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Housing can be accomplished without ruining the game.
Zathoral
Member Posts: 110
I know this is a delicate topic. Many players that will be enterting SW TOR when it is released will be migrating over from SWG. On the other hand many players will have never played SWG, and will most likely be veterans of more recent games like WoW. For those of us who played SWG, including myself, housing was almost unanimously one of our favorite features in SWG. To me that relaly was the one feature that made SWG great. There has never been a game where you and your friends can build your own cities that actually have purpose. Most more recent mmos have instanced housing if they have housing at all, and the housing really serves no purpose. In SWG players could open up shops, malls, and create unbeleivable works of art using every day items found throughout the game. This is what made housing in SWG special.
Now everyone who played SWG knows that it had its down sides also. The entire galaxy was covered in houses, and there were few areas where you could go out and adventure without seeing houses sprawled out every 10 feet. I think we can all agree that that is annoying.
SWG veterans do not want instanced housing. Instancing housing takes out everything that SWG vets liked about housing. We liked having a house that was actually PART OF THE WORLD, and we liked having people come visit our houses, even if we didnt even know them. It is a very good feeling when you're just sitting in your house doing w/e it is you do in there, and the next thing you know some complete stranger walks in and you have a nice conversation. This can't happen with an instanced house. Furthermore SWG veterans want to be able to place our house where WE WANT. we don't want to have an instance housed that has the same cookie cutter instanced location as millions of other player's houses. I remember way back in SWG I placed a house in the middle of nowhere on a mountainside overlooking a river. It really was a beautiful view, this is what made SWG housing special.
Let me get to the point here. What TOR needs is a way to incorproate housing without ruining the environment of the game, but without instancing it which would ruin the purpose of housing all together. I know the prospect of using a ship as a house has been brought up. This is all fine and dandy, but a lot of players want to have an actual house as well. I've thought about this problem for quite a bit, and I think there are actually several solutions that could give both sides of this argument satisfaction.
Solutions:
1. Partition the planets into separate areas. I will use tatooine as an example. There would be two sides or areas of the planet. On the west side there would be 3 or 4 NPC cities like Bestine, Mos Espa, Mos Entha, etc. This western side of the planet would be created specifically for adventuring. It would be your standard themepark zone as seen in many other recent mmos, with quest lines, iconic areas for players to adventure, etc.
On the Eastern side of the planet would be the sand box zone. This zone would have several NPC cities like the Western side did, but this side of the planet would be devoted to player housing and organizations. Players would be able to place their houses anywhere on this side of the planet, as well as start cities. It would not, however, be a simple massive flat area. There would be some iconic locations as well as geography that provides for interesting places to build cities and houses.
2. Create two verisons of each planet. I do not like this idea as much as the first, but it is none the less a posiblity. Two separate zones or instances would be created for each planet. Each would have the exact same geography, and each would have places of interest and iconic locations in the same corresponding areas in each zone. One zone would be devoted to adventuring and would not permit player houses to be placed. The other would permit player housing, and players would be able to place houses anywhere. This idea has some consequences though. In order for these two zones to be identical there would need to be a lot of flat land and a quite massive area for players to build their homes and cities, and because of this, the zone would lose its theme park feel. Also iconic areas and quest objectives would have to be spread quite thin because the size of the zone would need to be large to allow for the housing of thousands of players, and as such it would call for a lot of boring speeder drives or walks through the zone.
I know neither of these ideas will be realized because I'm sure TOR is already far into development, too far to consider such a demanding idea, but I thought i would share it anyway. I look forward to TOR, but I am quite skeptical of it. The screenshots and videos that I've seen look like the same theme park zones we've seen over and over agian over the past 6 years. I'm personally ready for something new, and although I hope TOR delivers this, I do not think it will.
Comments
I don't like either way you suggested, and the SWG was the worst housing system I've ever seen.
Better to have it instanced.
They wont ever do housing like SWG even though it was great Lucas Arts ain't interested in it. Besides without a crafter based economy it wouldn't be as fun. I reckon they'll do guild halls or have you walk round the inside of ships.
I'm a SWG Vet and I hated that aspect of the game. It was nothing more than a useless time sink that created lag. I don't see anything wrong with making the houses instanced. And like someone already said, this game will most likely not have a player run economy so there is really no point to them. Unless the player is forced to eat,drink and sleep I see no need to have them.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
The current rumor going around about SWTOR's housing is that we will all have personal ships to act as our housing. Not sure where that one got started, but I suspect this would be the route BioWare is going based on how the Ebon Hawk operated in the KotOR series.
I Reject your Reality and Substitute it with My Own!
I´m not sure that SW:TOR is the kind of game where things like player housing fit in. As I understand it, the game is more about being the Hero and expeience fantastic action adventures. Even if I´m wrong, I think its a bit too late to redesign the game at this point.
However, for the sake of discussion, if it should be player housing in the game, I would like to see the player ownded houses as a part of the big NPC-cities, and not have separate player and NPC cities. If you have to many cities you just spread out the players, and end up with cities who feels dead. Why not have the center of a city with NPC buildings, like the starport, hospital and bank, you can use for travel, cloning, etc, and let the buildings in the outer ring of the city belong to the players. This way you avoid building cluttering the landscape, but still let the players feel like they are a part of a city.
I love the idea of player housing. As a SWG vet I had a nice little pad on Tat in a town which was coordinated really well and didn't look like shit.
I disagree it should be instanced but it should be controlled. A good idea would be to take aspects of the guild level system from WAR and the player towns from AoC. As you progress you would be able to build a larger town, but also keep a cap to a reasonable level and not allow towns to be built anywhere. Furthermore, set high requirements to build, own and maintain playerhousing/malls/cantinas etc so they aren't easily attainable and would require dedication to achieve. The problem in SWG was that by simply joining a guild you'd be given the deeds to a house which you'd set up and many people would barely use. By implementing a system of requirements you would wittle out those who simply drop a house on a location and never use it.
Or another idea would be like in the MMORPG "Tibia" where there are a set amount of rentable houses in towns and you pay rent monthly and they are set in a fixed area and can be decorated.
The problems in SWG with player housing apart from how easy it was to set up a home was the fact missions would randomly place objectives in the middle of towns, which I'm assuming wont be the case in TOR and the fact you could set up housing near enough anywhere. Fix these two problems, and add limits to player towns and you have solved the problem.
It can be done, and can be done well. It enhances immersion and offers alternatives to work towards aside from combat.
Played: SWG, Tibia, WoW, Vanguard, AoC, WAR, LotRO, Guild Wars.
Currently playing: Law Degree, American Football.
Houses are asome and I loved it
they were
a way to sell crafted items
a way to strore items ( like a bank but a real house )
a way to show off your wealth
a way to make the world/server uniek , and it looks like you live in a real world ( people can change the world)
I can only imagine what you might consider better as SWG had one of the most elaborate and well thought of and designed housing systems of any MMo on the market even to date.
They are making this a game, not a simulation. Stop with the SWG comparisons already. They have no intention of ever making this game like SWG, so it's pointless to keep bringing up these debates. Housing is a worthless endeavor for an adventure game and nothing more than a time wasting money sink in simulation / sandbox games.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
I can only imagine what you might consider better as SWG had one of the most elaborate and well thought of and designed housing systems of any MMo on the market even to date.
It had Ultima Online's housing system. The only addition was the lot system, which did nothing to address any of the problems UO's house system had. Urban sprawl in an MMO is not a good system, since adventure areas are filled with houses. Tatooine was supposed to be a barren lump of sand, not a maze of houses sprawled across the landscape. The developers talked about houses being restricted to certian areas prior to release. That, much like most of the interesting features talked about prior to release, never made it into the live game.
One thing they should have done was to offer increased bank storage, for a price similar to housing maintenence. Have the increased space take up lots and you end up with much fewer storage houses littering up the landscape. The zoning system should also have been implemented, along with tying lots to account, which would have eliminated lot trading across servers.
SWG's housing system took a system that the developers knew was broken (as they were the ones who implemented it in UO in the first place), one they aknowledged was broke but promised they had the solution that would fix it, and implemented it without attempting to fix it. SWG itself was comprised of half finished ideas, abandoned when some new poorly thought out ideas struck the dev team, in a cycle that led the game to its current state, a horrible mess of a game that subsists based on its licensed IP.
Seems to me instancing a hanger on each planet for everyone's ships would be the way to go. You can really accommodate most people this way. So it's not a house, it's better, it's a spaceship. You could still show off your wealth with the size of your ship. People could still come by Tatooine section 32 lot D (not intentional but hey I'm a guy) to hang out in your ship. I'll finally have a place for that mounted rancor head the wife won't let me put over the fireplace.
Sections of the instanced hanger can even be marked off for certain types/levels of ships. If you need to get to the other side of the Universe ,and your ship can't take you there cause it's not mapped for you yet, then go see "Jimmy the Smuggler". He's got an Imperial Cruiser he highjacked parked on Hoth that can get you there and he has all the waypoints in the Universe. Similar example for any crafted goods (if that becomes a bigger aspect of the game).
An instanced hanger won't ruin the look of the planet for the adventurers. It will give the credit horders a place to hang out and show off. The hanger could even be considered part of a trade district for crafters and the like. Seems like a simple and fun solution to housing IMO.
Or bioware could do it like they had in their original KOTOR game and give you a little apartment to base out of. If this is going to be a heroic storyline series of adventures, I seriously doubt you are going to be worried about which lamp looks best your house.
If you want a SWG housing system, go to SWG.
"If we don't attack them, they will attack us first. So we'd better retaliate before they have a chance to strike"
It had Ultima Online's housing system. The only addition was the lot system, which did nothing to address any of the problems UO's house system had. Urban sprawl in an MMO is not a good system, since adventure areas are filled with houses. Tatooine was supposed to be a barren lump of sand, not a maze of houses sprawled across the landscape. The developers talked about houses being restricted to certian areas prior to release. That, much like most of the interesting features talked about prior to release, never made it into the live game.
One thing they should have done was to offer increased bank storage, for a price similar to housing maintenence. Have the increased space take up lots and you end up with much fewer storage houses littering up the landscape. The zoning system should also have been implemented, along with tying lots to account, which would have eliminated lot trading across servers.
SWG's housing system took a system that the developers knew was broken (as they were the ones who implemented it in UO in the first place), one they aknowledged was broke but promised they had the solution that would fix it, and implemented it without attempting to fix it. SWG itself was comprised of half finished ideas, abandoned when some new poorly thought out ideas struck the dev team, in a cycle that led the game to its current state, a horrible mess of a game that subsists based on its licensed IP.
I believe that you are simply wrong on the facts, especially in what you say about Tattoine. Housing was restricted to some areas right from the outset. IE. You could build in some areas but not in others. This was always the case.
It had Ultima Online's housing system. The only addition was the lot system, which did nothing to address any of the problems UO's house system had. Urban sprawl in an MMO is not a good system, since adventure areas are filled with houses. Tatooine was supposed to be a barren lump of sand, not a maze of houses sprawled across the landscape. The developers talked about houses being restricted to certian areas prior to release. That, much like most of the interesting features talked about prior to release, never made it into the live game.
One thing they should have done was to offer increased bank storage, for a price similar to housing maintenence. Have the increased space take up lots and you end up with much fewer storage houses littering up the landscape. The zoning system should also have been implemented, along with tying lots to account, which would have eliminated lot trading across servers.
SWG's housing system took a system that the developers knew was broken (as they were the ones who implemented it in UO in the first place), one they aknowledged was broke but promised they had the solution that would fix it, and implemented it without attempting to fix it. SWG itself was comprised of half finished ideas, abandoned when some new poorly thought out ideas struck the dev team, in a cycle that led the game to its current state, a horrible mess of a game that subsists based on its licensed IP.
I believe that you are simply wrong on the facts, especially in what you say about Tattoine. Housing was restricted to some areas right from the outset. IE. You could build in some areas but not in others. This was always the case.
I think you have it reversed. You could build anywhere on Tatt. except special areas ie. cities/landmarks. I think what the previous poster was trying to get at was more limitation on where you cuold build ... like special areas not the whole planet.
Although I didn't mind all the houses. They probably could have limited the lot system to 10 lots per account instead of server though or w/e the lot count was. Too many people, myself included had over 10X the amount due to lot trading between servers.
I think you have it reversed. You could build anywhere on Tatt. except special areas ie. cities/landmarks. I think what the previous poster was trying to get at was more limitation on where you cuold build ... like special areas not the whole planet.
Although I didn't mind all the houses. They probably could have limited the lot system to 10 lots per account instead of server though or w/e the lot count was. Too many people, myself included had over 10X the amount due to lot trading between servers.
I never really had any problems with housing in SOE myself.
I have a very nicely arranged three-guildhall set-up (between two accounts) in the far north of Tattoine. One was set aside for manufacture, one for storage and one for a museum. The compound was close to a great little player city called Sidious that had its own shuttle and Imperial fort.
I had a barker's tent for selling my food and drink just outside Bestine.
Finlly, I had a little bolt-hole my Jedi could run to on Dantoine.
I have never experienced such variety, choice and capacity when it came to housing in any other game.
Would I like to see similar housing features in ToR? Sure - if ToR offers larger, persistent landscapes. Do I think that, as currently described, ToR will offer this kind of housing? No, I don't. But I don't really mind because ToR isn't going to be a sandbox-type game which would demand SWG-type housing.
Perhaps you didn't play SWG much or didn't understand it all, dear.
And here we go with the typical response from the SWG fanbois: If anyone disagrees with me then that person either didn't play the game enough or just didn't understand the game enough in order to properly enjoy it. We understood the game okay? Some of us played for quite awhile because we had guilds that we belonged to and enjoyed the fun that we were able to create(no thanks to the people in charge of content.)
I understood perfectly when the NPC I was supposed to kill was standing inside one of those houses of yours. I understood the game perfectly when I lagged on a simple bike ride across Tatooine. I understood perfectly when I looked over the open world and saw a bunch of empty houses. And I understood the game perfectly in PVP when those buildings were used by jedi to plop down and hide in just a few seconds. That housing system was poorly implemented and only fun for non-combatents and exploiters. Dear.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
One way to combat the sprawl would be to limit one house per account, accessible by all your toons.. Increase storage for the houses and if someone's account lapses, the house is automatically removed from the game and packed up. Additionally, housing could be a guild specific feature; that is to say, a guild of a certain size gets a license to create a city, and so anyone with a house can only build but only within the city limits.
Perhaps you didn't play SWG much or didn't understand it all, dear.
And here we go with the typical response from the SWG fanbois: If anyone disagrees with me then that person either didn't play the game enough or just didn't understand the game enough in order to properly enjoy it. We understood the game okay? Some of us played for quite awhile because we had guilds that we belonged to and enjoyed the fun that we were able to create(no thanks to the people in charge of content.)
I understood perfectly when the NPC I was supposed to kill was standing inside one of those houses of yours. I understood the game perfectly when I lagged on a simple bike ride across Tatooine. I understood perfectly when I looked over the open world and saw a bunch of empty houses. And I understood the game perfectly in PVP when those buildings were used by jedi to plop down and hide in just a few seconds. That housing system was poorly implemented and only fun for non-combatents and exploiters. Dear.
I think you point out many of the weaknesses of SWG's system, but those flaws were allowed to persist because of the incompetence or laziness of the SWG developers. Each one of the problems you cite had simple design solutions, yet those solutions like in so many other aspects of the game were never implemented.
Also, Vanguard also had an open world design and it also lagged despite having no housing in the areas in which I adventured.
And to say that housing was only fun for noncombatants and exploiters is ridiculous. I knew many players to contradict that view.
I guess I should add that as much as I loved SWG's housing system, I don't think we will see it in SWTOR. Nor should we see it in TOR, because from a design perspective it sounds like they are creating a totally different type of game.
I have an which would make the game free of sprawl, yet add some nice dynamics to the game.
Each planet would have (lets make up a random low number here) of 5 cities controlled by NPCs. But these cities start out small, little villages if you will. Then the more people who live in these cities, the city grows up, becomes more vibrant, more npcs, buildings expand, etc. ANyone can live within these cities, all you need is $. You get an apartment, house, shop or whatever (depending what you buy).
Then you have 20-30 plots for guild/faction cities. These start out as plots of land, and grow as the guild/faction grows in that area. With multitudes of planets, this can not only give AMPLE room for growth (more plots can be added based on population). This would create an EVE - esque system, cities can be created as a capital or oupost (need skills to start them so not every one can have a city). They could be fought over, destroyed or taken over. Each area has its own bonuses, resources, npcs, etc. Imagine EVE on ground.
But fear not, if your city/house gets destroyed, your home is not. You (in this game system) will have a copy made within an npc city of your choice on that planet (this is TOR and not EVE....unless they impliment a pvp server with these rulesets).
So no urban sprawl, dynamic cities, cities meaning something and safe havens...all in one.
Just an idea i was toying with.....
Agreed. It would be nice to one day see the choice and complexity of SWG's housing feature in a real sandbox but, as the fanbois tell us, ToR is not a sandbox. I have no problems with that.
For posting about houseing you get - 7 points on a scale of 10-0-(-10)
SWG veteran here, and SWG was never about housing. it was about what houses let you do often. While its housing was cool. id rather swg without its housing, and a 1/2 decent combat engine. (which it never had).
While your ideas are good, they do not apply to this game at all. This game is not sandbox, instead it very directed and theatrical, but still large. -5 for not knowing your ideas do not even get close to fitting into the current structure of the game.
But +10 for having a nice post with thoughtful ideas.
PS these points are dumb but i did this because i didn't have a good reason not to.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
I'm not against housing in the game. It's not like it would affect me in any way, unless there was some game mechanic where you had to go rest in your house or something.
But I simply don't get it. I dont' need a house, never get one in games that allow it unless they force me to for some reason. I"m going to kill mobs, group, and do quests, buy gear, and PvP if they let me.
When I'm finished doing that, I'm logging off right where I stand, unless there's a chance I'll get killed by wandering mobs or players, then I'll log off somewhere more safe.
Why do I need a house? I assume there is a bank somewhere for my credits and junk, that's really all I need.
Not a bad idea. I think one more thing is you need to have a mechanism where if a player has cancelled his subscription then he/she loses the house. Forget the money for maintaining the thing. If you are paying a monthly subscription then your house stays. If you aren't, then it disappears.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
Maybe you should play the sims. I personally, think combat hasn't seen a good day after daoc . Don't get me wrong wow's and may other games have better combat engines and systems in place, but what you do with them is rather lame and poor.
Wow arenas are group vs group composition (classes in the groups) more so than equipment then player skill.
The reason why games fail is not housing its combat (vs one mob, as a group, as a raid, as a side) and maybe character advancement/development.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine