Home, At Last - Housing In AdventureQuest 3D - Part 1.

Contractually obliged, as I am, to cover developments regarding housing in any and every MMORPG I have ever, will ever or might ever play, regardless of how much I or anyone reading this could care less about them, as soon as I read the news about AdventureQuest 3D's latest update I knew I'd be writing this post. 

I know! You don't need to tell me! It's not like I don't have better things to do with my time but here we are anyway. I knew what I was getting into when I started this thing so theres' no point complaining about it now.

I ought to make it clear before we go any further, this won't be any kind of Guide To AQ3D Housing or even a walkthrough, although lord knows someone should write one. When I logged in this morning I thought I'd be done in ten minutes. It took me two and a half hours.

It shouldn't have. It's not like I haven't claimed a free house in an MMORPG before, right? I know the form. A couple of clicks, zone in and it's over.

Oh hell, no. Not in AQ3D, where everything always takes forever. It has to be one of the nitpickiest, fidlly-faddly games I've ever played, which I don't necessarily mean as a criticism. It's actually part of the appeal but I always forget until I play again just what an old-school set-up Artix have going here. It might have a lot of time-saving devices like instant travel straight from the map but it also has a propensity to take everything extremely literally, the way these games did twenty years ago.

It's only taken eight years...

Remember when in EverQuest II, if you wanted to start a guild you had to go to a government office in town, speak to a registrar, obtain a document entitling you to solicit membership, then cart the thing around with you until you found enough people willing to sign it? Then you had to take it back and hand it in to be notarized? 

Maybe I'm imagining some of that but that's how I remember it and that's going to be how I remember getting my first house in AQ3D ten years from now. A whole lot of running around, talking to people and getting the paperwork straight. If that's your idea of a good time, jump on in. You can thank me later.

To be fair, I was almost expecting it. Before I even started, I took the trouble to watch a video on YouTube. I had a notion it would save me some grief and it did. A little. I think my first mistake was pausing the video after thirty seconds, as soon as we saw the NPC giving the quest. I figured I could take it from there.

And I was right, except I had no idea how much farther it was going to take me and how many times I'd get turned around and have to go look up how to find my way back to where I needed to be. By the time I'd finished I'd watched three more videos , read the official handout and browsed two reddit threads. And I still got half of it wrong.

You could at least give me a hard hat!

It certainly didn't help that as I was stumbling my way through the extraordinarily long list of things to do before you get your key, I kept getting sidetracked by other quests. AQ3D is an exceptionally quest-driven game with NPCs everywhere calling out or beckoning you to come do their jobs for them. 

I managed to tune most of them out but it still seemed like every second NPC I had to speak to for the quest I was actually on also had two other things they wanted me to do while I was in the neighborhood. I don't mean I had to do those before they'd help me. It wasn't one of those Little Red Hen situations we're all so very fond of in our games. No, it was worse than that.

I've always believed AQ3D has some kind of a reputation as a kids' game in the vein of Wizard 101, even though whenever I play it that never seems to be borne out by what I see or do there. For example, would you think it was appropriate for a game aimed at minors to include a parody of the infamous diner robbery scene from Pulp Fiction?

No, me neither, but when I went to the bank to get the manager to sign my Proof of Insurance so I could move into my new home, that's exactly what I found myself caught up in. And naturally I was the one who had to put a stop to it, too.

Why are you laughing, dad? I don't get it...

I guess the excuse would be that it's like the old joke about the lady who complains because a man walks past whistling a dirty song. If you don't already know...

My problem with it wasn't anything to do with morality or decorum. It was more along the lines of it being a pain, having to kill ten bank robbers before I could just get on with my business. The same sort of thing happened in the forest and in the bank vault and just about everywhere I went, mostly because the AQ3D quest interface is not the easiest to parse. I was never quite sure which quest was mine and there always seemed to be several of them so I kept starting new ones.

It's also not the least-buggy game I've played, either. Somehow, I managed to kill all ten bank robbers and still ended up with only 9/10 on my count. I was wondering if that was going to be a problem but then I zoned out and in again and all ten were back, along with Honey and Pumpken, who I'd also killed the last time. 

Pretty soon I had 11/10 on my kill-card, which another strange quirk of the game - you can get extra credit for going too far. Rather than carry on, I just talked to the Bank Manager, who happened to be an owl but we won't get into that, and suddenly all the robbers went away. 

Things like that seem to happen quite often in AQ3D. I think it has some fairly robust self-correcting processes running in the background that put you back on track when the wheels start to come off, which I guess is one way of handling it. Personally, I'd prefer they just worked properly in the first place but then I'm old and bad at adjusting to the new ways.

Just what I play fantasy role-playing games for - the paperwork!

To sum up, the brief sequence for getting a house runs something like this. Remember, it's not a walkthrough. If I was going to write a walkthrough I'd have taken notes. This is just what I remember and some screenshots I took.

• Speak to the first questgiver who sends you to the second questgiver. 
• Speak to all the builders, about half a dozen of them. 
• Find the tools and the toolbox one of the idiots dropped off the roof. He's the foreman, too, so that gives you an idea how competent these people are. 
• Go to the forest and speak to a surveyor. Do his damn job for him.
• Go back to town and speak to the Architect.
• Speak to the guy you spoke to earlier and find out you need Insurance. Seriously, when was the last time you needed an actual insurance certificate to buy a house in a game? What are these guys on?
• Go to the bank and find out the Manager can't issue your Insurance because he's lost his pen. 
• Stop a bank robbery on the way to the vaults where he thinks he might have lost it. Not sure if that part has anything to do with the housing questline or not. I doubt it, actually...
• End up doing a completely different questline about getting access to the Main Vault because everything is all jumbled together and nothing is clear. 
• Do that and then realize on the hand-in you didn't need to but now you have the follow-up so you're in it up to your neck.
• Finally remember AQ3D has a quest-marker that literally points you to the next location, right down to each individual item of a collect-10 or a scavenger hunt. 
• Kick yourself. You deserve it.
• Using the quest-marker, go to the right vault, kill the right mob and get the owl's pen back. (Turns out it's not his pen but if that's a plot  thread I didn't follow it.)
• Try to hand it in then realize you really do have to go to a desk and actually sign the sodding insurance form. Mutter bleakly about some people taking things far too literally.
• Get the signed insurance form authorized and go back to where you started.
• Speak to that guy yet again and get the key to your new place!

...and then find you have to pay real money for it.

Nah. No you don't. But I believed you did for about fifteen minutes, all because the blasted quest interface is so confusing. I clicked on the unlabelled + sign that lets you add a second home to your collection, an additional perk for which, not unreasonably, you have to pay.   

Oh, now I see it...

I spent a while fulminating about the injustice of it all and figuring out how to earn the necessary cash shop coin to buy a house without actually having to get my credit card out (You can earn a random amount of the necessary Dragon Crystals by opening the daily Login chest. It could take anything from a couple of weeks to a few months to collect enough because the daily stipend is extremely random.) 

Then I finally noticed the original announcement does specifically say the new housing system gives you a free house. And the wall of text explains you need to "locate the new housing button in the menu" and "click on the inviting door icon" to be whisked away to your "very own abode". 

So I did that and found myself, at long last, in a grim cell with no door, no furniture and just two dully glowing windows you can't see out of. Holy hell! All of that for this?

As it happens, it's really a lot better than that but the first impression wasn't great. I'd explain how it gets better but this post has run on long enough already. Also, this way I get two posts out of it, which is only fair since it took me all morning to do.

Part two tomorrow, unless anything more pressing arrives before then.