What happened was, I finished the Renewal of Ro tradeskill signature questline on my Berserker/Weaponsmith and the reward was a choice of desert-themed crafting stations to place in your home. Only he already has one of every regular station set up in his crafting hall in Mara, the home everyone on my account uses as a kind of alternate guild hall. Well, everyone on Skyfire, anyway, which is all of them except go-it-alone Mitsu.
Since he's a Weaponsmith, I thought it might be nice to have a forge in what used to be his main residence before he started spending all his time in Mara. For a decade and more he lived in an extensive mansion in Maj`Dul, which he expanded to take in much of the city by using teleport pads to "break out" into the rest of the zone.
That house is just packed with memories - all the things he's found, earned, bought and won over many years of adventuring, crafting and exploring. Parts of the mansion of it looks like a museum, some of it like a place someone actually lives and the rest like a warehouse that's recently been struck by an earthquake.
I wandered round, taking screenshots, feeling proud, puzzled, nostalgic and overwhelmed. There's just so much, lots of it tidily shelved, organized and displayed, lots of it... not. It's also almost impossible to photograph. The EQII camera won't pull back far enough indoors and reacts too strongly to obstacles. I might do a video tour one day but first I'd have to know what everything was, which I certainly don't at the moment.
The Mara house is exactly the opposite. It's wide and open and airy, quite literally a whole zone with all features enabled. There's no need to break out - indeed there's nowhere to break out to - and you can fly, swim and dive just as you would be able to in the open-world version.
Although the home comes with a large number of useable buildings, a few of
which I have made some use of, almost unconsciously I've found myself
focusing on decorating the outdoors. There's plenty of it, after all. Just
about all the trees, plants and foliage you see has been added by me, along
with all the statuary and wildlife. About all that was there to start with
were the buildings, the grass, the water and a few scrubby pines.
I had to fiddle with that last shot in Paint.net because, typically,
when I logged back in to take a picture for the post it was the middle of the
night. EQII's housing is the best in the genre but it could still be improved
by taking a few pointers from other games. I'd love to be able to set the time
of day, for a start.
Top of my list, though, would be the ability to sit properly in chairs and lie down on beds. Almost every other mmorpg allows it. I'm sure Darkpaw would love for it to be possible in EQII as well so the fact that isn't must be down to the ancient, proprietary engine the game uses. If it hasn't happened by now it never will.
I'd also like to see something added to housing in EQII that I've never seen the point of in Guild Wars 2, namely in-home harvesting nodes. In GW2 the yield from these is so minimal I've never seen the point of them, although since players habitually offer access to others in general chat so they can visit and take advantage of them, maybe I'm missing something.
In EQII, however, you can place both the full range of crafting stations and personal storage that holds hundreds of thousands of crafting materials. You can do all your crafting at home so it would make perfect sense to be able to do your own gathering there as well.
Maybe someday. For now, I'll be content with what we have. What we have wonderful.
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All that outdoor space reminds me of Rift housing. Very pretty! Atheren
ReplyDeleteI think Rift's housing must have been based on EQII's. They're very similar.
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