Player Housing (How? Why?)

I’ll get to part 2 of Ugly Truths in Gaming at some point, but I recently got into a discussion with some friends about the kinds of things they want to see in MMOs.

Top of the list, as always, was player housing. I have such a love-hate relationship with the concept. On the one hand, some people LOVE it. It’s their own personal in-game space that they can make their own and get that little extra bit of immersion going. People love it, and get super invested, goes the argument, so why not put it in? Everyone loves it, right?

Why Not Every Game Has Houses

Player housing is hard. Yes, I know other games have done it, yes I know it’s possible, but honestly no one has done it *right*, and it’s incredibly resource-intensive. I’ll get to the part of that sentence that makes most people angry in a moment. First, a little bit of tech:

In order to implement even the most basic player housing, you need a few things. First, you need the ability to create instances. Sure, Star Wars Galaxies, Shadowbane, and Ultima Online didn’t do this. I would point to the vast amounts of empty space (or ridiculous overcrowding) in both of those games, and comment that city planners exist for a reason, and players simply slam houses down wherever if given the opportunity, which is not something you actually want. Instancing, in this day and age, is not that difficult, except that for player housing you need to have a very specific instance saved per player. Not terrible, but it’s notable that that kind of data (i.e. saved instance data) doesn’t generally hang around more than a day or a week in most games, for things like raid lockouts.

You also need a complete in-game interface for placing the stuff that goes in the house. This is an entirely separate interface from any other part of the game, requires you to be able to dynamically generate collision and pathing information (so that your pet doesn’t walk through the chair you just placed, and neither can you), and needs an entire items database for things that you can display, how they work, how to orient them, and how they behave once they’re placed.

Then you need art, visuals for all of the stuff that goes in the house, that has to be tested with all of the other things that could go in the house to make sure there aren’t any unintended things that happen when they’re placed (like, for example, a little seam that makes you fall through the world). This usually involves thousands of objects, many of which are custom-made just for the player houses.

What Do I Get For All Of This?

The above is not an insurmountable amount of resources. A development team dedicated to putting in player housing can reasonably implement it, if they so desire. Unfortunately, one of the big things that comes up in design discussions when picking what things to add is “what are we giving up to get this?”

In the case of player housing, it can be something like “large group (raid) content”, or “PvP”, or “four to six full zones”, or “three player classes” or “crafting”. None of these are small things, so if you’re going to give one of them up for player housing, you’d better make sure that your return is more awesome than whatever you’re giving up.

I mentioned above that no one has done player housing right. What I mean by that is that no one has designed a model for player housing that makes it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s worth the trade-off. The pitfalls are as numerous as the benefits; player housing splits people up into little private instances, making cities feel empty, they’re huge resource hogs, only some percentage of players even care, and that number is smaller than feature X that would otherwise be removed.

The biggest one, and the one that I have the hardest time with, is that there’s no actual gameplay involved with player housing. You have this extra system for houses that is only used there, only used for decoration, and then you look around it or show it off to other people.

Housing That Matters

I don’t think it’s a hopeless cause, though. The system just needs to be designed to be more than just a dollhouse to show off one’s fancy décor. A house should be something that adds tangible value to your character, rather than simply a money and time sink. Imagine a game where part of it is colonizing new, uncharted lands. You need to forge out into the wilderness and make your home there. The instanced neighborhoods in LOTRO would be great for this, either little pockets in a larger landmass or little islands or both, but instead of simply a row of houses, there would be hostile mobs, resource nodes, everything a “real” zone has.

You could get hooks into the crafting, raiding, and questing systems as well, as you actually build your house and clear out hostile mobs from your territory. As you develop your land, you worry less and less about mobs coming and wrecking shop and more about the most efficient means with which to harvest valuable materials from your area. If you’re working collaboratively with several different players, you can clear an area faster and develop more quickly. Possibly, if you’re a devoted crafter, you hire other players to help you clear out the baddies while you craft what you need for the house. Dragon inhabiting your island? Get some raiders to take it down for you, and in return they get a nice place to hang out.

In The End

I think the biggest issue with player housing is that it needs serious evaluation from the design side. There simply hasn’t been a compelling design that’s been more than a little added bonus to the game rather than a fully-featured system, and it’s incredibly difficult to justify that kind of resource expense without a solid design plan and without appeal to a wide range of players.

Hopefully we’ll see a design that simply blows everyone away, for the industry as a whole to latch onto and build upon.

9 thoughts on “Player Housing (How? Why?)”

  1. oh my god I love the idea of a new zone, where you clear the area and forge anew and build your house. OMG I would love that in so many ways.

  2. FFXI has functional player housing. Each item you place in your space has an Element and a Strength associated with it. If you heavily weight your furniture with an Element, you would gain a “Moghancement” which provided a boon to your character (e.g. better crafting results).

    See: http://ffxi.somepage.com/itemdb/furniture.php

    Also, placing certain furniture unlocks quests. In order to increase your bank space, your Moogle needs to “sleep” on different Beds. He would enjoy the nights rest, become nostalgic, and ask for some additional items to go adventuring.

    Housing instances also let you teleport around the city (once you unlock the feature via quests). Some FFXI cities take 10 mins or more to walk across.

  3. “there’s no gameplay reason to visit a house.”

    Khaer hits the nail right on the head here. It’s all about gameplay, and as soon as gameplay is removed from the equation, the whole thing falls apart.

    I have a rant about flying mounts in WoW, and why they’re devastating to the experience, more than almost any other thing they’ve done, because it removes huge swathes of gameplay from the game.

    I kind of want to post something positive next, though, so that rant will sit until later, although I could rant about MMOs poisoning the well for days if given the chance.

  4. Great post it is nice to see some cost vs scope reality at least introduced into these discussions.

  5. You can always tell an Ariad post vs a Me post 🙂 Everyone knows I am extremely gung ho for player housing. What I want is the ability to have a house like the one I had in EQ2 here in Rift. To me EQ2 was pretty much the pinnacle of guild housing.

    DAoC tried housing neighborhoods near capitol cities, and all in all that was more of a nuisance than it was worth. Granted it was awesome for a role-playing aspect, and in many cases you got to know your “neighbors”. However having to traverse multiple housing zones just made the experience frustrating.

    Anyways for me, I want something like EQ2 but made more modular. You could do some amazing things with EQ2 housing, but problem is, none of it was really meant to be done. It involved painstakingly placing items and repurposing things like shelves to be turned into staircases. I loved how cool the housing could be, but it wasn’t terribly accessible to those who were not willing to in essence “hack” the system.

    Give me instanced player housing along the “appartment” model, with nice almost minecraft esc simple housing item placement and you will have a very very happy Bel.

  6. I’ve never been able to see the real sense in player housing. If I wanted to spend my time decorating, I’d play The Sims or some such. MMO’s are about interacting with other players and the environment. I had a house in EQ2. It’s where I kept my pets. I think I had a bed, table, chairs and a lamp and that was it.

    I can see some benefits to a guild hall, but I think it should be within a thriving city and really only contain storage and meeting space, maybe crafting space. Vendors, portals etc should still be outside the hall so you get the opportunity to interact with the community and not just your guild mates.

  7. Early EQ2, I believe, came fairly close to getting it “right.” And although the development of housing obviously was significant, since it existed at release, players never felt there had been a tradeoff, since there was never a time when developers appeared to work on player housing to the detriment of another game feature.

    It felt like an integral part of the game, and I would suspect that a majority of players – of casual players, at least – were quite proud of their house item quest rewards. Housing entrances were always in cities, so there was always traffic in the city, and the city housing locations felt natural – but then, EQ2 has always had very credible-seeming cities.

    There was a crafting skill specifically tailored to housing, and it was popular. Visiting other houses for social and guild events was common. There *were* gameplay interests in housing, in that initially you’d sell items by AFKing in your house (okay, that was one of the stupidest MMO design decisions ever) and later by using consignment boxes. Later there were house items that were portals to other zones, or temporary buff items, so visiting a house would have some gameplay value.

    There were serious irritations, too. The faction system meant that some housing was difficult or impossible to visit. I’ve spent a lot of time sneaking into other faction’s cities, but I don’t think it’s possible to take a good character to a Neriak residence without an accomplice. And the housing music is gruesomely repetitive; a few seconds of the major city theme, generally, that repeats ad nauseum. Why SOE has never added a toggle to turn off your home’s music is beyond me – especially when they introduced a huge range of musical snowglobes, which are pretty much worthless unless you disable repeating music.

    But that was the early days. Then SOE added guildhalls. And we rejoiced – but guildhalls destroyed player housing.

    Now there’s no need for a house for socializing. The guildhall housing portal amenity meant that not only did guildhalls leech all of the activity in cities, you didn’t even need to travel through the city to your door, you could just port from the guildhall. Those nice buff and portal items can be placed in the guildhall, so there’s no gameplay reason to visit a house. Other than to save broker fees, since consigment boxes still require a home.

    Carpentry is a pretty-much worthless profession now. Guildhalls still need decorating, but with the item count restrictions guild hall planners tend to be fairly miserly with requests. Where you might have had a free hand to design an entire home’s contents before, now there are probably several carpenters conforming to the wishes of a guildhall trustee.

    That isn’t to say that in the early days player housing was free from the problems you’ve listed, but it *did* feel like an integral, if limited, part of the game. Now it’s not even a diversion.

    At this point, I’m not even in favor of guildhalls in an MMO. They can increase the sense of community within the guild, but to the detriment of the overall game community. As raid buffing / prep stations they’re fine, but you could do that without a guildhall. I’d rather have vital cities, and places that *look* lived-in rather than an artificial instance. Oddly, I’d say this is an area where WoW’s design works much better than my favored games. Stormwind and Ironforge feel real, where Qeynos and Freeport feel dead, and Meridian seems like an oversized quest mechanic with no personality.

  8. I’d like to see Guild housing sometime. One of my issues right now is the splintering off of people according to level, so I never get to interact with the majority of people I want to. And it effects alts and such as well. I think having a Guild house (or pub 😉 would be an awesome way to interact, even briefly, with each other a bit more outside of raid groups.

    But yea, resource intensive as hell I imagine…

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