Player housing.

[castanjojfc]

First of all thank you for reading this.

I think it would me nice to include a housing system in the game and some other crafting systems, like for example, the hability to craft forniture to your house.

I was a Ultima Online player and one of the things that made me really enjoy the game where features like this. I bilieve that a Ultima Online\Diablo hybrid video game would be very interesting if not unique.

Please tell me what you think.

[hooby]

The only singleplayer/offline game that I know of doing something along the lines of player housing, was Neverwinter Nights.

You got a small castle there, where you could unlock new rooms and areas, that did provide you with certain optional bonus features that were not required to finish the game.

I very much enjoyed it - it was really cool to own a little castle that you could expand with new rooms, where all your companions would reside. That being said, it actually was not much different from what the spaceships in KotoR and Mass Effect do.

The "real" kind of player housing - meaning it can be individualized by placing furniture and decorating it - is a typical money-sink for MMOs. I love it there too - but I very much prefer not to have to pay monthly ingame money fees to keep my appartment - like some MMOs do it. That's extremely annoying imho.

Just now something else came to my mind - actually Minecraft and Terraria do feature sort of player housing too - it's different, but it definitely is player housing. I don't even want to know how many freaking hours I spent, building the perfect dwelling in those games...

So I can definitely see something like that working in a single player game too. I'm just not sure if the TQ-Engine can handle that kind of stuff - having a player dynamically place furniture around is something that the engine has to support - and I fear the TQ-Engine simply doesn't.
I'd love to see it - but even if the engine can do it, I believe it's rather a post-release feature, added as DLC or with an expansion. The main game probably should put all it's focus on getting combat and gameplay right.

[matthewfarmery]

from what we have seen of the housing module, we can only have one level, ground floor, not sure if we can have a second floor at all? so doing a castle would I think be very difficult for the engine, but I might be wrong, I wouldn't mind a player house of sorts, maybe as a quest reward and it starts off as a piece of land and as you progress throough the game, it gets built bit by bit, but how big the house will be or how complex it can be, Im not sure, the other issue is, once you are inside the house, it would have to switch to a dungeon view or something, as you won't see yourself if the house has a roof

so in general, I don't think player housing would work that well in this game

[JohnNamikaze]

I am not into the idea of having player housing since everyone has their own preferences of what they want in their house. It could be simple just to have a one floor house with a bed and other furnitures, but that would be too bland.

[Haaznahnuf]

Ok then, a one floor house, build against a cliff, with a rear cave/shelter/dungeon complex, and an upper exit, on the cliff's top to a private observatory and some siege defenses (like the Lookout Cave at Rhakotis, in TQ).

In stead of a hard-to-do in-game customizable area, I wouldn't mind a "dynamically" changing area, according to Player's progress on some quests. Here, in this research base / survivors' camp / New Eden, you would have various merchants and helpers, NPCs with remembrances of your deeds, some travelers (as the mysterious Professor X, dark gypsies, a wandering arbiter, etc)... , the Treasure Vault, the Achievements Hall, a town portal, a forge. In fact, the whole area would be an "Achievements Board" by itself, made easily accessible to modders, with place-holder areas, an experimental portal (which is powered when the given modded resource file is present)...

It would not be as a real personal housing, but still, an appealing* place where you may want to return (by some incentives), whenever you make progresses on your comprehension of Cairn's fate (call it "main quest"), and maybe at each and every moment you quit the game.

Some elements could be saved (in the savegame file), so that statics destruction, NPC deaths and added facilities would be kept from one loading to another. Because, there would be some everlasting fights (upon reloading), and if you don't defend YOUR ****** AREA, it will change for the worst.

Sorry, I am wandering off the topic.


*: by Cairn's standards...

[castanjojfc]

I was thinking more like a "The Sims" style of construction system. Since I believe this is going to be also an MMO, it would be great to incentive PvP in housing areas to make the game more hardcore.

And yes full loot upon killing a player would also be nice, but I guess that in this case it would be more convinient to have normal and "Hardcore" servers.

What do you people think?

[Rainier Wolfcastle]

Originally Posted by castanjojfc

I was thinking more like a "The Sims" style of construction system. Since I believe this is going to be also an MMO, it would be great to incentive PvP in housing areas to make the game more hardcore.

And yes full loot upon killing a player would also be nice, but I guess that in this case it would be more convinient to have normal and "Hardcore" servers.

What do you people think?

This game will not be an MMO. It is a single/multi player game and games are hosted on local computers there will be no game servers.

[matthewfarmery]

Originally Posted by castanjojfc

I was thinking more like a "The Sims" style of construction system. Since I believe this is going to be also an MMO, it would be great to incentive PvP in housing areas to make the game more hardcore.

And yes full loot upon killing a player would also be nice, but I guess that in this case it would be more convinient to have normal and "Hardcore" servers.

What do you people think?

no idea where you thought it was going to be an MMO, the game will be offline and there will be modding tools, something that a MMO will not do, so again I don't know where you think this is a MMO from?

[castanjojfc]

Originally Posted by matthewfarmery

no idea where you thought it was going to be an MMO, the game will be offline and there will be modding tools, something that a MMO will not do, so again I don't know where you think this is a MMO from?

You are correct, my bad. Anyway, I believe that if the game would support servers with 32 people, more or less, the concepts that I described could still be implemented, thus improving the PvP experience.

Cheers.