It's a rare MMORPG that tries to get by without player housing these days. What was once seen as a niche feature most games could easily do without has become almost de rigeur for any game expecting to be taken seriously.
Guild Wars 2, one of the last major hold-outs, finally cracked and added housing this summer. World of Warcraft
may be able to get away with going without after the dabacle that was Garrisons, but even the not-so-big gorilla looks
increasingly out of touch, insisting players may think they want
somewhere to hang their hats after a long day's adventuring but really
they don't.
With the feature now so well-established as a standard fit and especially with extensive and elaborate player housing in the form of base building forming part of the minimum viable product spec for Survival games, the upstart hybrid currently chowing down on the MMORPG genre's lunch, any new entrant to the increasingly blurred marketplace is taking a big risk ignoring house and home.
Throne and Liberty is different. It was originally conceived as the third in the hugely successful Lineage series and is still referred to in some quarters as Lineage 3, even though the project was long ago "re-purposed" by NCSoft to be something else entirely. The Lineage games do not have player housing so perhaps it's no surprise that T&L doesn't, either.
Except, as I discovered last night, it kinda-sorta does...
There was a flurry of excitement earlier this year when the developers announced in a livestream that various "Life Skills" would be coming to the game. These turned out to be fishing and cooking, both of which are in the current version that's just launched in the West.
I got my first bamboo fishing rod last night, when I reached a certain point in the storyline and I think I may also have been told something by some NPC about cooking but as yet I have neither cooked nor fished.
A few commentators, having watched that stream, also got very excited about what they thought was going to be the addition of player housing to the game. They were wrong, sadly.
What was added to the Korean version back in the summer and which was included in the game at launch in the West, was Amitoi housing. Or, to be more specific, an Amitoi house.
I have to confess at this point that I'm somewhat vague on what an Amitoi actually is. From observation in game I can see they're fanciful creatures that both look and behave a little like Palworld's Pals or Once Human's Deviants.
The first, the appropriately named Helpie, appears in the introduction and stays for the Tutorial, before leaving in a dramatic and rather emotional clifftop scene. I was sorry to see Helpie go but almost immediately afterwards I realised I'd acquired a replacement in the shape of Forest Sapling Grover, who looks like a knitted treant.
Grover heals me so long as I have piles of leaves that have to be purchesed from an NPC. At least, that's the only way I know how to get them so far. I probably need to do some research on that because the healing is significant.
I also have a corpulent penguin called Vagabond Percy. He was given to me by another, much bigger penguin called Pro Adventurer Percy, who stands about in the town of Kastleton as though three foot tall penguins wearing woolen armor were a completely normal sight there, which by all the available evidence they seem to be.
In common with most - conceivably all - Korean, Japanese and Chinese games I've played, the boundaries that would mark the dividing line in a Western game between content intended for adults and that meant for children are thin to non-existent. Why shouldn't a penguin be a professional adventure?
Whether it's rational or reasonable it's a fact and I can prove it because last night I sent Vagabond Percy out on a mission. What was added in that summer update wasn't just housing for penguins and other plushes, it was a whole mission system whereby Amitoi could go adventuring on their own.
I've had the quest to set it up for a while but I'd been ignoring it because to begin I needed to go to "The Amitoi House" and I didn't know where it was. I tried looking on the map but I couldn't see it. There was no quest marker for it and no sign of it as an icon or a named location.
In the end I went to Google, where I learned I was far from alone in not being able to find the blasted place. It transpires that the Amitoi House is accessible only from the UI and in the most nit-pickingly hard-to-spot part of it at that.
If anyone's looking for the door to the Amitoi House here's where to find it:
That little circle shows a picture of your current Amitoi and when you mouse over it an even tinier icon of a house appears in the top right corner. Okay, circles don't have corners but you get what I'm saying. I'd have used a screenshot that showed the icon itself but obviously it never shows up on a regular shot and the game is down for maintenance now, as it seems to be just about every morrning.
It would be helpful if something in the game told you about this extremely obscure means of access but as far as I can recall nothing ever does. I hadn't even noticed the circle let alone seen it was wearing a house for a hat.
Once I knew where to look it was all very straightforward. A click teleports you into what has to be one of the cosiest private rooms I've ever seen in any game. It's delightful. It makes that inn room you get in Final Fantasy XIV look like a dockland flophouse by comparison.
I spent a while wandering around looking at the fixtures and fittings and soaking up the considerable ambience. There's not a lot you can do there although the potential is immediately apparent. There's a collectible book to pick up and there's also a very impressive record of your exploits so far in the form of a journal you can open to watch replays of all the cutscenes in the chapters you've finished.
It also has a door that doesn't work. Only it's not just that it doesn't work - it tells you it doesn't work. That suggests that one day it might work, although where it might go if it did remains a mystery.
The main attraction, though, is the Amitoi Expedition Map. Click on that and a whole interface appears from which you can pick a selection of missions on which to send your various Amitoi. For rewards, naturally.
It was an easy choice for me. So far I have one mission and one amitoi to do it. You can't send the Amitoi you're partnered with so it was all down to Percy the Penguin.
I did get to decide how long he was going to be off adventuring and since I was going to bed right after I gave him the full eight hours, the longest adventure on offer. Longer runs mean better rewards.
With that done, I sat by the fire and logged out. It felt much better than logging out in a city street or somewhere in the countryside as I'd been doing up to then.
I have mentioned a few times before that I always try to leave my characters somewhere sheltered and safe when I log out. So far in Throne and Liberty that's meant sharing an awning or a hut with an NPC. I'm a lot happier now, knowing I can leave Califa comfortably tucked up in a cozy, book-lined room, settled on a soft cushion in front of a roaring fire. It would be a lot better still if I could move the furniture around and add a few things of my own but it's a big improvement over sleeping rough, that's for sure.
So, it's definitely not player housing but it's not nothing either. And there's more. As I was playing last night I happened to notice a guild vendor standing around in a village so I went to see what sort of things you can buy as a guild member. I'm probably going to post something specifically about guilds in the game so I won't pre-empt that but I'll just mention that, through something the vendor said, I now realize guilds get a "base" of some kind.
That piqued my curiosity so I opened the Guild window in the UI and there I found, to my considerable surprise, that guilds get access to a base at Guild Level 2. Even I ought to be able to get that far.
Once again, the base isn't proper housing. You can't even decorate it in the half-assed fashion GW2 uses for Guild Halls. Still, it is a personal instance with some functionality. I'll save any further commentary for when and if I get one of my own but for now I'll just say that I have a new goal and if I meet it, Califa will have a choice of places to spend her free time, when I'm not calling on her services.
Pretty sure she's going to live in the Amitoi House anyway, though. I mean, I would, if I could. Wouldn't you?
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Your screenshots are making me want top try this. It looks really gorgeous. Of course when everything I normally play has been put for at least ten years, I may be a bit too easily impressed :-)
ReplyDeleteIt is a spectacularly good-looking game, although as I said the environments they've chosen to represent are not exactly designed tomake the most of those great graphics. It's also a very old-fashioned MMORPG in some ways, something I may get around to writing about. It might fit in surprisingly well alongside some of the older games you've been playing.
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