Housing inside Home Instance
It’s unclear. In a few interviews and blog posts Anet has hinted that player housing is something they’re working on and that it has a pretty high priority for them, but so far we have had zero details about how it will work
I know there was few details on housing.
I just wanted to make the point to Anet. If housing is inside the home instance. Don’t make players homeless within the home instance.
Yes, I was wondering about this as well.
I am all for developing the home instance according to our adventures.
I would still really want my own house in my home instance
I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I think adding player housing within the home instance might be more complicated than it seems when you factor in lore and the current layout of the instances.
Other than the humans none of the races have conventional houses (at least by current Western definitions). They’re much more communal with entire social groups (families, warbands, krewes etc.) living together and often sharing that space with other groups. The sylvari might get a room to themselves, but the charr, asura and norn seem to have at most their own bed and a few shelves or a chest to store their things, which I suspect would disappoint a lot of the people wanting housing.
Humans don’t have that problem – it would be relatively simple to add a door and an interior to one of the existing houses and call it ours. The problem there is that our characters are split into nobles, commoners and street rats and it would be ridiculous for all 3 to share identical houses but incredibly unfair if one player got a tiny backroom and their friend got a mansion just because they preferred different storylines.
On the other hand it wouldn’t really make sense for them to live elsewhere as the first few Personal Story quests clearly establish that this is not just an instance to return to but actually the area where your character lives.
The only solution I can think of at the moment is to add a Personal Story arc where your character creates or claims their own home, either within the instance or elsewhere in the world. It might take a bit of juggling the lore for it to make sense but for those who care about lore it would be better than nothing, and it could also include choices which determine the sort of house you have (and maybe where in the world it is) and act as a sort of ‘tutorial’ to the things you can do with it, which would make it worthwhile for those who don’t care about the lore.
For example for human characters maybe an enemy from early on in your story resents what you did to them and the fact that now you’re the Pact Commander (level/story completion requirement) no one will even listen to their side, so they burned down (or seized or otherwise destroyed) your old home. The Queen is willing to offer you a new house in the city or you can choose to take the opportunity to move elsewhere. The story branches depending on what you choose and goes on to offer other customisation options.
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
Really, I’d prefer that if housing is ever done they do it in an instance of our choosing. I for one am not a huge fan of cities and would prefer my housing to be set in a more rural wooded area for my human character.
Seems to me like using the Mists as a story excuse for instanced housing would work since with the Fractals and WvW jumping into and exploring the Mist is becoming more common. Then they could just add in a mist portal to our home instance and guild halls whenever those are added as well.
(edited by Exploding Acorn.3754)