Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Dark Age of Camelot also had good housing, at least in the sense of customizing it (the housing area itself was vast and not easy to locate houses), such as decorating the outside, both the house and the grounds around the house. Being able to add an NPC consignment merchant to sell goods acquired in the game was also a nice touch.
I have to be able to link items together to a base item so that when I move the base, it moves everything else. Bookshelves, cluttered tables, fences, any manually made structure shapes. All these need to be linked for convenient moving.
Other tools I like for housing involve being able to add simple animations or basic state trigger commands to some objects. aka a cosmetic pet being set on a basic walk path, or a light turning on opening a door.
A hefty item limit per house is needed if non-interactable clutter objects are needed to make a home feel lived in.
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As far as furniture goes, I love being able to show off trophies from dungeons and raids I’ve cleared. Plants and other landscaping options are good to have, lots of different styles of furniture to make a variety of looks. Depending how the freeholds work, structural pieces would be great to have to add additional cosmetic-buildings outside the standard functional-building cap.
Skyrim's housing system has zero creativity involved. You make three decisions on what rooms you want, then fill out all the furniture. This is technically player housing, but it's not the player's house. They did nothing to make it theirs.
Runescape player housing hits a good mix of form and function, even if it splits everything into big square rooms. I don't like that it's incredibly expensive to decorate.
When I briefly played maplestory 2 I really liked their housing systems. They make all the basic options free and give you reasons to decorate and put time into your house. You can go for complete practicality or make it look super nice, but if you manage to do both and advertise your house, you'll have lots of people coming through.
Easy color swapping would be good. Easier to personalize a prefab bought/traded by players.
And permitting clipping of objects. I have seen some seriously creative constructs by players that would no-clip a bunch of random things together and make something they could not if snap-to was used.
Those little elements of making the characters and their minions feel more involved is something that almost no game on the market has handled, and it's the sort of thing I think a lot of people would appreciate. Even if you can't manage it for the Summoner minions, the cosmetic pets or animals acquired through taming and animal husbandry may well be doable for this sort of thing.
The ability to turn, rotate, raise, lower, and scale in size for any item in the game. The ability to ignore both clipping and gravity if you desire (but the game should also have the ability to enable both). The ability to make any of these changes easily on a very fine scale is also important.
Additions to that would be the ability to create "sculptures" of multiple items, and be able to lock them in together so that they act as a single item rather than as a collection of items. This includes teh ability to move, resize, or even save or clone these sculptures as a player sees fit.
The ability to snap items together at corners or other specific points would also be useful, as long as it is fairly easy to use, and also easy to turn off.
With these tools in place, the only real thing left that is needed are options. The more items the better. The more housing options the better. The more content rewards that can be placed in housing the better. The more lore books the better. The more usable items the better. The more lighting options the better.
1. Secret guild lairs in secret locations (e.g. in mountains or in a portal, but secret and not obvious how to obtain)
2. First person camera where body is visible from inside the players head (do this by zooming camera into head) where body is more visible for added immersion and hanging out.
3. Fortress player housings in the mountains
4. Treehouse non instanced player housings in a large world tree village, or something like that, either in a village inside the tree trunk or in a village the branches and leaves
5. Housing decor items with purpose (teleport objects, storage boxes, boxing rings, trapdoors, secret hidden rooms)
Want really badly
5. An empty court house for mock trials to complement the bounty system
6. Bounty gold collectable on kill for each corrupted player, or a token redeemable for gold.
7. Construction or carpentry skill to make furniture for houses
8. Butler NPCs who can take things to the bank for player housings.
9. Some form of permanent instanced housing if possible.
Related to housing material and items
9. Special wood and ore only obtainable in high level areas or preferably just PVP locations.
10. Scrolls, crystals or runes that contain single use spells and an enchanting/imbuing skill which allows players to imbue objects with single use spells like teleports or heals (these would all have a 30 second cool down to prevent the use of multiple teleport scrolls or runes consecutively).
Questing
11. Narrative quests that are similar to Runescape's quests in their structure. (and require development of certain skills to a certain level to achieve eligibility to accept the quests)
Having possibility to place any object on free surface would be a dream, if I want to partition my 2 square house I can do so as long as I have the materials and free surface.
I would really like my house to be a place that's useful. A Man cave where I can have my tools in good order and use them, store items and rest.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
@Schlol and @Nyxxa had some stellar suggestions that I would want, and in addition to the various taxidermy trophies and gear mannequins everyone has mentioned, could we get a huge world map for the wall that would "fill in" as our character explores? I think it would be a great way to showcase a character's exploration (or lack thereof).
Finally, I am very interested in the possibility of linking décor to other systems. Could scribes craft in game books to fill bookshelves, or food buffs be limited/increased in how many people they affect by having a feast table versus small table? Finally, would it be possible to have décor influence rest XP? For instance battle trophies giving a combat buff, religious symbols increasing NPC renown, book shelves increasing crafting, or some variation. For me, effects like this would tie a fun aesthetic into a place that actually relates to my characters adventures.
Im not saying that all furniture and decor need to have a specific purpose beyond looking good.
But having more items in your living space that you can interact with and haves a specific purpose. Like resting bonus in bed, cooking stuff, maybe some old school music box that plays different tunes, sitting by the fire and read a book to improve something or get a temporary buff. Would provide more of a reason for players to actually use and visit their home.
So, snapping into place, limited turning of furniture, because if I can turn it into every degree and place it everywhere I know I'm going to spend ages just trying to align everything.
And I'd like to be able to save multiple blueprints of the decorated house, so you can easily switch between a couple of interiors you've decorated.
I understand some people just view homes as a utility but I have always appreciated the softer side of MMORPGs. I appreciated socializing, exploring, building, and crafting sometimes more than fighting or raiding. Having the ability to create a completely unique space with freeform placement sounds great.
tldr:
1. Freeform coordinate placement system with written out XYZ, angle, and tilt coordinates for precise decoration placement.
2. The ability to clip or noclip decoration so some can have physical presence and some items can be stacked and arranged on top of and inside each, other allowing more fluid capabilities.
3. Allow us to visually scale decorative items in-game. Maybe a painting looks okay on a wall but it would look better if it was 13% bigger. Things of that nature.
― Plato
Like a screenshot from the sky that happens the moment you win the attack or defense, with a neat little description.
"Metropolis of XXXX. Conquerd at date XX.XX.XXXX"
Another thing i haven't seen yet in other games is a black board to put up on a wall in my house so i can place a to do list on it.
Hell if free form drawing is possible on it, i see raids using it for strategy meetings.
The board itself could loose durability while using it and the chalk used to draw could be consumables to give another thing for artisans that need constant production.
We used to do this in Discord in the last game I played, but it would kinda cool to have a more RP way of doing it!
I would love Items that was easy and cheap to get in games. But also items that was super rare and you could show them off with pride.
I would also be okay with cosmetic skins from the cash store. If it was just a skin of what you already had. Etc a bed.
Lots of color options and different styles.
Oh and shiny flowers like in ESO. Love making a beautiful garden that glows at night!
Of course with a better handling
Ranking metrics perhaps measured by a number of means in line with the type of node they are associated with.
That being said, if i take Ark's building design as a reference, i hated clipping. Make a preset position for items and then let people rotate, lower or raise to their hearts content.
Also, for freeholds if possible, i'd like to see the ability to make shrines dedicated to families with busts or manequin as was already requested.
Have a nice one
The idea is that I can use surface snapping to place a bunch of objects on a surface and snap major components together, then I can freely toggle off snapping and lock movement along certain axes to precisely place objects within each other from there.
FFXIV doesn't do that exactly but does at least have the option to store furniture items in a separate unused housing storage area once something has been crafted, so you can pick from and place (or not place) items from that list, which is helpful.
I know it's the more traditional way to go to have the crafting bench/inventory method, but it's also annoying to have chest upon chest of unused furniture because you're guessing what will look good in a space only to find that it doesn't and needs to be stored. It's even worse when games do this with already limited storage/inventory space. I swear that half my chest and retainer storage is eaten up with random chairs and decorations in ESO.
-Like a hunting wall of the beasts killed
-trophy room of armor collected etc
In general, my favorite home building was City of heroes and Star Wars Galaxy.
-I love you can customize the home so much with several different items and change the layout of walls etc.
-Also, love how you can move any item in your inventory and place it in the home. So you could make a dinosaur out of random items.