Guild Wars 2

Hello,

I would like to know some of your opinions on housing. I never really liked the idea, until i saw this.

I have never experienced housing in a game before, what do you guys think?
Is it something that gives you progression? is it something for GW2 or not and why?

the last time i had a “house” was in ultima online.
and it was quite cool.
oh, and in skyrim too, but they arent really customizable.

but nowadays, adding a house, customizable, is a lot of work.
imo they sould focus on guild house.
these would be cool.
they could be in instances and maybe guilds could “challenge” other guilds to fight on their turf.

I have a feeling that housing in GW2 will be, to some extent, similar to the HoM in GW but with more customization. A place to display achievements and rare weapons/armors, minis, pets, etc.
Honestly, my initial reaction to people calling for personal housing was “NOPE!”, but then I thought about it, and I really had little logical justification for it; it was just a gut instinct likely coming from there never being player homes in GW.

If ANet can deliver on attractive, unbuggy housing without having to compromise on working on other, more urgent, game issues, I don’t see how it would hurt the game any (provided there are no buffs associated with owning/filling up a home).

Eq2 has one of the best housing systems in all the mmo’s. Nowhere else does a player have more power to manipulate their own environment than that game. Even the tradeskills allow the crafting of home items. I’d love for ANet to implement something like that here.

The Divinity’s Reach neighborhoods just “scream” for player housing. Rurikton for me…if something like that ever gets added

I love housing in LOTRO. You could get recipes and craft specific items for your house or lawn. You even lived in a neighborhood which was instance so you felt like you had real neighbors.

I fully support the house system and would love to see it implemented. I would like to see guild houses first, but the house system would be great to see. Especially if it were a free teleport so you could use it as a central hub , kinda like HoTM to LA.

I want more MMOs to add houses… but at the same time I understand why no one does.

I think Ultima Online/Darkfall style houses are pretty awesome, and I think Aion found a decent in between for them. The downside to Aion is that there is a limited number, so there’s a serious lack of available units for everyone to live in :-P

My favorite housing so far has been from Runes of Magic. It was mostly a storage room for most people, but my favorite feature was the ability to put up mannequins that can wear spare pieces of armor you’ve collected. Even better is the ability to right-click the mannequin, and you’ll instantly swap all equipment with the mannequin.

We need guild houses, at the very least.

The more that people can adjust and decorate personal or guild/group housing, the more interesting and impressive they can be with what they somehow manage to create. I played City of Heroes, and some of the super group bases I saw in there were truly mind blowing. I also found that the more the group did with their base, the more important it became to them. In some ways, it became as much a part of the group as their name, almost a long-standing character in its own right.

I’d first like guild halls and then player housing.

Both of these are completely feasible, would make ANet money, and would be received with much anticipation by PvE players. I could also definitely see the benefit for PvP and WvW guilds as well.

Anything that makes a character or guild feel unique and makes the player feel invested in their character is welcome.

Player housing could even be in the mists if they don’t want to use the home instance. It would add a lot more room for customization.

I think it would be fun, but more plot-based content would be a higher priority for me.

I wouldn’t really use housing, but other people do. More options are always good.

i really miss having a guildhall to jump to, i think some kind of personal space within a guildhall would work, like an instanced cottage type thing, just to hang my trusty greatsword.

Honestly don’t care for either (house/guild hall) never bother using these places in other games, rather be with other people than in small area’s that only select people can enter.

well Anet did say we’d have a home instance… where’s that

I can’t view the video at work, but I’ll still give my opinion on how housing should work (never played GW1 so don’t know if this is similar to what it did).

But housing should be limited to guild structure only. They should be instanced so you can’t actually see the real structure until you go into that instance. When outside the instance it will look like a generic guild structure in a blasted, war-torn wasteland. Guild members would go to this structure and enter the instance and based on their guild, they would enter a zone with their guild’s actual structure.

A guild could then have a small instanced complex where individual members could have housing if need be, but until you entered the instance, it would look like 5 generic houses in a square (this is relevant later).

As a guild gains influence, xp, members, etc their guild castle/structure will grow. Some quests could give guild rewards that allow you to add small towers or some such nonsense to your guild keep/castle. So the more successful your guild is, the larger their castle will look to its members.

The point to all of this is Guild vs. Guild combat. When 2 guilds decide to attack each other, their 2 castle instances would be loaded into a larger instance with 1 castle on each end and a generic, randomly generated landscape between them. The idea would be to siege the other guild’s castle and steal some artifact kinda like CTF and that’s it. If you win, you get to add your enemies banner to your banner hall so all your guild members can see how your guild did. You would also gain random guild tokens that could be cashed in etc for random things as time goes on.

the guild that lost doesn’t lost their castle or anything and they would still get XP, Infuence and such based off how well they did so guilds would still be encouraged to participate. Perhaps winners would get 5 tokens and losers would get 1.

After a few months have gone by and the guilds have ranked up on their server and such the above mentioned generic keep where people would go to zone into their guild hall instances would be replaced by an external view of the top 3 castles as a sort of ranking system showing off the best guilds. These castles would look just like their respective guild keeps and once a month these castles would be refreshed to show off the current top 3 and what their respective castles look like.

I have never had housing in an MMO but I would love it in GW2.
It can be instanced I don’t care as long as your actual house is customizable.
New crafts to go with it like carpenter and weaver would also be great.
and I would love a space to put all my armours and cool souvenirs from the world

Characters already have housing, the home instance. The feature just isn’t fleshed out yet.

It’s the instance that serves as your “base” during the personal storyline, it depends on your race. And it’s even called “(Home)”. That’s technically where your character lives.

Owning a house would be an interesting feature, I think the game “Runes of Magic” did a pretty good job as well, at least for a “start.” Was a little annoying seeing about 40+ people standing in front of ONE npc trying to get into their house, so perhaps an option on the “Hero” menu below the achievements (or move the achievements tab down one.) A plot of land and many customization options would be pretty cool, as well as allowing friends to visit.
Simple thing with no stat bonuses but would be fun to see what different kinds of homes people come up with.

Also as a side note, this is how crafting should have been done as weel. A guild would buy crafting merchants and would be allowed to queue up work for their NPCs to do. The NPC’s would have a % chance to make everything sub-legendary in quality and any items of value specified by their guild leader would be sent to the guild bank. The rest could be automatically put on the trading post.

This way you could have the above mentioned guild tokens be used to buy a Dwarf Craftsmen or something that has a higher % chance to create exotic heavy chests. Or a Asura craftsmen with a higher % chance to create an exotic gun etc etc.

This is how it worked in Shadowbane and I absolutely loved it. And since the economy in this game is already a waste of time, it could be implemented quite easily.

I came from ff11 and its housing was kind of meh over all i did not use it other then adding more storage spaces. In this game i find my self in WvW most of the so i would never see my house so it will do nothing for me unless they add in more spaces to store things or even a growing system like ff11 where you can grow goods to sell.

Thanks all for your replies I had no idea so many games had housing ^^

As a roleplayer, in-game housing would… would… well, let’s just say someone would have to catch me if I ever saw it announced in patch notes/future patches. :P

Absolutely a YES to guild halls and player houses. It would be awesome to have a customisable house. Ideally with more bank storage, it is a house after all.

I am a firm believer that the more facets you bring to every game grants it increased longevity.

While I may not enjoy every aspect of a game, say for instance “crafting.” The more you offer the more I may find something that intrigues me and ties me to a game.

Housing offers one such attachment. It also benefits by providing a source to remove income from the game and balance the economy. People stop hoarding vast amounts of wealth which causes inflation.

Housing opens up crafting options beyond personal attire; now craftsment can make chests as well as bags; wardrobes for clothing and other mundane functional furniture and decorations.

Housing besides storage, also provides for other aspects of the game such as crafting locations or roleplaying.

Simply making it instanced similar to what was found in EQ2 would be a great option. It wouldn’t take too many modifications to add doors to a major city or outlying inns/villages to provide a people with a portal for their abode.

My favorite City of Heroes character had a solo Supervillain base that was her own private Batcave, and it was rad. The Captain Mako Appreciation Society and Scrapbooking Club had a footprint big enough to have multiple distinct themed RP environments set aside – the part that looked like a city park with a small boardwalk full of shops and games, the part that looked like a bunch of grungy storefronts and back alleys, the part that looked like the exterior of a huge mansion, the part that looked like a secret sewer lab for mad scientists, the prison, the trophy room, the swimming pool, the labyrinth, yeah. It had more storage than I could ever fill, teleporters to all Villain and Co-op zones (yeah, I was a badguy), medical facilities, and a giant heap of Base Raid PvP stuff that was just for show since they disabled Base Raids years before the game was killed, but still looked awesome. It was pretty sweet.

Contrast that with my FFXI Mog House, which was a tiny single-room apartment with inflexible rules for item and object placement, which I couldn’t invite other players into… but wouldn’t have had room for them if I had. It was pretty much a locker to keep your time-sensitive private crafting projects, like growing plants for magic crystals or trying to hatch chocobo eggs. It sucked, but I still spent a ton of time in there arranging things until it at least looked OK. The biggest problem with it was that placed furniture still ate inventory slots.

What would be really ideal for me in Private or Guild Housing is access to NPCs like the Bank and Trading Post, so I could tend to my business without being in a huge swarm of people. Sometimes I like to play on my laptop, and it starts to strain when it has to load more than a couple dozen other players.

Guildwars 2 “housing” IF ever implemented will be an interesting thing. Can we lay on beds? sit on chairs? organize the way we want?

How will they be protected from other players stealing? will their be events that tie into our house? will they cost 500 gold?

Exciting I say, exciting

I think housing is a great idea however there would need to be many different designs of each object, but not enough that the game starts being called ‘The Sims Wars 2’!

Having NPCs sell furniture could be a great goldsink for the game but having the ability to craft items out of things you find could be something very special indeed! Imagine getting together four very rare planks of ‘flamewood’ that fell from the ceiling of CoF after defeating the final boss and then crafting yourself a ‘flamewood throne’ using other bits of wood and orichalcum and gold….

Finally a use for crafting!

the only issue I have with this is the fact we cant sit on furniture as it is or lay down on beds…..so whats the point?

As others have mentioned, I have zero interest in something like housing, but I’m fine with them adding it if it will give other players something to enjoy and if it doesn’t take much/any time away from developing other parts of the game

I don’t really care about it unless it offers something like extra storage, but I’d rather that extra storage just be added to my vault instead.

lotro, which is the game I previously played, did a pretty bad job with housing, so my view is probably jaded a bit. lol

I like the way houses work in Rift. They take a piece of the open world and turn it into a insistence house. Works much like the single player missions in this game. So it wouldn’t be to hard for Anet to do something similar.

As long as it’s instanced. One of the worst things about Ultima Online was that you had a hard time getting to some areas between all the houses and almost never felt like you were actually out in the wilderness because every single space big enough (at least on more populated servers) was crammed full of houses.

I think putting it into the home instance would be logical since the personal story makes it quite clear this is actually where your character lives. (At least for humans, charr and asura, I’m not so sure about norn and sylvari.)

An alternative would be instanced areas inside the racial cities, like the asuran dorms or houses in divinities reach. That way you could have some choice over where exactly you live (and maybe could live in another races city).

Or they could be part of/connected to guild halls.

The main thing for me is they need to be instanced, not scattered around the open world in whatever rediculous place people can think to put them. But on the other hand there should also be an option to visit other players houses. Maybe like the HoM in GW1 where you could visit each others versions while in a party.

I’d love to see a mix of SWG and Skyrim housing.

I don’t see a RMT game offering much though, other than fancy furniture we can’t use.

DDO had housing as well. Storage chests that you could add as well as improve were a big help!!

Player housing does not need to be just a fluff add on. Wildstar and Archeage have it right. I really hope this is added and some depth to it Pls. IMO this is a must have and can really round out the game and bring in new fans that like this kind of thing and kept people like my wife playing who is a fan of making things purdy.

I think housing should dip its hands into crafting, exploring, and maybe combat to tame an area to plant your house. Just my two cents.

Will it come with buy mode and lifetime wish?

I really don’t care if they institute personal housing or not…

but I really really really miss Guild Halls from GW1, with the “skirmish” mode so you could duel your guildies…

Guild Halls over houses and a new hall of monuments for display of achievements please.

I like the idea of housing… having them in UOL and also Horizons (Istaria) (great game)… In Horizons… you would have ot build them (gather mats or hire people)… it was a pretty good set up… you could put down a price for X and people could come and add it… thus using their skills (since its hard to be master of everything)….
Guild plots cost more than house plots etc…

emikochan.8504:

well Anet did say we’d have a home instance… where’s that

It’s already in the game, like I’m a human ranger and Salma is my “home district” and it’s an instance.

If you’ve done your personally story, you’ve gone there many times.

On housing, yes!!!! Runes of Magic and LOTRO had great housing but EQ2 had my favorite.

They had different sizes you could choose from to suit your character from 1 room little spaces to large palatial bi and tri level homes with patios and everything.

Tailors made curtains, throw rugs, cushions, wall hanging. In GW2 all the professions could make something, even cooks could make placeable food for tables, sideboards, meat on spits in the fireplace that another profession could make.

The possibilities are endless.

A huge yes to housing!

This topic is seriously beating a dead horse. Most MMO’s, this is one of the most requested features including this one but as always it isn’t a development priority and is something they would like to add in the future. For most MMO’s that future never comes. What I can guarantee, it will not come for free and will likely be included in a paid expansion which isn’t even on the radar atm.

More to my point, I have come to the conclusion that hoping sandbox features get added to a themepark games is a exercise in futility. These games were never advertised as sandbox games so hoping for these features especially in a reasonable amount of time is an unrealistic expectation. I will also go as far as to say it really isn’t fair to expect it out of a themepark. Since every game I have played since DaOC, the one feature I want the most is housing but time and time again it isn’t a dev priority.

Going forward, I feel it is far more constructive to just play themeparks for what they are, themeparks and set your sights on the next AAA sandbox title. One of which was just announced today for us here in NA. Until then I will just enjoy GW2 for what it is and not make it into something it was never advertised to be.

Last MMO I played that had housing was DAoC, and I have missed it ever since then. Wildstar and ESO are the two MMOs I am keeping an eye on at the moment.

Archeage just announced their NA publisher today…..

Yeah, I’d like housing. Like others though, I would prefer Guild Halls and then Housing

Ashanor.5319:

Last MMO I played that had housing was DAoC, and I have missed it ever since then. Wildstar and ESO are the two MMOs I am keeping an eye on at the moment.

Yup, yup!

I am actually excited about what little I’ve heard of ESO.

It’s sad these newer games have even less features than games 10-15 years ago, these pretty graphics do nothing for us.

Yes… i agree newer games have less features… more graphics… wish they would bring some back… hell before graphics I played MuDs that had housing…

Raf.1078:

Eq2 has one of the best housing systems in all the mmo’s. Nowhere else does a player have more power to manipulate their own environment than that game. Even the tradeskills allow the crafting of home items. I’d love for ANet to implement something like that here.

The Divinity’s Reach neighborhoods just “scream” for player housing. Rurikton for me…if something like that ever gets added

Good, because I would really want an aquarium with skales and a kennel for mini Logan:)

Only MMO I’ve had a house in is in Aion. And only reason I liked it, was because a) i could store excess stuff there outside of bank storage and b) it gave you a exp buff when you logged out there. I never really got far enough into the harvesting plant aspect that it had there, so not sure what that was about.

I don’t really think we need it (wouldn’t complain if we got it though), but I would like to see them make more use of the home instance. It is pretty bare bones and would like to see it change a little bit. As far as the Sylvari one all I have is the quaggan hanging out in the pool there. Only thing that is different since finishing the main story. Overall, you have no reason to ever go in there other then for the main story quest line. And even that comes to an end after the first part of the story.

The frame work is already 50% laid for Rift style houses.

Remember how in story mode had insistence’s in the open world.

Raf.1078:

Eq2 has one of the best housing systems in all the mmo’s. Nowhere else does a player have more power to manipulate their own environment than that game. Even the tradeskills allow the crafting of home items. I’d love for ANet to implement something like that here.

The Divinity’s Reach neighborhoods just “scream” for player housing. Rurikton for me…if something like that ever gets added

Agreed 100%. Housing needs to be as customizable & functional as possible. Guild Halls in EQII are the most epic depiction of guild Achievement I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately I think that if Anet does Housing it will be pretty lame. I’m not sure why, but they seemed to do customization half-way. Can’t dye weapons, can’t pick voice tone or stance, personality does nothing, they have no capes & a pathetically small handful of back items, no mounts or secondary visual customization. The “Home Instances” are already completely forgettable, not chosen by you & have no customization. Even GW1 guild halls had zero customization.

Leablo.2651:

Characters already have housing, the home instance. The feature just isn’t fleshed out yet.

that’s a galactic understatement..

Leablo.2651:

And it’s even called “(Home)”. That’s technically where your character lives.

My Norn lives in someone else’s house? I wonder if Knute Whitebear knows. It’s also strange that I live in a market with no place to sleep, eat & people walk right through all the time.
& The Asura live at the Snaff Memorial? interesting..

I want guild halls & houses to be good, custom endgame goals, but I have really no hope.