demographic that never came. SOE and Lucas Arts built a wonderful MMORPG with incredible potential then ruined it by chasing the "Game" dragon that WOW has fostered. The method, know as the NGE, failed and now LA is trying again with simular formula in SW: TOR and SOE seems to have apathy to the project as SWG is a low supported venture today. Hope thats simple but informitive enough.
Yes, I know. Why bother? Because as hated as SWG has become, it still has a strong roll as a MMORPG.
Houses could also be taxed. Like RL the money would go for "infrastructure and law enforcment". Close to the city more tax, bigger the house more taxes.
The farther away from cities the greater the risk from monsters/wildlife. Don't build a cheap straw house where a wolf can blow it down.
While LotRO, in my opinion, has the BASIC right idea for a way to have instanced and "open" type housing all at the same time....they did a SHIT job of allowing customization OF your homes. If you're going to allow me to HAVE a house, ffs at least allow me the sort of freedom we have in EQ2 of decorating it and customizing it. Don't tell me I can only have 8 items and that they have to be placed in 8 SPECIFIC spots. WTF? LotRO's housing, because of THAT.....is shit.
Now......
EQ2, although instanced, has FAR better housing. If there was a way to combine EQ2's internal customization, with LotRO's neighborhood-style instancing, and then perhaps allow 20 houses to be PLAYER BUILT within those neighborhoods on limited size lots.....
THAT would be great housing, imo.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
YOu r not missing much. There are housing neighborhoods. There are instanced zones. You get a small house for 1 gold, a delux house for 6-8 gold and guild halls for 16-18 gold.
Small houses have 1 beedroom and one small living room, they are very small and you only have about 10 hooks on the inside and 4-5 hooks outside to place items. You only get one storage chest to use as shared bank
Medium houses have 2 beddrooms and a large livingroom they have about 18-22 hooks depending on the housing type on the inside and 8 hooks outside to place items. you get 2 shared storage slots.
Guild halls you can place 30 items inside and about 10 items outside including huge yard siplays. You get 3 shared storage slots.
And unlike other games you are limited to the type of furniture/yard orniment and how and where you can place them.
You are very limitied to how you can use houses. This is one of the hotly debated items that still gets thread deleted on a daily basis. Most folks are very unhappy that lotro put in in and 2 yeas later has just about totaly forgotten about it.
It is pricy and maintenance is a huge issue. Like I said the cheapest house 1 gold and for a new player that would take a month of grinding. Also you have to be level 15 to get a house, or have a guild thats been around till rank 7 to buy a house.
i think Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted still has better housing options then SWG
there are whole communities build by players from the ground up.
plus where else can you build a dragon lair, i know of no other game where you can do that
SWG and Mortal online both had/have this open world housing ideas. The reasoning for both being that you can go basically anywhere that you can see, so that opens up a lot of land for houses. In Mortal online, As long as you have flat land, you can make a house way up in the mountains is you wanted. In SWG there was so much open space, towns would just form in the middle of nowhere. Ultimately housing systems in a 3-D environment usually only work out like they should in a giant exploration-type setting for a game where you can go everywhere. That's what I've noticed anyway.
I don't think "showing off" quite captures what houses mean to people (at least not to the people I've met).
Houses tap a territorial instinct which has a powerful impact on how people perceive the game world - it's like the "ownership" of equipment ... having a little territory that "belongs" to the player matters. There's the dollhouse effect - macho bravado aside, people like playing house ... there are good reasons why the sims sold over 100 million copies. Finally, in an MMO, people really like their characters to have a presence in the world, even when they themselves are offline - if the houses are somehow interactive, that's an even bigger plus.
SWG housing has 'maintenance' fees to maintain.. as well as possible 'city tax' fees that apply to certain services (shuttleport for example.
If you don't keep your housing maintenance fund up, it gets condemned and can be packed-up (stored in your character data pad).
SWG housing pack-up allows players to move houses pretty easily. They also have decorative 'copy' commands to be able to reproduce a design effect by saving & loading it back up in an identical structure/room.
The housing system alone for SWG is significantly advanced .. and even beyond NGE its has progressed to include more housing options.. WINDOWS.. larger item storage.. full item rotation (after completion of a few simple quests).
It a real wonder to my why any MMO exists that does not offer this kind of customization feature. Is it really THAT expensive to do.. its it really THAT hard to work out the details? SWG housing us unmatched from what I know.. and its fundamentally six years old.. thats ancient in MMO years.
Its funny that there isn't even a good 'copy cat' version of SWG's housing system in some ohter game.
As another poster metioned, the housing system even applies to portalized (instanced) player ships (POB)... so you can decorate your gunboat or YT-1300 (Han Solo's ship type) or even a gigantic Mining vessel.
There are also novelty houses... ATATs (attack walkers)... Jawa Crawlers... Starship Hangers (allowing you to drop starships inside)... Barns (allowing you to drop beast inside).
Players often underestimate the attraction of the roleplayer.. there are lots of potential subscriptions out there for people who want to just be social in a certain 'theme'.. that PvP and PvE simply cannot fill.
The mixture of options...the social with the combat.. the crafter with the loot drop... instances with sustained.. PvP with PvE... its uncanny what can be done if the developers use a bit more imagination than just the WoW-based default.
I hope games like STO 'matures' into this... making ships with crew quarters, captains offices, starbase housing, planetary housing... there are tons of opportunities IF they see it for what it is.. retention... expansion.. loyalty.
SWG/STO/(SWTOR)
Much better write-up this week Justin.
I really believe that the only flaw in SGW's housing system is that the houses often loaded after you were riding into an invisible wall (side of the house). I think if someone could figure out how to make them load up (world cache that trickle updates or something) then it would have been a near perfect system. (To be fair the loading problem only really happened while on a speeder. If you were on foot everything would generally load up well before you ran into it. Tho most of the time you were on a speeder, lol.) The interior design options were excellent and you could basically display any loot item plus lots of different styles of furniture, paintings, trophies, etc.
As eluded to by Justin one of the big problems with non-instanced housing is having enough real estate to actually put houses. I strongly disagree that housing needs to be in or near cities to be worthwhile but the real estate problem is still in play. Quite simply most MMO worlds are not all that big and don't have the open expanses of land needed to build housing. The zones are designed for very specific purposes and that's it.
Shadowbane's city system worked in a way that actually changed the landscape as you built your cities. Once your Tree of Life (city center) was built it flattened a certain area of land and cleared it of any obsticals. This meant that if you built it at the base of the mountain the mountain would actually be cut out so you could build your city. If you built it on the edge of a sea the sea was filled in extending the beach area outward so you could build your city. Every time your Tree of Life was upgraded your city area expanded and more of the land was flattened so you could build on it. Shadowbane had lots of problems but as I recall the city building and terrain altering features actually worked very well.
For me, housing adds a lot to feeling that you are a part of a virtual world. This is especially true when you can build your own house and not just buy a pre-built. While the article discussed a few of the different implementations, it really could have used another page of looking at the possibilities.
Here's how I see the degrees of implementation, starting with just storage and ending up with a fully designed building.
0) At the most primitive level, you have no real housing, just a storage chest or bank.
Most MMOs will provide some kind of storage where players can offload items from their inventory. The first improvement is to allow this storage to be expanded. Then you can allow a portion of this storage to be shared between characters on the same account, sometimes even with other players. Finally, you can have guild storage, hopefully with multiple divisions and different levels of access depending on a player's standing in the guild.
WoW has gone as far as full guild storage, but unfortunately never added housing.
1) Instanced appartment housing is the most basic form of housing and sometimes is little more than a walk-in bank vault.
This usually requires a monthly rental or maintenance fee, although RoM provides one for all players for free (in addition to a bank). The apartment is usually located in a town for convenient access, but adds no clutter as it is only visible in the main world as a door. The storage always has limits and some can be expanded. Most implements allow some kind of decoration, although this is often limited to using pre-defined hooks and pre-defined wall/floor textures.
Some of the better implementations like in EQ2 allow free placement of item on the floor and walls and even allow players to turn their appartment into a shop for selling things.
2) Pre-build houses, either in an instanced subburb or a remote location.
With this type of implementation, you get to see (and usually decorate to some degree) the outside of the house as well as choosing between different sizes and styles. The interiors are usually similar in features to what is found in appartments, but will include multiple rooms. Bigger houses may have multiple stories and/or a basement. Guild houses are usually also available.
LOTRO has the instanced version of this and AC1 has both the remote location version as well as the apartment version for those with limited funds. A fancy versions can include crafting facilities and a player shop.
3) Player built houses on either pre-defined lots or pre-defined regions, using pre-defined designs.
As as discovered in UO, its a bad idea to let players build in-game structures without any limits. Istaria and Vanguard both have predefined lots of various sizes where players can build, choosing from a variety of designs. Some like Istaria also allow free placement of yard decorations within the lot. SWG allows construction anywhere in whole regions, with the main restrictions being level terrain and proximity to existing structures.
As with previous categories, the interiors can allow a variety of features, with SWG having one of the most flexable positioning systems (with X-Y-Z axis controls). Letting players actually build their houses gives them even more of a sense of ownership and belonging to the world. It also enhances the crafting and player economy diveristy.
4) Player designed houses with preset or free-form components.
I'm surprised that the author didn't even mention the MMOs in this catefory, one of the most flexable. The biggest problem here is that it adds significantly the complexity of the virtual world objects. A Tale in the Desert allows players to build and expand houses in most locations in the world, limited primarily by distance from existing objects. Houses are built up in pre-defined blocks, but the blocks can be combined into just about any desired combination. Players can also create as many houses as they want, convert them into guild-owned structures and manage access lists. Most player built objects can then be placed in the house (and most of the things in-game are player built, including all crafting devices).
The ultimate in free-form player housing is Second Life, which while being an MMO, isn't actually a game. Players can create any combination of objects that they desire and then add scripts that let players interact with the objects in any desired way. This is the ultimate sandbox box, but for most game players it lacks enough built-in structure and has no pre-defined goals to achieve. It also takes a lot of work to create something that looks good. Anything a player create can also be sold and people can earn real money by selling their designs.
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I know there are many other games that I haven't mentioned, but I was just using ones that I'm familiar with to illustrate my points. For me, the ideal game would have the crafting flexibilty of ATITD, the community organization and skill based system of SWG and the rich variety of environments, quests and UI scripting found in WoW. I know that's a lot to wish for, but I think there is still hope.
There are definitely ways to implement housing where they are not in the way and where others can visit them and still have tons of other content players want. And it's pretty simple actually.
Godspeed my fellow gamer
Sorry but LOTRO's housing system was the worst I've ever seen. You'd never see more than one player in any neighbourhood at any time so it actually felt even emptier than if they'd just instanced each house individually. At least in the likes of EQ2 you'd have a crowd of players gathered outside the housing entrances, in LOTRO... no one at all.
It doesn't help that the customisation options were also the worst I've ever seen... your house had 'slots' where only certain objects could be mounted, and the options were severely limited. Almost everyone's houses looked identical since the positions off everything were the same and there were only a few different wall/floor styles so the whole system was pointless.
Yes, guild housing is different get to it!
Personally, I think guild halls would be much more immersive and more feasible to implement than player housing. Anyone that reads medieval fantasy novels can attest to how permanent one's "settlement" is in regards to where the adventurers stay. Most of the time its in some camp, empty shell of a house, keep or an inn. Plus, it'll be something a whole guild can work together towards in terms of an overall goal. I think some form of housing does add to the game though and it really shouldn't be ignored, look at well the Sims does =x
This concept is massively over-complicated. MikeB in your post you fail to point out Ultima Online (unless I missed it at the end) which did implement houses in the game world with ease. SWG also did a pretty good job of 3D player housing and cities. Darkfall also does it pretty well, although much less open. I am not sure why developers cry in the corner when they think about housing. Player housing only poses a resource problem if a player can have more than 1 or if the game world is single server. Otherwise, creating arbitrary land mass to accommodate a single house for each player/guild becomes somewhat trivial and has been done before.
Go buy a House in Wizard101 a child's game and you will see how to make housing work in a MMO environment.
You not only get a HUGE house that you can place stuff EVERYWHERE but a HUGE piece of land that you can plant trees place gazebos and other oddities in some you even have waterfalls and pools to splash around in, not only that but everyone can come and see your home inside and out by teleporting to you.
Now if a child's game can do it why not for us grown ups??
RedFang069
Right now I'm playing with an idea that involves instanced housing, but probably having a good viewing system that has previews or something. Additionally, players could place their instanced houses within alloted spots on the actual game world if for a fee. From a development prospective that can turn into a hell unless you either kept all houses the same of forced the ones (at least eligible ones) to follow a certain template and just load it as an x by y square of terrain. Well... depending on the engine, an object that fills a gap in the terrain. Of course, that's only one technological difficulty with it.
People that put themselves above others put me in a bad mood.
http://www.surrealtwilight.com/index.php
^Has nothing to do with that retarded Vampire Novel Series, I swear!^
Do you have any proof that these system implemented them with "ease"? Or that any of the games you listed implemented them without designing their game engine around player housing from the start?
The Wizard 101 system offers a lot of ability to customize the actual houses and for that it definitely deserves some credit. However its also a fully instanced housing system. It does offer the ability for people to let guests come in but in the end it still suffers from the same problems that were brought up in regards to the fully instanced housing systems.
Hell I even will play a Sims Online game with a VERY good Graphics, VERY GOOD player driven economy and REAL GOOD shopping system (like you can own a shop, and selling your craftable stuffs).
I think this is a good article but I'm a bit confused as to why housing is assumed to be 98% cosmetic and only 2% functional as extra storage?
I think housing should be close to major hubs and should tie in closely communities. Dadown did a great job breaking down the different types of housing however I think those need to be all tied to functional communities.
Communities could then build crafting equipment - hire vendors - (develop more things for guilds like player made guild quests for fun, can place items up for rewards - maybe even develop a faction - can make different player made quests with faction threshold so not just anyone can grab the quests) then make those communities expandable and make them about to grow upward and allow for player owned housing able to be rented out (condo/apartment type / town home style)... This eliminates the the problem of guild members running out of room to get housing next to each other.
Most in game cities have tons of wasted space. I mean how many empty pubs or buildings with 1 guy standing inside does a city need? Utilize on city space that surrounds a Keep (where all the quests n' stuff are) as player made --- give people a reason to congregate and be social. (I really dislike out of the way housing zones. who wants to go out of the way to get to a zone with a bunch of unattended houses?) Make the cities bustle!
Then there could be country side housing with more land surrounding them.. could make these expensive since they will be few and far between. On this land a large house can be built. farming can be done (LoTRO) or other crafting centers can be made... maybe have a merchant to stock up things like potions or other goodies that passing adventurers could utilize to restock...
I think the biggest problem now is not the housing itself. its the purpose behind the houses that needs to change.. make the houses be part of something more than just a house.
Players need more of a reason than just someplace to show off (not sayin' showing off isn't fun). Players need a place to call home, show off, socialize, and actually use the space they are renting for more than a bank.
I think the idea of guild housing is more complex and perhaps should be incorporated into cities and make more of a elaborate show of styles and customizing ability. These should be the true 'oooo's and ahhh's' of the city.
Country side guild housing could be used for those that would like to build their own Keeps or fortress like housing - again could be more expensive and more difficult to construct. These could come with larger land - maybe even allow guild only housing on the land.
https://www.youtube.com/user/NemsGaming
I agree that SWG did it pretty darn good. Course, you guys (MMO makers) won't look at that system and try to improve on it for whatever reason. Ignore the player city, crafting and housing features and instead look for a quick substitute that requires minimal effort. But yeah, things like designating various areas not around npc hubs for PC development would be one way. Figuring out the acceptable amount of houses that could be set in those areas and limiting that would help. Not being afraid to make big open worlds with wide spaces (like Dereth in AC, or the planets in SWG) factors in. I never really understood why you guys were so scared to make wide open spaces. There doesn't have to be "content" every 2, 5 or 10 minutes of running around. That too is part of what has killed exploration in MMO gaming. Everything is practically in your lap.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
As Justin points out, non-instanced player housing is a complex system to build and get right. It causes a host of problems - of which UO and SWG experienced all of them - such as lack of availability of land, urban sprawl, neighbourhood relationship issues and escalating costs. Much like real estate in real life, come to think of it. Everyone wants the right location, which is usually near a hub and that adds to the server load of that area.
Player housing is a nice idea, but it is one beset with design issues and I completely understand why most MMO developers put it on the backburner.