Syp wrote about the horrors of open world housing, focusing on various housing rushes, minutes or even seconds long events while housing spaces are all sold, leaving nothing to the majority of players, followed by most of the housing space being empty of content and many abandoned. He is astonished that such things haven’t gone extinct.
The reason for that is the developers have good ideas and stick to them, they just fail to realize that there are three fundamentally different reasons for player housing and these reasons cannot mix. More than one type can be present in a game, but only as different homes. One building can’t be mixture of any two reasons, or the result will be just as bad as we see. Everyone is right: housing should exist in games, but only in a very focused form.
- Fun homes. These buildings only exist for the vanity of the player. It’s a mini-game or rather a mini-art of building a beautiful home and a place to have your collection items at display. This is a good idea to have in any game, but only if the devs keep it totally non-competitive. One should get one easy and without competition and having one should not help in any competition. Open world makes these impossible, so fun homes must be instanced and invisible to everyone else
- Competitive buildings and farms. These installations have a point, to help players progress one way or another. They can provide resources, or help train skills or open portals. These buildings can and probably should be open-world and in limited supply, serving only serious players, while casuals could get the same services on a lower quality from NPCs. Albion’s open space crafting buildings, Archeage’s farms and EVE space structures come to mind. However they should constantly cost resources to operate and this “rent” should be high enough to balance the available space to the amount of players wanting it for that price. Alternatively landless players should have an option to take the space from owners by some form of competition.
- Trophy buildings. While they can have some function, but their real purpose is to show off the awesomeness of the owning players or guilds. They should be in very limited supply and should be automatically assigned based on who’s worthy this week/month. Black Desert Online could be a good example if anyone would care about the wars that determine the winner of ownership.
Homes have a place in games. Homes that are visible and have function to every player have place in games. But the devs must be very focused on what function they want to achieve with the buildings and must resist the urge to add something “cool” or “fun” that doesn’t belong to that vision.
Wow the two you wrote a lot of words: here let me clarify and simplify:
Eve: if you use it. its hard to kick you out and it is a form of status. If you don’t use it its getting way easier to kick you out
Instanced worlds: Rent is weekly miss a week and your home goes away. Set up a system where everyone who doesn’t own a home is on a list for that server and when a slot comes open its random draw.
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The reason I like BDO housing (it’s the only system I actually cared enough to use) was because it’s a weirdly functional combination of all three (well, kinda).
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There’s another type of housing which is defense based and actually hand built by the players. Life is Feudal is finally launching in November so we will see how this plays out.
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I know members of the cult of SWG
yeah. noclip total free interior design. and further down the comment about markethub, the economy of SWG was player driven so you had real estate and set up vendors or joined traders to set your vendor at their guildhall right out of town in the nearest player city. besides the politics system that had to do with player cities. and besides one of the fundamental ways to store loot.
SWG with all the shit and bugs had some very clever and interesting ideas, and it somehow worked, not great but it worked and drove the mainpoint of the various systems. sure housing was a bit immersion breaking.
out of all housing I loved SWG interior housing. I’m on the fence about where the houses where put down and about the lack of exterior. I never got into politics and cities really.
They where definitely competitive structures, just because of the entangled different systems of the game and the choices a player could take.
mmo housing systems today are too boring … you have your crafting stations and that’s it like BDO. GW2s home instance is a joke, people use it for the various daily nodes and that is it. Aion you have apartment instance or can auction houses for more space … not that it matters very much tho.
Like you said Gevlon, devs need to really think about housing.
defence based and actually hand built by the players.
I loved this part in 7 days to die and ark survival evolved. not mmos. I would like to see some good housing in mmos .. I guess it is too much of a headache for the devs tho.
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