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Learn More About Homestead in PTS Patch Notes - Elder Scrolls Online News
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Learn More About Homestead in PTS Patch Notes - Elder Scrolls Online News
Zenimax will deploy the Homestead update to the Elder Scrolls Online Public Test Server tomorrow. To give players an idea what to expect from Homestead, including the addition of Master Crafting Writs, Motifs, and much more, the team posted the patch notes on the ESO forums.
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Reason: the rooms are available to all via a quest so everyone who wants one will have one. So it would be wise to assume that a lot of people could be going in and out. Banks can be busy and there is one per zone; this will be one room per alliance.
Now this would be less of an issue if the other options were "cheap". Apartments between 11 and 13k - not so bad; maybe there should be more of those.
Beyond that though the costs become less trivial - all the way up to very high.
So if there is going to be a - potentially immersion breaking - pinch point(s) it is going to be the rooms.
What hate? I don't see it. Not everyone likes the game but that should not be confused with hate.
As to how well the game has done I think we can say: not as well as they had hoped but as a result of the console launch and abandoning the sub it has done OK. (7M+ sales but that has to be offset against 9 years development / support + set up costs.)
Oh they will be available for Crowns too. Just a question of whether those prices will be seen once the PTS version goes up (supposedly later today).
Since you can own every house in the game and the aggregate amount of money they will cost is just under 27 million in game gold you can rest assured people will be spending real life money for them. Especially considering that even the most prolific gold farmers who play all day every day since the game opened havent even gotten to 5 million saved yet. So quick napkin math would suggest to make all the money necessary in game would take a guy farming gold like a farmer would take 15 years.
Of course not everyone has that OCD in them, but then again these guys introduced the boxes with a casino dealer animation to boot into the store not too long ago.
I am not making any major judgments as they have to make money some how but I thought the lockbox thing was a little over the top.
At least with housing youre actually going to get (a ton) of play time out of them, assuming you approach them like some have in other games with all the time decorating and creating. While they dont seem to be as in depth as Rift, they will surely be as in depth as anything else that has been introduced into MMOs. We will know more once we see them first hand. But I imagine once they hit there will be an influx of crown store decorations and that list will continue to grow and grow. Dimensions are basically single handedly keeping Rift afloat at this point. So I imagine Bethesda will see the cash cow they have had out to pasture for 3 years and will suddenly realize it was actually the fatted calf.
Introduce too good and too necessary crafting bags to "optional" sub
Introduce dyeing benefits to "optional" sub
Lockboxes
Buy houses with cash
Buy "optional" sub if you want to remove artificial decoration limits on said house
Future I bet: Buy furniture and decorations off of the cash shop
It's turning into Korean level shittiness here without the awesome combat and graphics of Korean games, so there's few upsides. I'm glad I quit after I saw the crafting bag and dyeing changes. When all they had was the occasional DLC I could purchase and I was free to ignore the sub and mostly the cash shop as well, I was happy. This is quickly going too far.
There's no reason to introduce any of this stuff and as for the housing stuff - just make the purchase price cheap with gold and reasonable so players can easily afford one and reasonably many if they want, and don't put any limits on decoration. Really how hard is it to make people happy and design a fair game?
I'm not sure what's worse - that Zenimax is doing all of this, or that they have a ton of blind fanboys that are letting them. Do you want to know why other developers do this stuff that you all complain about? This, this is why and this is how.
The one thing I will say that whether its crown or gold this is going to be a MASSIVE currency sink of some sort. The few vendors I lookd at with 'regular' stuff all started around 100G per whatever and as high as 1000. There is no way to preview the amount of slots each one has, at least I didnt see it. I just went in and bough them from the preview page through the store for 1 Crown each. The beauty of PTS I guess.
Also the crafted decorations and furniture are either extremely difficult to nearly impossible to get as well as the price tag for the initial recipes. Many take legendary materials and some quick napkin math put he cost of some things at 80-100K gold themselves.
So while people might have thought the initial prices for the houses werent all that bad, the cost to do anything 'fun' or in depth with them is going to be extremely costly and could in some cases be 2-3 times the initial cost of the house itself, even the 3 million gold ones.
As a vet of Rift and hundreds if not a few thousand hours in their dimension system I know how to do comparisons.
I also understand this is the initial roll out, before the roll out actually. But its clear to see they think there are people with caches of gold horded somewhere. Or they thing manor houses are supposed to be de facto guild halls. That may be bu they arent big enough or expansive enough to fill that roll. They do compare somewhat to Rifts initial 'guild' sized dimension, but since then those have been dwarfed by others offerings. Not saying that wont happen with ESO. The difference is those guild dimension were basically free and didnt cost what might amount to the entire net worth of every member of the guild just to buy it let alone the cost to furnish it at a basic level.
Will have to wait and see but right now these things look to be extremely cost prohibitive. Be it the buy in or the subsequent currency walls to furnish and make them seem 'lived in'.
I think people would have purchased DLC which had a series of quests / quest arcs - for which the reward was basically houses. Could have come straight out of the Skyrim playbook.
The prices are serious. I wonder what the short term impact on the economy will be. Could be a detriment to the playing experience of new players in particular. I even wonder whether houses will catch on at these gold prices - especially with no storage - then again I suspect buying with gold is not intended to catch on.
And having to use reagents for items - doesn't sound like a winner either.
At the end of the day if people want to buy houses for crowns - shrug. Houses don't bother me but I don't feel the need either unless they offer e.g. storage.
Conclusion: a missed opportunity; a potentially a damaging update.
In the end ESO is a but to play game, a premium priced one at that (even though it does go on sale a bit) and it also has a not so optional subscription option. I suspect that is the rationale for some of the pricing(and some of the properties behind the DLC wall which purchasing with crowns bypasses). But until we see the crown pricing we wont know for certain but I have to think the crown prices for these will even have the white knights balking. Many think the gold prices werent bad. I havent seen the reaction to the combination of house and decorations and what it will cost overall to flesh a single nicer property out with anything but generic looking furniture. Even with the seemingly small item cap limits.
But even if its Bethesdas goal to make these a combination of in game gold and crowns these things still need to offer way more than just some scenery.
But if theyre nothing more than a one time big ticket purchase to funnel a ton of in game currency out of the game and get a few horded piles of crowns off long time players then they look like a perfect 'tool' for that. But as is I dont see them bringing in people who arent playing the game already or bringing back people who may have played and were waiting for housing to bring them back.
In a game like this with phasing and soloist attitude and no 'real' AH houses would be a perfect opportunity to offer that to anyone and everyone. Crafting stations in housing is a no brainer, a 'market' minion of some sort is also a no brainer even if it is a generic one that is in every courtyard and specific to that house or district alone. So if you own the Serenity Falls estate then you have access to the Serenity Falls "market" . That would also (in their money grubbing minds) incentivise people to own more than one house and in more than one district. And of course the storage issue.
They will more than likely add storage (for crown or as a sub perk). But it should have been in the initial release. They have had 3 years to think about it.
In the end it always comes down to what players think the intentions are behind certain decisions, and with this update even though its free the intentions of whats offered and what isnt offered and where it may or may not go down the road have too many unanswered questions or the all to familiar conspiracy theories behind them.
(I always adore when developers are sneaky enough to put in items that are technically available via gameplay but really only practically available via cash, and thus manage to get the white knights to defend them with cries of "It's not greed! You can earn them in-game, anyways!")