Gamescom 2012: Player Housing in RIFT

God help us…Trion amazes once again.

Looks awesome. I’m a mainly LOTRO player and I’m always scared developers will use a similar, awful hook-based system. But it looks like you can put stuff almost anywhere, which is great.

I hope they give us reasons to be in our house and ways and reasons to invite others to our homes. That’s always the downfall to me.

While I applaud their efforts and some of this looks very cool, I think they are missing the underlying psychological fulfillment players are looking for with housing. My first ‘house’ was in Ultima Online, where your house is indeed part of the landscape. You could hide in it to avoid PKs, battles occurred around it, you could create player cities, guilds and players could attack keeps (though on the structure, rather players that ventured out of them). DAOC had “instanced” housing and it didn’t take off. The reason is simple- that it just wasn’t fun to hang out in them- it wasn’t part of “the game”. They only served an initial “oh cool” feeling, maybe an occassional “come check out what I made”, but you didn’t actually “play” the game in the housing area. While it was likely less strain on development and the servers, I think it’s better to spend the extra time and provide players with the immersiveness they unknowingly seek. If 100 people can “own” the same property, just different instances, you would not feel connected to the game the same way you would in UO or SWG. You ultimately want to build something, have a plot of land or city that is yours. You want merchants outside of your house. Speaking of which, perhaps instead of the AH system, go back to the UO system of merchants in these instances, giving players a REASON venture around the world going into houses versus a silly achievement. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE Rift or I wouldn’t be writing any of this. But I’ve spend most of my life since UO days playing every game and don’t just listen to me, look it up in the laws of gaming by Raph. Hope this works out well. Would hate to see the DAOC implementation.

Love it!!

It looks more user friendly than LOTRO but not to the extent of Everquest, also agree that it would be way better to have the housing mingled in with the playing fields instead of in an isolated area few go to, haven’t found a game like that yet tho.