player-housing
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City building in Earthrise to allow autonomy for guilds
One of the games we're looking forward to playing next year is Earthrise, a post-apocalyptic MMO currently in development at Masthead Studios. At launch, Earthrise will offer guilds a wide selection of buildings and facilities that can be built within their controlled territory. Masthead Studios has bigger plans for city building and Territorial Conquest game mechanics post-launch, though. Long term goals for this aspect of guild-level gameplay include expanding options for guilds to become less beholden to the major NPC factions (and the cities of Continoma and Noir). Specifically, Masthead Studios would like for players to establish administrative buildings, which will provide some of the conveniences and features generally found only in NPC-held cities. According to the Earthrise devs, "Administrative buildings will remove the requirement to visit cities even further by providing access to Market, Warehouses and more from inside the Guild owned territories."
Wizard101 school housing info and video
Wizard 101 isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's been doing quite well for itself and certainly delivers on the premise of letting players take on a wizard's role. Well... mostly, anyway. The player housiing has sadly been lacking options for some of the more eccentric wizards out there. After all, a nice townhouse is all well and good for some wizards, but what self-respecting fire wizard doesn't have a metal and stone deathtrap perched precariously over molten rock? Luckily for those players with similar tastes, the game will be adding seven new styles of housing in mid-December based on the seven schools of magic. Tipa at West Karana has an excellent galley of the houses available, complete with decorating tips for some of the more challenging house arrangements like the cramped underwater house for (you guessed it) the Water school. MMOQuests also has a brief video tour of the Death house, which looks like something straight out of The Nightmare Before Christmas. And speaking of Christmas, the houses are slated to be priced at either 100,000 gold or 10,000 Crowns, the latter of which comes out to about $20. Not a bad price for a gift for your favorite Wizard 101 player, when you get right down to it.
Linden Lab to test new house/land incentive for premium Second Life accounts
While the growth of Second Life new-user registrations remains steady, as do active users, the number of premium accounts in Linden Lab's virtual world had entered into an accelerating decline, last time we had any data available to us. This is hardly surprising, as tweaks to the land-centric Second Life economy over time had largely eliminated the need for many users to have a premium-account. The Lab is announcing the creation of a new continent (name and location not known at present), which will contain a number of unfurnished homes on 512sqm parcels of restricted-use land that do not share a border with the parcels of other users.
Runes of Magic spreads holiday cheer all around
It's that time of the year again, something you could tell by stepping into any mall in the US where seasonal music is now being piped in all day long. There's a connection to be drawn between malls and Runes of Magic, perhaps, since both want you to be ready and willing to buy -- but that doesn't mean Frogster's game isn't willing to give you something as a bit of a present. A lot of games have holiday-themed updates, and Runes of Magic is no exception, but they're pulling out a bit more than usual for this year's celebration. The update for the game scheduled for mid-December promises to be fairly standard -- holiday-themed decorations in the cities, along with the chance to earn gifts and festive decorations by completing daily quests. But the advent calender is another story. Every day in December up to the 25th, a new piece of art is being put up for fans of the game to enjoy. The first three are already open, and the art work is certainly an attractive treat for the game's many fans. It might even entice you to stop in to the game itself and take a closer look at what they have to offer -- and it's better than going to the mall, since you won't have to listen to the Salvation Army band.
NCSoft reveals "Visions of the Future" for Aion
"As the Daevas dream, they see Atreia's future." Just in case there was one person left out there who didn't find Aion to be a visually stunning game, NCSoft released a nine minute gameplay trailer last night entitled "Visions of the Future". The trailer was presented on the official forums and greeted with a storm of "OMG". Upgraded graphics improved the appearance of an already beautiful game, but that wasn't the thing that caused the excitement among Aion fans. An extensive look at player housing offered samples of available exteriors and interiors, as well as furnishings. And for the remaining fans who hadn't begun salivating? Mounts. In fact, seen here and there were what appeared to be flying mounts, as well as a dinosaur. The first half of the video was rounded out with clever aerial camera work designed to highlight changing seasons over gorgeous landscapes, and promises of swimming. The video rounded out with an aptly named segment of "Pulse-pounding battles", both aerial and ground-based. Fire-breathing dragons, huge allies summoned from beneath the ground, and what one fan described as "awesome nuking" completed the picture. A "never ending challenge", promises the end of the trailer. Take a look for yourself after the jump and see if you agree.
All the World's a Stage: Player housing, interactivity, and other possible features
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles. Playing Warhammer recently has made me think of more features that WoW could add in order to create a better roleplaying experience. Far and away the most important one, to my mind, was the Tome of Knowledge. WoW players really need an in-game resource they can refer to as a standard for information about the Warcraft universe, and having this at hand, roleplayers could do a lot better than they can today. Knowledge is the most important thing, of course, but there are other features Blizzard could add to the game that would help roleplayers too. I'd like to address a few of these things, and see how much they could really do for us. Player housing is a possible feature that gets talked about a lot, but I have my doubts as to whether or not it would really help roleplayers all that much. Another issue is one that is more important to me personally, and is another feature inspired by my trial with Warhammer Online: looking at interactivity between characters.
Free Realms to introduce new job, pets, player housing and more
The world of Free Realms is about to get a bit bigger this holiday season as even more content is being added and improved for the game. According to Sony Online Entertainment's Creative Director for Free Realms, Laralyn McWilliams, the game is about to see a new job, new job structure, new pets, player housing and more added by mid-December. We caught up with Laralyn to get a few more details on the upcoming improvements before the first stage of these updates goes live this week. Follow along after the jump for the complete interview, and in our gallery below for some exclusive screenshots of the new content.%Gallery-12980%
Mortal Online's beta starts rolling out more features
We still don't know nearly as much about Mortal Online as we would like, but the slow deployment of information we've been getting is certainly appealing. With promises of open PvP, long-term repercussions of actions rather than the usual respawns and resets, a crafting system encompassing nearly every item in the game... suffice to say it aims at being a niche game that knows its place and its peers. Unfortunately, as it's in beta and under an NDA, information is slow to be released. The October newsletter for the game has mercifully given us a few more bits of information, most importantly the next features being brought out in testing. November 1st (that's today!) will see the release of the next beta build, which carries with it the opportunity to start taming and harnessing mounts as well as building houses. The newsletter specifically mentions that building materials -- most likely the type of wood -- will be integral to the home's quality, keeping with the very detail-oriented approach the game has taken so far. There's also an in-game event promised for the patch, which should certainly be a nice bonus for the players lucky enough to take part. For those of us not yet in the testing, however, there's a promise that there are more lore and developer updates coming to the site in the near future. You can currently get into the beta by pre-ordering the game, which might be a bit of a risk for some players... but for the niche Mortal Online is aiming for, it might well be the sort of thing you can't get anywhere else.
All Points Bulletin podcast #12 delivers community Q&A
All Points Bulletin's 12th video podcast sees the conclusion of the Mark Rein walkthrough and an informative Q&A with the game's design lead, EJ Moreland. Some of the questions are things we already knew but bore repeating, like that the game is going to be PC only for its first release.There's new information in there, too. Like the fact that a car you design cannot be stolen from you while driving it, unlike a car you steal from a pedestrian. There's also talk about player and clan housing as future additions to the game.We think the video podcasts are a great way to clear the air of any misconceptions while simultaneously giving the community a chance to meet the people designing the game they so very much want to play. So hopefully we'll be seeing more of these in the coming weeks leading up to wider beta and eventually, launch.Check out the video after the break.
More ideas for player housing
Spicytuna has a nice little writeup about a much-discussed but never implemented feature in World of Warcraft: player housing. Blizzard has borrowed (and subsequently improved upon) many of the most common features in MMOs -- they revamped leveling with ideas like rested XP and recruit-a-friend, they changed the endgame with the ideas of Heroic instances and daily quests, and they've tweaked PvP with battlegrounds, Wintergrasp and Arenas. But for some reason they've never taken on the idea of player housing: a place in the game for players to make their own. The reason we've always heard is that they never landed on a good implementation of it -- if they couldn't do it right, they wouldn't do it at all.But Spicytuna proves there's no shortage of ideas. The main thought so far is that such an area would be instanced, as having actual buildings in the game as player houses just leads to emptied out ghettos of buildings left to rot.
Darkfall gets a free expansion, adds new weapons, weather, and player housing
Exciting news comes out of the Darkfall camp today as they unveil a brand new set of enhancements to the game, bundled together to form Darkfall's first free expansion. The update unleashes some massive changes, including the addition of weather, character specialization, new fancy weapons, PvE changes, and the big kahuna of additions, player housing.Of course when Darkfall adds player housing it's not your average, cuddly player housing. Houses, in addition to being able to be built on all sorts of land outsides of cities, can be formed into small villages that can be owned by clans. Villages will generate taxes for the owning clan, making them quite lucrative. Every six hours these villages go into a free-for-all status, allowing enemy clans to come in and take ownership with requisite bloodshed.You want to know more? Of course you do! Check out the full patch notes over at Darkfall's main website.
E3 2009: Player housing coming to Free Realms
Now that Free Realms is live - and by anyone's standards, tremendously successful - SOE's Free Realms team (at around 100 people) is busy working on new features and improvements. In September (or October, perhaps) they plan to add in player housing for everyone to enjoy. For those of you who have been pelting them on the forums for a home of your own - your request has been heard! A nice, shiny home in Free Realms should be yours in time for the holidays. You'll be able to select land, size, and style of house; then really dig in and modify it to make it all your own. The plan is also to create new mini-games involving maintaining your house as well - we're guessing something along the lines of time-management games, perhaps? According to what we've heard, the garage coming out in July will be attached to your house, so you can show off your cars to friends. Neighborhoods will be instanced (currently planned for three buildings per personal plot with no word on neighborhood size) but they expect this will give players a new place to hang out and enjoy their time in Free Realms. There's currently no specifics on what will be available for F2P and paid members, so we'll have to wait and see. Massively was on the ground in Los Angeles last week and covering all the latest E3 MMO news coming from the convention. Check out our breaking coverage (or all the Joystiq network E3 reporting) and keep your eye on Massively's front page for the latest developments.
The Daily Quest: Forsooth and what not!
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Etherjammer has an old but quite humorous look at BlizzCon etiquette. My favorite line: "Use spells such as Slow Fall and Levitate to go from one level of BlizzCon to another at your own risk, as players report that these spells have been unreliable at best in past BlizzCons." Why? Because some idiot jumped off the escalator half way up last year, and it caused quite a ruckus. Pardo was near the esclator talking with some folks, and he just looked and shook his head in a /facepalm manner. Activision-Blizzard is suing Double Fine over Brutal Legend. Guild halls and player housing. Love 'em or hate 'em, lots of people want them. The Hunter's Union has an interesting take on them. Casual Raid Leader has a great post about encouraging more oraganic and communicative raiding. Stoneybaby of Big Hit Box has a good review of how he got back into PvP, which would be useful for those of you looking to do the same. Notice how we've linked Big Hit Box a lot this week? It's because they're producing great content for the community! If you're writing compelling content or come across a great site or blog post, please let us know! Click here to submit a link to TDQ
Earth Eternal opens sign ups for closed beta test
Interested in running around a browser-based MMO fantasy world filled with over 22 races? Yes? Then you need to get over to Earth Eternal's website and sign up for their recently announced closed beta test!Earth Eternal is an an MMO that's all about what happens when humanity ceases to exist and the Earth is roamed by beasts of myth once more. It's also free to play and will run on almost any computer thanks to a client that runs inside of the browser, similar to Cartoon Network's FusionFall. Players will find a wide variety of features available, including multi-classing abilities, customizable housing in the form of "groves," and a design emphasis on small groups rather than huge raids.There's still no release date announced for Earth Eternal, but we're guessing that with the closed beta happening so soon, there can't be much time left before the release date is fully confirmed.
Mortal Online presentation puts all you want to know in one place
The Mortal Online team decided to create a PowerPoint presentation (available here -- the .rar file is 100mbs and includes some videos) to explain to the world what their game is. As it turns out, the presentation begins with a list of what their game isn't. The short version is that they're trying to make a very different MMO experience. Of course, if you've been following the game you're well aware of that fact, and it's probably what has you interested. The PowerPoint serves its purpose of bringing all the information together in one place, but if you can't be bothered downloading it and want a quick way to learn what's up with Mortal Online, we've summarized the biggest points from the presentation after the jump.
[1.Local]: To agree, to disagree, or to agree to disagree
Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.Flamers and trolls aside, WoW Insider readers are generally a contentious lot. Their viewpoints are as divergent as the player demographics the site attracts – all types of players, from the casual to the hardcore. With this many angles to consider, WoW Insider becomes a melting pot of ideas and opinions, from the sublime to the ridiculous. (And let's face it – some of the so-called ridiculous ideas are the most entertaining to read.) Yet this week, readers seemed to be more often of one mind than not – whether that agreement was ultimately to agree over the topic at hand or to agree to disagree. [1.Local] highlights several reader conversations that made the radar this week.
WoW Insider interviews Tom Chilton on Patch 3.1 and beyond
Now this is by no means the first time we've interviewed World of Warcraft's Lead Developer Tom Chilton (aka Kalgan) but we though with the recent release of Patch 3.1, this would be the perfect time to sit down with him and get the 411 on Blizzard's plans for their latest patch.WoW Insider: Blizzard seem to be treating each major patch as more of a mini expansion, what are the reasons for this?Tom Chilton: I would say the biggest reason is because we're always pushing ourselves to do as much as we can in every patch. We're never really satisfied with what we have in the patch versus what we didn't have. Maybe the developers get a little out of control - but in a good way as that's good for players. More than anything else we want to make sure that in a patch we have content for everyone. We feel like one of the things we didn't do so well in the past was to deliver content for everyone, we would deliver content for different parts of the player base at any given time like a 25-person raid or a 10-person raid or here's a new battleground, back in the day of Arathi Basin. However we didn't really hit everyone at the same time so we're trying harder to do that while at the same time maintain our pace of Expansions ... our blindingly rapid pace of Expansions.
Breakfast Topic: Missing features
April Fools' Day came and went, and as expected, a lot of jokes popped up all over the 'Net. Of course, among the jokes we looked forward to (or dreaded, as some of you curmudgeons ranted yesterday) were the World of Warcraft-related jokes. However you might feel about April Fools', I think we all eagerly awaited Blizzard's April Fools' gag, a long-standing tradition. The European World of Warcraft site had theirs -- a Pimp my mount feature -- launch earlier than the North American gag, an RP-ization of the forums and the new Dance Battle System. Not bad, but definitely not their best prank.Actually, the Dance Battle System was less funny to me if only because it reminded me of the one promised feature they still haven't delivered on. Remember the dance studios that were supposed to come with Wrath of the Lich King? They pruned that feature away even before Beta, but it doesn't mean we've forgotten all about it. In fact, this latest gag might've been Blizzard's way of poking fun at themselves for failing to deliver on their promise.
Player city changes abound in Star Wars Galaxies Update 8
The patch notes for Star Wars Galaxies game update 8 are two posts long and full of information about all of the changes and additions coming to player run cities -- one of the staple pieces of content of SWG.One of the biggest changes comes in the form of a 90 day log in time placed on all citizens of a city. If a citizen does not log into the game for 90 days, their character will be removed from the citizens list of the player city and their house will be eligible for pack up. On the bright side, this will allow city mayors to remove unused buildings and items from their city, should they be cluttering things up. On the down side, each character must be log in at least once each three months.Past that change, other additions include a new guild master elections system, the ability of city vendors to wear bodysuits, a new 69 month veteran reward, and increased experience when in groups.For the full list of changes in update 8, check out the patch notes over at the main Star Wars Galaxies forums.
The Daily Quest; Of Mage lore, Elemental builds and Player Housing speculation
The Daily Quest brings you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Today we bring you a lot of lists. Foofy has posted part 3 of her How To Moonkin video covering Idols and Enchants. CriticalQQ is exploring the major lore character of Azeroth that are Mages. The Thunderstorm blog has a new guide to speccing Elemental for Shaman. Blessing of Kings has a prediction about who will be the big winners and losers with the new Dual Spec system. The Druid Team has been writing a series of on-going posts detailing how they see Player Housing working in WoW. They have designed housing for many major starting cities as well as for Crafting, complete with floorplans. Part 1 - Stormwind and Thunderbluff Part 2 - Personal mailboxes, vendors and more Part 3 - Darnassus and Silvermoon Part 4 - Secondary profession housing items Part 5 - Orgrimmar Part 6 - Gathering professions housing items Submit a guide, post, podcast or resource for inclusion in TDQ, by using our tip line and we'll consider it for a future TDQ post.
