Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Housing is not enough

I talked last week about SWTOR's housing addition: Galactic Strongholds.  It's a very neat expansion that adds almost free-form housing/decorating to the game.  Guilds too get to join in on the fun with their own spaces to decorate.

I really like this feature, but it alone won't keep me in the game.  Sure, I'll mess around with it and see what it is all about.  I don't see it driving me to play the game though.  Some people enjoy decorating for decorating sake.  Not me, I value functionality much more than aesthetics.

In SWG, I loved housing.  That was mainly due to all the functionality it added to the game.  You could house your vendors there, storage containers, the biological device things, and display nearly every item in the game.  The vendor piece was key though.  That brought people into my house and me into theirs.

I don't see myself running old content, achievement hunting, or doing reputations just to get access to decorations.  I find that to be pretty tedious.  I'm much more likely to go the crafting route instead.  Of course, who knows how much of the decorations will be craftable.  They have to distribute them out to all of the different gameplay types.

So beyond checking out my Nar Shadaa pad and seeing what decorations I can craft, I just don't think housing will get me to play the game regularly.  In fact, I may cancel my subscription if they don't announce new story content soon after.