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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Player housing a not taken seriously?
Obamanizer
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I've been seeing things on other games like ff14 housing and seeing just how crazy the customization is, and its a MASSIVE part of people feeling really attached to the world and then I look at what I've seen on Q & A about ashes housing and it seems like it will be very limited...... I just wanted to voice that I believe it's being overlooked and may end up being a huge missed opportunity if it goes the way it's planned.
Full freedom placement should be industry standard. And you should have the ability to grant access to other players to your housing inve tory of placeable objects so they can design your place for you as that's a wing of economy all on its own and in turn would drive the furniture economy sales as well.
Full freedom placement should be industry standard. And you should have the ability to grant access to other players to your housing inve tory of placeable objects so they can design your place for you as that's a wing of economy all on its own and in turn would drive the furniture economy sales as well.
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Comments
As I guy who has spent countless hours on both Wildstar and FFXIVs housing, I can tell you that free-placement and clipping are what makes a good housing system.
I can't remember what live stream it was stated in, but I have heard the developers say that they really like to see what players can come up with by abusing placement and clipping to create new objects from housing objects in other games.
This makes me hopeful that the devs will allow object clipping and maybe even some scaling like in Wildstar.
Outside that, you can save your house layout, so you don't have to spend 300 hours placing things back down when lose a house then get a new one later.
Things sound promising. Just the fact that the developers have acknowledged the value of clipping gives me hope that the housing will be good. It would be a tragedy to get a system where placement is strict just for the sake of neatness.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
That is the best part about a good housing system. You don't let quality mess it up. The thing that makes these systems good is the jank. Being able to place objects inside each other and at strange angles. The stuff that gives a QA department nightmares.
Cutting corners in this case will make housing top teir.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I thought NW & BDO did access to others reasonably well and I especially liked the touch NW did by making the house with the best gear score on show for all to see.. but still allow access to any other player`s house.
I haven`t played ESO in a few years now, it was reasonable but do not remember about access to others.
1000% agreed about the lions in New World. What were they thinking?? "Here's this insanely dark, mysterious and dangerous setting. So anyway let's shove a rainbow lion into it that clashes with every single aesthetic and town design in the game."
At 16:45 they start showing a video regarding Freeholds. Then they talk a bit about them after.
Bear in mind these are from a year ago and they only had 1 kind of furniture in at the time so they look similar.
While in game housing is not a big thing for me I get that other people like it and seems Like Intrepid does as well. Will be interesting to see longer term how "janky" stuff is or is not as far as placement.
While I do talk a fair amount about that game, housing is the one thing that it absolutely gave to the genre as a whole. While it wasn't the first game to do player housing, it was by far the first game to make it a valuable feature of the game.
Players in that game can have up to 25 houses each (with enough variety that some players wish they could have more), and there is an un-exhaustive list of current housing items that is at 12.5k right now (the game has 120 different glass bottles you can place in your house).
It also has full x.y.z movement and rotation of items in houses, along with essentially limitless (for all practical purposes) resizing of items - as well as allowing clip or no-clip.
As a number of Ashes developers are from EQ2, especially in the art department, EQ2 is the standard I am personally setting for housing decorations in Ashes.
Nobody is talking about it because no one played that game! XD
Jokes aside, I remember I had some plant monster in my house in EQ2. That thing was sweet AF.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Sounds like the item from the EoF expansion - you could feed it specific items and get back collection pieces.
Was one of the functional items in houses as opposed to just decorative.
I forget, I want to say this was sometime around 2006-08... I remember the plant came from some bonus items when I bought the game. There was like 9 dvds to install it at the time. I think the plant was stronger than me and killed me or something. Like, I was not keen on going back into my house after I put that plant down. Very vague memories here. LOL
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I doubt we'll have that much freedom in ashes but I'm hoping we can clip, scale and rotate furniture freely. (within reason)
I have a guild house in FFXIV and the majority of decorating time was spent glitching items to sit on top of tables/counters. Just...let us place furniture freely. Let's us just grab and lift them because that's what houses look like.
I shouldn't have to follow a tutorial to place a vase of flowers ontop of my fireplace lmao
Star Wars Galaxies (which came out the year before) would like to have a word with you.
Housing would not have been a mainstay in MMO's if SoE had stopped at the SWG model. It was seen as being too clunky, too amateur to make it in to a mainstay of mainstream MMO's.
It was a building block towards a solid foundation, rather than a solid foundation in itself. EQ2 refining it (using a number of the same developers - it is worth noting), is what made other developers eventually look up and realize that it could be a mainstream component of MMO's.
Yours truly was very much hoping that since at least two of the 5 panel members from the 2018 expo were veterans of Star Wars: Galaxies, that we'd have more free-placement, but this doesn't seem to be the case. In addition, it's not looking like every single object in the game world will be a decoration-enabled piece that you can free-place as decoration; I really, REALLY wish it was this way, instead, as it made for some AWESOME and out-of-this-galaxy decoration in SWG.
That sounds like opinion to me, based on a personal preference.
(I'm not slamming on EQ2; I played it and liked it.)
SWG had real world housing rather than the pre-made instancing in EQ2. It was more advanced, where EQ2 was a step back. You actually built a house from blueprints, placed it on a lot in the world, and could travel around it from the outside. The economy was player-based and stores were located in player-owned buildings. It was far more important in SWG than EQ2.
Also, players built cities that were collections of player-made and player-based buildings. Those player cities were almost as important and useful as NPC cities. (Unfortunately they never let you put everything in those player cities which was a place where SOE made a mistake in my opinion.) EQ2 didn't have anything like that, because it was a completely different game; SWG was mostly a sandbox (literally one on Tatooine, hehe) and EQ2 was more of a themepark (and was really good at it). It doesn't mean one game was better than the other, but in a sandbox game the elements that a player creates and controls (like housing) are infinitely more important.
SWG housing wasn't clunky and amateurish. EQ2 let you dabble in psedo-housing, while SWG was the real deal. It allowed XYZ placement of items just as you said EQ2 had, and full rotation. (I remember taking a little stuffed bantha toy and making it so that it sat on my bed by making it "float" so that it looked like it was sitting on it.)
Again, nothing against EQ2 which was a decent game, but your praise of housing in the game is nonsensical. It replicated everything SWG did but at the same time it was only a shadow of it. It's like calling someone a pioneer for following the same trail as a previous pioneer and only going halfway.
It was - I'm sure you'd agree - a bit janky.
Even Archeages housing was a bit janky, due to player placement. There is no way a Blizzard or ArenaNet would have something like that in their game.
Also, I don't think you looked in to EQ2 housing quite enough. You praise SWG for allowing you to place a toy on your bed how you want - yet people in EQ2 in the early days were taking upwards of 100 items and resizing and rotating them in order to make a single aquatic display in their homes (before they added aquarium items).
Edit to add; that thread is not even close to the most impressive things I have seen players do in EQ2 housing. It was simply the first example of a multi-item build I came across that still had all the pictures in place.
EQ2 housing was nice. It did well for what it was.
However it wasn't innovative. Other MMOs don't owe it a debt. It didn't open a whole world for housing that other MMOs emulated. Pretty much everything you said in your first post is untrue.
I get that you like EQ2. I like EQ2. It was a really great game. I have very fond memories of it. But it wasn't in any way a pioneer in housing. Nobody owes it a debt because it didn't bring anything to the industry.
It might have fixed some of the jankiness of what SWG had, but that was at least in part through limiting what you could do with it. It only had a fraction of the ambition of SWG, it took far fewer risks, and (I'm sure) it also learned from some of the mistakes of SWG (because I'm sure many of the same people worked on both games). But there's a very good reason why it's not often mentioned in discussions of housing; it's because it didn't really bring anything new to the table.
(Keep in mind I have really fond memories of my little house in Freeport and my pet duck. And I did think my house in that game sure looked better than any of my houses in SWG. The game was newer though and had better graphics.)
EQ2 proved that player housing can be a polished feature.
Before it, developers didn't think it could.
After it, they knew it could.
Houses in aoc will have tools that you actually use for progression, not just decorations you picked up effortlessly and you place around.
Not a boi but generally yes in so much as.the apartments and static housing will have different sizes. Freeholds supposedly level up in size over time as well. Layouts are a less known detail.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_housing
Yeah, there will be different sizes for freehold houses to choose from. Don't think we have an official quote about different layouts.
In-node houses had different layouts and sizes in Alpha1 already.
The size of the freehold is fixed and doesn't increase over time iirc.
Freeholds level up (or at least are stated to do so), but there is no details given as to what this actually means.
A mansion sized home may occupy up to 50% of a freehold plot.[43]
It is more clear sounding in the actual live stream. Not 100% clearly confirmed, but it's pretty much so.
That is referring to the half acre not the house itself. It's more clear in the actual live stream. Freehold building footprint size is determined by blueprint. No reason to assume this doesn't include housing given my other wiki citations.