Everquest II: Housing
At level 12, I took Ephrator the Kerra Necromancer looking for the capital city for his starting region. Since he's a necromancer, he's evil, and since he's evil, he starts off near Gorowyn. It's actually quite challenging to find Gorowyn, even from Gorowyn Beach; the path up to it is unmarked, and were it not for the yellow dot on the minimap (which took me some time to notice), I'd not have found it for a long time.
Once inside, I explored some, and then found two key things: tradeskills and housing. I'll write about tradeskills later; right now I want to rhapsodise about the housing.
You get your first house for free. It has one room (mine is large and octagonal, with a round window). It cost 5 silver a week to keep it. This is by way of being a small pittance; ten minutes of killing off the pirates on the beach near the city will net you more money. It comes with some free starter furniture - a table, a chandelier, a mirror, and a noticeboard thing that works as an interface to the market system. You can store stuff here, and furnish it however you like. If you put it crafting gear, you can do your tradeskills stuff here. If you furnish it with display cabinets and such, you can sell things you make, gather or loot here too.
Coming from the point of view of WoW, where player housing doesn't exist, and a brief drop into LotRO, where it was too pricy for my noob self, and EVE, where a player-owned station is pretty strictly a corporation endeavour and requires a lot of logistics, this "here you go!" thing is great.
And then I visited the guildhall for my new guild. Oh. Em. Gee. The building is gorgeous. I'll provide pictures at some point, once I find out who in the guild did it, and if they're ok with me posting images. And it has ALL the crafting facilities you might need, plus NPCs standing ready to sell you materials, broker your stuff to the world, or provide numerous other services.
This level of support for guild activity, well, certain other games could learn a thing or two...
Posted by Drew Shiel at May 14, 2009 10:56 AM
