Monday, March 10, 2014

SWTOR Player Housing

The big news coming out of SWTOR last week was a teaser video revealing that player housing was on its way.  The video, found below, did not really convey too much information about the new game system.  The mere knowledge that they will be putting in a housing system is pretty exciting though.

It does leave me with some questions.

Decoration.  Will decorating be free form or hook based?  SWG, Wildstar, and EQ2 would be two examples of free form placement.  They really let players go crazy and create some amazing things.  Hook based just let players put things in pre-defined places.  LoTRO went with this system and I don't think it was very popular.

Functional.  Will houses be purely cosmetic, or will they have some useful function?  In the video it shows a mailbox in the house,  so it seems like it will be somewhat functional.  For me personally, I need it to be functional.  In SWG, I built my house around my vendors.  I don't expect personal vendors to ever make their way into SWTOR though.

Location.  In the video, we see a house on Coruscant.  Housing will certainly be instanced.  So how many planet choices will players have?  Hopefully it is more than just one per faction.  This is certainly an area I see them expanding in the future.  I wonder what a house on Tatooine would look like.

It is nice to see BioWare working on horizontal content rather than just vertical.