Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
MMOs have Large faction cities with lots of Houses. So whats hard about making those houses in the c
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
Just a curious question.
But in many MMOs, we have large decorated NPC cities/Faction Cities as some call it.
These cities have many houses built into the city.
So whats to hold back Developers from allowing players to own these open world houses in the city? Sort of how Housing in elder scrolls singleplayer games are handled but larger scale.
I ask, because I wonder if this sort of feature is a tech issue.
I will post pictures showing what I mean.
See all those potential housing locations, in the open city?
Here another below.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Comments
It would be great, though the problem is that many of the houses in faction cities are just models with no insides. Like literally, if you were to clip through the walls of a "house" in a WoW city, you'd be standing in a big empty box with probably no textures on the inside. So devs would have to go through and model the inside of each house. Which would be pretty easy for them, honestly, so to answer why they haven't done it...laziness? I dunno.
Laziness? no, I'm sure artists would love the extra work, it's paying for it and the additional time that are the problem.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
This was discussed so many times before... /sigh
1) First, it is only somewhat recent games that tech allows citites of the size you posted screens of.
2) Then, one of the major, obvious issue is Capacity and all the issues that stem from it.
3) It's rather fluff, pointless feature so not very high on priority list.
+1
Just imagine this so-called faction city.... if a million players decided to own a house, how long are you going to be willing to travel up and down streets just to find YOUR house? At best, there'd be a limit to housing that would piss off a large majority of homeless people that have no game-breaking issues stemming from being homeless. At worst, it would be instanced, pissing off the people that would rage because they can't own their own house.
And after the initial month when the next game comes out and everyone leaves, what do you expect to happen with the houses all sitting around? Do they just disappear leaving big pointless gaps all over? Do the houses stay static for others to move into, or do they somehow condense everything down, thereby making people have to search for their house like a bad gameshow?
Housing in games is about as useful as glittery effects in combat and glowing armor.
On on hand, you can always set up a teleport function back to your house.
On the other hand, few players probably care about such a feature and so no dev is going to spend money on it.
A game would have to incentivize us do it. Example: SWG had players cities, do away with these and make guild towers. I remember in one of the cities on Tat, there were towers all around the city. They could have leased those to guilds. Vendors on the ground floor, player rooms on each floor. They could have players protect a boss npc of one of 2 factions. If the boss was killed, no venfors or space travel from the city. A setup like that would have worked. Wishful thinking.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
Great question OP, let me point out the most glaring flaws in my opinion:
The number of homes available.
See in World of Warcraft, if you have 10,000 - 20,000 people playing in a given faction, over the 3-4 major holds you are going to have to have at least 5-10,000 houses available. each. So now all of a sudden Storm wind has to become the same size as all of the southern half of the eastern kingdoms to become functional.
I feel like the bigger games are able to get, the more we will see features like this (un-instanced of course)
there are many problems regarding player driven cities:
1. urban layout, cities have to be organized, so there must be someone dictating the plot organization, not just allow players build their house wherever they want (like if it was a slum)
2. it can work in a fantasy setting cause in medieval/renaissance, most industry was of artisan origin, and as such houses usually were workshops too. but in more modern settings that changes, with the advent of industrial facilities taking over domestic workshops. for example in a steampunk or sci-fi MMO housing is more for domestic purposes than for anything else.
3. practically all MMOs require the player to be outside, housing is relegated for cosmetic, roleplaying and storage purposes, a real reason to have a house has to be created. this doesnt happens basically, because the real needs for a roof over your head(protection against the environment, security against wildlife,base of operations,a place to rest) arent present in online games
4. it would have an effect in performance, just imagine a city with hundreds, if not thousands of player made homes, and people moving around, the lag would be intolerable. unless this can be fixed then we cannot have player made cities, at least in an open world setting, instanced player housing would be a solution but it would break inmersion(unless you can get an almost seamless transition, but i doubt it).
5. (an IMO the most important point here), unlimited growth. if its a fantasy medieval setting, expect city's growth capped by the defenses. you would either have to build outside of the walls or periodically deconstruct and reconstruct the city with a larger area. non medieval settings fix this by not having walls at all. and as such leaving the city open for invasion, but the problem remains, with worlds so small, urban expansion would bring issues to the overall worlds layout. unless you had a game where worlds are trully big size(bigger than the largest game world we have right now i guess).
There are a lot of city houses that can be entered and used by players for RP, etc. I think the challenge is with ownership: How do you assign ownership? How do you manage the qualifying attributes of ownership? How do you manage item and ownership decay? In a virtual city, there are a finite number of art assets and pixels, and not every house is open because of this. So with a finite number of assets and a potentially infinite number of players, how do you decide who gets a house or not?
Unless you have pretty robust systems in place for housing, I think leaving them open to players as you can see in various games is a viable workaround. I remember my WoW guild called "dibs" on two locations: a large tavern in Stormwind City Park (pre-Cata) and a smaller 2-story place off the PvP area in Ironforge. Of course, "dibs" is useless in WoW but for scheduling meetings and events, those were the two places we'd reference. One of the really enjoyable aspects of exploration is checking out town dwellings; in LOTRO there is an achievement for entering every house in one of the villages.
The question of ownership is answered by instancing, and many games with housing use this to solve the problem. But the interactive nature of city dwellings is very desirable, so there will always be a call for ownership this way that I imagine to be very difficult to balance.
One day this will happen. We'll get an amazing city like GW2's Divinity's Reach, where we can be actual residents and live in the houses (rather than all sharing the same instance as a "house").
I imagine some of the reasons that keep it from happening are performance related. The devs don't want to turn their capitals into the game's lag capitals. :P
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
It would be very cumbersome to play. How are players going to "commute" from the dungeon to their homes?
Either:
a) it will take a long time (think about a city of 50k and you have to find your house with just the speed of riding a horse, or
b) put in teleports .. and in this case, you may as well have instanced houses, or
c) people don't visit their homes because it is too much work.
And i don't see why non-instanced homes will add fun to a game.
So for me, very bad idea.
Well, the npcs have to live somewhere as well (if the game have any) so you can't make the entire city player owned.
But making some it is actually pretty easy, EQ2 did a lazy version where they instanced it so many people can live in the same place but most cities in EQ2 ain't particularly large. In fact many MMOs have very little room for people to actually live.
In a city like Divinitys reach is there really no problem far that as long as you force players to actually log in each month (and in a MMO 24 hours are usually 2-6 hours IRL so it would be once a week or so depending on the game) to pay the rent or players would hog the good places forever even if they quit a year ago.
It do take some work to design those houses, but if you also add player owned stores and inns it would certainly be worth the time.
Well, you do need a large enough game to have enough housing for everyone on the server, that is true. Many games have too small cities but far from all.
You could also besides rent add that certain houses needs enough faction that need to be kept up, a noble title, military rank or something else to keep. Or achivement points for that matter.
That some people live in crappy apartments seems realistic to me at least, particularly low level characters with little money and no title.
The barrier is that those "houses" are just a one-sided facade. It's not a problem of allocating logical space in a game world. It's one of creating the artwork for what should go inside of a house.
What you ask is kind of like looking at a painted piece of plywood designed to look like a house from afar as part of a movie set, and then asking why someone can't live in that house. There's no house there to live in.
Certainly, a game could build out interiors of a bunch of houses and then make the houses owned by players. But that takes away from other stuff, as your budget is finite. For example, do you think that Guild Wars 2 would have been a better game if they never created Frostgorge Sound at all, and used that work to create interiors of houses in the major cities and let a handful of rich players live there?
But that's where player customization comes in. Players could placed objects in the houses. Make the house more alive.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
...and where do you think those "objects" come from?
Who's the lucky one getting one of those houses? You make it sound like there's actually plenty of space for everyone to move in, but the fact is, even the biggest city in a mmorpg could only have around a hundred people living in it, and there's thousands of players.
Go count the houses or potential living spaces in stormwind, and take all the shops and inns out of the end number, and there's just a handful of houses to actually live in, it's extremely small place for a actual city. The game would have to be designed housing in mind and perhaps have more housing centered cities and towns all over the world map. Most developers just dont seem to think housing is a thing since there's not even instanced housing in most games?
I firmly support this idea. At some degree the cities are always a dead place. There are fake houses, pretty much like walking on a Hollywood set. The same goes for smaller villages and farmlands. Now I work in urban planning so I can see a lot of things in real life that MMO's could pick up. Why not learn from the actual world? A few notions:
1. Housing should be possible all over the world, in urban areas and rural areas. Make the housing economy player based. Yes, have taxes that are a bit of a gold leak, but give ownership over lands and buildings to players. Why not let a rich player build a multistory building on a plot in the city and rent out several apartments to other players? The "government" (devs) should be in control of the building regulations and conditions. And let players be able to sell their plots/buildings/apartments/etc to other players. Only the first transaction should be paid to the "government".
2. There should be price variations. Building or living in large cities should be rediculously expensive (as in the real world), for instance a regular player could only afford a small apartment. Living outdoors in the rural areas should give the opportunity for more land around a house, farming opportunities, etc.
3. For this to work there should be incentives that offer benefit to those living in cities. In the real world this usually means living close to services, provisions, shops, etc. With a travel system like in ArcheAge (heavy packs are difficult to transport) this could work. Having to transport materials or tools from a certain area to your bigger rural house should take a lot of time.
4. Create abilities for players to create shops (for instance guild shops in ESO), maybe crafting workshops. Be sparse with public provisions for crafting, or make them expensive. Let players compete by opening their own crafting workshop that's cheaper to use.
5. There should be no instanced housing. Ever. Housing is one of the ways to keep the world a living, breathing space. Let players customize the world. Effort on the devs side? Just to create a basic map that players can expand upon. Give players the tools. Customization options range from building in a specifically regulated area (cities, for instance building has to be a certain style) to open areas without regulations (rural farm lands). The inside should be fully customizable for the owner/rentee, etc.
6. In all cases: housing has to have more purpose than now. Give players things, items, etc. that benefit them (f.i. workshop tools) and they have to place somewhere to use. Beside that: perhaps a "well-rested" bonus with those that have a house. Others can buy it for short periods of times but this is more expensive (hotel system).
For now I am enjoying my time with Archeage and am seeing some good things in the way they treat the housing/farming system. Combined with their travel limitations I can see a system with great potential.
How awesome would it be that a small village on the outskirts of a large city over time turns into a suburbian area? Or a player building a "safe" building/fort in a contested area where players of his faction can meet up, craft, resupply, etc. Or investing in a plot of cheap farmland only to sell out bits of it later for players to build houses on?
Best Answer:
FFXIV:ARR is currently in the process of testing this concept out, and it has generated so much backlash from the players that they have an apology letter from Yoshida (the chief developer) addressed to them saying they are sorry for how they handled player housing.
The Problem:
You have tens of thousands of players and all of them will want an opportunity to own a house if that is an option in your game. At best, you'll have a thousand or so plots people can buy or own. Players want houses for their own personal amusement and do not want to compete with other players for the opportunity to own a house, but that is exactly what happens when you have static housing. On top of that, the demand for housing causes the price of houses to skyrocket, and people will actually buy up the virtual deeds to the house to resell them at grossly inflated prices. None of that is satisfactory to a player.
Realistic may be ... but it does not sound fun to me. What can you do with a small room? If i want to play the decorator, SIMS is a much better choice.
Plus, most MMOs are combat focus anyway. Giving me a room that i have to jump through hoops to get to does not sound compelling to me.
zero problem.
It just costs time and money.
as a programmer myself I can tell everyone with high level of confidence that its not a problem. I have done it in Neverwinter Nights 1. It is however time consuming just as any feature is.
ok here is the problem
1. Sims and Minecraft are at min. one of the best selling games of all time for any platform.
That should be good evidence that there is a market of taking MMOs and games beyond just fucking fighting.
Speaking for myself the first thing I look for in an MMO is the crafting engine and I got money coming out of my ass just waiting to spend on something.
I would say that there are a lot of people who would love to have a house in an exact place in a city.
As it stands now, in Archeage, don't you still have to "go to your house"?
Probably the same schism that brings us the "want a world" vs the "want a game" debate.
Since there are games that offer your own "housing" space (EQ2, Aion, LOTRO and more) it would be easy enough to have a set amount of housing interiors based upon neighborhood, size, etc.
First come first serve (just like Archeage's plots) and the house itself would be instanced. Someone doesn't want it? It goes back to being "backdrop" just like any house in a city. Someone wants to buy it? They can buy it.
It's really just a logical extension of any housing done in any game that offers housing.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo