You Must Come Over Sometime And See The Place. Only Not Right Now.

When I began writing about Noah's Heart last summer, one of the recurring themes of my posts was how little of the game I understood. Now, more than six months later, after what has to be at least a couple of hundred hours played, I'm not convinced I know all that much more than when I started.

Some of that bafflement is down to the game itself. Despite having some of the best in-game documentation I've ever seen, many of the systems still manage to retain an enviable air of mystique. I've been battling away in the Fantasy Arena for months, for example, but I still have no clear understanding of how the matchmaking works. I've slowly developed a sufficient degree of intuition about my opponents to be able to take on teams rated only fifteen per cent weaker than mine, a huge improvement from the fifty per cent margin I used to need to be sure of a win, but how those ratings are calculated still escapes me.

Most of the blame, though, if you even want to call it that, lies with me, not the game. I long ago settled into an extremely comfortable groove, where I log in every day to do much the same thing.

I work through the list of recommended Activities to earn the maximum two hundred adventure points, which in turn gives me the daily limit of three tokens towards the total needed to move the current Season forward. Each stage currently asks for twenty-two, so it takes just over a week to earn them all. When I've collected enough I play through the next part of the story, then the whole pattern repeats until I get to the end of the Season, something that's usually timed to happen right as the next is about to start.

As well as working on the Seasons, I do some of the regular events as they come up. I particularly like Planet Traveller, which seems to refresh about once a week. It only takes about fifteen or twenty minutes. If the fancy takes me, I might also do some exploring or clear a few side quests out of my journal. Once in a while I even do some more on the main quest, which I still haven't finished. If I'm not feeling it, I just log out after the dailies.

Maybe once or twice a week I buckle down and do some work on improving my character. I might craft some enchantments or spend some points on Refinement. I check if any of my skills or abilities are ready to upgrade and generally go through the various menus to see if anything's flagged. 

By now I have a vague idea how most of those systems work but whatever knowledge I have is shallow, at best. That's why the huge majority of all the upgrade components I've earned are still in my bags; I'm not confident I know how to use them to best effect and I'd rather save them than waste them.

In this lazy, haphazard fashion I'd guess I average somewhere between thirty minutes to two hours a day playing Noah's Heart. It's more of a habit now than a thrill but I can honestly say I look forward to my daily session and enjoy my time with the game.

What I don't often do there is anything new. I'm peripherally aware there are substantial aspects of the game I've never really touched, like the instances, realms and training grounds I keep getting quests for, or catching, taming and breeding horses or collecting birds, fish and insects... I dabble in some of them, as the mood takes me, but the mood doesn't take me often and even when it does, it doesn't take me far.

I'm happy enough to play the dilettante but there is one part of the game I always planned on exploring to the full: housing. Back in August of last year, I was very bullish about the possibilities, claiming "it has the potential to be one of the better mmorpg housing systems I've seen". I did temper that with a proviso, saying I'd probably need to be a little further up the housing ladder than I was at the time before I could be sure my initial judgment was sound.

Now that I am considerably more experienced in that aspect of the game, I'm glad I added a get-out clause. Housing in Noah's Heart is impressive but it also has some limitations and drawbacks I hadn't appreciated when I wrote my gushing review last summer. Which is not to say I was wrong. It's a very solid entry in the mmorpg housing stakes. It's just that, like much of the game, it's appeal is mostly on the surface. There's less depth than perhaps I'd like. 

That, however, can be put down to the age of the game and its relative lack of success. The housing system is largely unchanged from launch, at which time it represented a very solid foundation indeed. Many other mmorpgs I've played have had much less flexible, useful, atractive and engaging housing offers at launch and the ones that ended up with the best housing spent years building it up.

That aside, there's one major design flaw with housing in Noah's Heart and that's the scale. It's a problem we often see in NPC housing, where all the doors are fifteen feet high and the ceilings would easily accomodate a herd of giraffes. The peculiar thing about Noah's Heart, though, is that the NPC houses you can enter - and there are many of them - are on a much more human scale. Positively cosy, in fact. It's the players' homes that seem out of proportion.

It makes decorating a lot more challenging than it ought to be, even though there's a good choice of furniture and soft furnishing to be crafted. I had every intention of fitting my house out in a style fit for a cover feature in the Gulf Stream City edition of Homes and Gardens but after a few attempts at filling the yawning, cavernous spaces inside my mansion, I found my enthusiasm waning.

Until a couple of days ago, that is, when for no particular reason, I noticed yet another feature of the game I'd let lie fallow until then. It's one of the more unusual, not to say original, elements of gameplay. I knew it existed because it comes up somewhere in the tutorial quests but even so, other than that one time, I hadn't ever bothered to find out how it works.

In Noah's Heart, you can visit the houses of your friends whenever you like simply by clicking on their names in your Friends list. In most games I play this would be supremely irrelevant because my Friends list would be empty but from the start in Noah's Heart I've made a practice of accepting every Friend request I've received. The maximum number of Friends you can have is sixty. At time of writing I have sixteen.

When I took it into my head to visit one of them, just to see how the system worked, I was very fortunate in that the person I picked turned out to be very houseproud indeed. I wandered around their home, gazing in envy at the way each room looked like somewhere someone might actualy live. It wasn't so much that they had better furniture than me - it was the way they'd laid it out.

But they did also have better furniture than me. They had a lot of stuff I didn't have the recipes to make. Which is where another unusual and highly attractive feature of Noah's Heart's housing design comes in: if you can see an item of furniture in someone else's house, you can copy down the details so you can make it for yourself.

To do so requires a number of blank blueprints but you can buy those for a few diamonds from the Mall. There is a limit of two hundred a week, though, so you still need to restrain your enthusiasm and not just copy every damn thing you see while snooping around other folks' homes.

As a direct result of my visit, I made a couple of very nice pieces. Placing them in my house immediately gave me an upgrade, taking it to Level Twelve. That opened another room, so now I have even more space to furnish.

Having seen the possibilities, I'm eager to get back to cranking out fixtures and fittings but before I get started there's yet another little wrinkle I need to iron out. One of the reasons I'd stalled on decorating my house was that I'd made several high-value items and then found myself unable to place them. They were all things I already had one of but the system wouldn't let me place another, insisting in mysterious fashion that my "warehouse" was full.

After some fairly tortuous googlng, I thought I'd worked out that this meant these were one-of-a-kind items you couldn't duplicate in the same instance. Since I couldn't figure out which recipes it applied to without actually making two of the objects and trying to put them both down, it put me off trying. 

Now, though, I've spotted multiple copies of pieces I was refused permission to place, sitting side by side in the houses of people I've visited. Clearly they know something I don't. Since they're all my Friends, I guess I could just ask them. Yeah, that's not going to happen...

What I will do is experiment a little. See what works and what doesn't. Try to spot a pattern. I do feel I ought to make some kind of effort to spruce the place up, now I know people are looking at it. 

And I don't mean you, dear reader. None of the screenshots in this post was taken in my house. I'll be saving that for when I'm happy with how it looks, which as of now I definitely am not. 

No, another thing I discovered while fiddling with the housing interface is that my friends have been visiting me. In fact, according to the Visitor Log I didn't know I had, in the last week alone all sixteen of my Friends have dropped by. 

I don't know whether that means they just clicked a button or whether, as I've been doing, they were actually wandering around, taking notes, but it wouldn't do to assume no-one's looking. Not any more.

I guess I'd better go do some housework, then. You never know when someone might drop by.