Home away from Home?
Ah yes, player housing. Once a wonderful concept but oh how painful in execution. Just take a gander to my left for an example of a player community from SW: Galaxies. Doesn’t look that bad right? Now imagine this vista…everywhere. That’s Galaxies at it’s worse. At it’s best is often Lord of the Rings with it’s separately spawned Player housing zone. Or Phantasy Star Universe’s player apartments.
But what can we expect from The Old Republic? Will the Hero Engine allow for endless communities of player homes? Or will Bioware ditch the idea all together for quest driven zones? Early on there was rumor that TOR was going to have a monotized micropayment method. Does that mean they might charge the player for housing in game? What other little features could they tease out with such a method?
We can hope that they’ll offer some place to store your gear, trade your guild loot, and meet to talk up the next raid/mission. We here at the Holocron have a booth reserved for us on Nal Hutta, you’ll have to get your own from the Hutts.
I LOVE player housing, guild halls etc … I really really really hope we can have player housing.
If you’ve been around the Official The Old Republic Forums, you’ve probably seen the ideas such as ‘Guild Capital Ships – which is a big space ship owned by a Guild, and each member of the guild can have their own room on the ship (player housing)’. I think this is how BioWare should do it (I guess that’s if they are having space flight/combat though … but I think they will, to me a Star Wars MMO without space is like a Pirates of the Caribbean MMO without the sea). Each member of the guild could pay rent to the guild’s bank for their room/house on the ship, and it helps build a community. The guild can have events on it’s ship, have it’s on cantina, friends can live next door to each other and people can own shops.
It would be AWESOME!
PurpleCliff
I really think they should go with ships for housing. Maybe instanced and accessible through the nearest space port or something.