i think he meant instanced housing, like you go down a particular alleyway, new instance with your house.

Yeah but instanced housing also limits how many houses can be there.

The places the houses are in can never really grow or expand.

Just because something isn't, doesn't mean it's impossible - and I was arguing against the "impossible" part.

You don't understand instances either, huh? You can have as many as you want. Eg, everyone can have their own personal instance, ala Otherworld, where they created a whole world, if the devs wanted it. So, no, there is no limit to instanced houses. However, if Tamriel was actually done to scale, like Daggerfall was, the world would NEVER be full of houses, even if everyone on earth played it.

Its pretty much impossible unless the entire world is some giant flat landmarkless place just waiting for player houses. If it wasn't, then there would be limits that make it not work as people want, and thus thier statement is true

Ugh your ignoring the context of the game again.

Otherland works because its a MMO, i mean within the context of the game universe, they have places to put those instances, aka other "servers" within the context of the game universe.

Also Daggerfell was not to scale, it was just very large, and thats unreasonable for a MMO

If player structures were destructable and very expensive (ie, coalitions of players put forts up, not individuals), you wouldn't see the landscape cluttered with them.

the reason a lot of games dont have instanced housing is because it seperates the players. the ESO devs said they will have outdoor dungeons specifically to avoid this.

Not quite "flat", just procedurally generated.

That's how you design a world ready for non-instanced player houses. That's why Star Wars Galaxies did exactly that - outside of the major landmarks, the landscape was procedurally generated wilderness. That's how Minecraft does it, on a smaller scale (as far as players per server goes).

In other words: If you decide to do non-instanced player housing, the fact that the world needs huge tracks of "empty" (though neither flat nor boring - see Minecraft again) land for people to build on follows. Design follows function, not the other way around.

Until the best player guilds end up finding out how to game the system and make uber-forts with people guarding them at all times.

it wouldturn into a situation were the richestest and powerful guilds own almost all the free land, turning it into a feautre 90% of useres will never get to epriance

Just like in the real world. It's a PvP game, deal with it.

You don't seem to understand network architecture. What you think of as a server, is actually already a bunch of servers. This is why zones can crash, even when tricksy programming is used to make them load seamlessly.

It's not impossible. SWG had NON-instanced player housing, UO had it before SWG. When a developer tells you something is impossible, they are full of it. Now am I saying the Tattooine slum world should berecreated in TES? No. But that is what housing limits are for.

Thats terrible game design, and that you can support it is saddening


Ugh..... I said "WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE GAME WORLD".

I wasn't talking about real-life servers. I was talking about how the different player made areas are in different servers within the context of the game universe.

I've come to the conclusion you kinda have no idea what you're talking about in any respect, but I'll humor you. The game world is made up of a bunch of real servers. A tree won't fall in the woods if no-one is there because the woods don't exist.

Do you know what the story of Otherland is? Otherland, in the context of the games universe, is a MMO.

I am not talking about it being a MMO to us, I mean within the game's fictional universe, Otherland is a game that people play.

Player made areas are, within the context of the games setting, in fictional servers in the fictional world.

It can allow world building because the setting of the game has a logical reason as to why they exist.

Elder scrolls does not have that same lore based reason for these player made areas existence.

As I said like 10 times, within the context of he game's universe.

EVE Online works just fine and derives most of its attraction from just this game design.

People who think it's space which is making non-instanced player housing problematic are missing the real problem with it (you can see no-one of you is a game designer for online games, really). Instead, it's the "ghost town" problem: Not everyone is playing at the same hours, and of course people sometimes leave the game, so most of the time, most of the houses will be empty and lifeless. The older the game, the older the settlement, the bigger percentage of them will be just empty hulks.

This is the "hard" problem. It isn't impossible to solve, but it requires hard thinking and some decisions (examples: "we let player characters stay in game while they are logged out" or "we let players have NPC servants, families and so on running the show") which have their own bag of problems and limitations to deal with.

Space isn't the problem for player housing.

It has room for all manner of player made stuff, I seriously doubt the hundreds of cities that were in Daggerfall will be represented, will this break lore? Of course it won't, because mostly only main cities of the land have deep ties to lore, or are likely to stay around for hundreds of years.

ive never seen the point in player housing.. shouldnt a person be out playing, not admiring their house?

Most of those cities in Daggerfall were randomly generated and aren't counted as existing in lore.

And again..... you have yet to provide a location for all these player made places to exist within the context of the games unvierse.

No, we should be piling corpses into interesting piles in our basemants like we do in Skyrim!

And I don't see the point of religion, but non-religous like me are in the minority. Just because you don't see the point of something, does not mean ALL other people share your point of view.

No, it's not, it's called procedural generation, a game like a TES Online cries out for it. Oblivion used it quite extensively. SWG used it. Eve Online uses it. Daggerfall used it, Diablo 2 used it...well, you get the idea. Not all content has to be hand crafted. Capital cities and main guild halls? Sure, but that's about it.

Sure..... make the world bland, generic looking, and use lots of copy-pasta BS. People wont get mad at that.

Diablo 2, Daggerfall, and Oblivion are not good examples because they had some crappy looking worlds.

Smaller hand crafted worlds > procedurally generated lame

What's the problem with instanced player housing? I think that would be just fine.

Also, they didn't say it's impossible. They sad it's "too hard to implement the way fans expect". Clearly they have to be informed about our actual expectations.

Why do people care about player housing at all?

If done right housing won't break lore.

Who gives a crap if some Dark Elfs's random crib in the woods was built in the second era, and no one wrote it down in a book for history...

Yes big cities etc could break lore, unless they come up with a reason why no one wrote about them in books.

Heck even a few hundred years ago in England, there were houses hamlets and even villages out in the countryside that literally don't exist anymore. And unless they were important enough to write about, who knew.