They (Devs) could make another MASSIVE zone centered around Tristram, Lut Gholein, Kurast, Harrogath, and the players could build house types around those towns by collecting materiel and such through farming and grinding.
The more better your home the more stuff it could hold, bigger stash, shared stashes, guild stashes. The best of the best homes could take like years to farm enough special materials, but it’d be worth it.
I think it would be instanced like in elder scrolls so it wouldn’t matter where so you could basically create a home anywhere on the map
Depends on how expansive and “MMO-ish” devs decide for D4. Of course it’s good to keep the scope in check, mainly for time management but also keeping the game feeling cohesive and “tight”, though I personally wouldn’t mind a more “bells-and-whistles” approach where they experiment and some things might miss. But if there’s guild/faction-owned castles you can raid and conquer then count me in!
Never liked player housing in other games I played, could work in D4 if there is NO power/currency benefits etc from it.
As a FF14 player I can say with some confidence that while housing systems are amazing when you or your clan actually manage to get one (my FC/clan built a bar in ours, and we even have bards playing music and serve drinks), I’ve seen first hand how much of a nightmare it is to implement such a system properly. That is, if the house does exist in a physical place in the world, like a housing district in FF14.
I think it’s a better compromise for a Diablo game to just have instanced houses or islands, similar to what Lost Ark and even PoE to some degree have. If you wanna see someone else’s house, you can just visit it. But I suspect that the whole drama that revolves around getting a plot of land in a residential district in an mmo isn’t what people are interested in seeing in a Diablo game.
If I want to build houses and hotels, I’ll play Monopoly.
I do not want I quit Karen living next to me.
There are going to be hideouts. Your personal base.
Personally I’d prefer more of an instanced system, one that doesn’t offer any real benefits, so players who don’t care for it, don’t have to worry about investing in it. Instead at the most, players could simply decorate it. Mostly with trophies of defeated enemies, perhaps even keep a stash filled with ears. But nothing beyond that.
That said, I certainly wouldn’t lose any sleep if there wasn’t any housing system in D4.
I’ve never really felt much of a need to have my own house in an MMO. Even as a guy who likes some RP in my RPGs, this has always been a bit of a bridge too far as far as my interest. I don’t play adventure games so I can play The Sims and do interior design. I don’t want to dump on other people’s fun. I’ve seen videos of people who’ve done some really cool things with the concept in other games.
I guess the issue is two-fold:
One of the WoW developers addressed the concept for their new expansion saying that for that game it would be such a massive job to do it right that they’re afraid it would take too many resources away from other development, so they’re not doing it. Credit is due here. They’re proud teams who don’t want to put their names and reputations on a subpar product if they can help it.
didnt they put their names on shadowblands?
also, running from a challenge as a developer? yikes. Guess that’s why they will never be compared to Bethesda or Blizzard North.
I am not in favor of housing in D4. It makes the game a very strange thing.
There would only be the possibility to run it like in the background somewhere practically invisible and absolutely hidden for those who don’t want to do that, so as a fun thing, without relevance.
Before you invest energies here, the game itself must first work properly, round and from one cast and feel at all so that it can accommodate a house system. To do this, the whole game would have to be completely different, which is equivalent to an MMORPG and thus all mechanics and speeds would have to be drastically reduced.
Such gimmicks can work, but have priority 197 on the “to do” list.
I can imagine in D2 in act 2 Lut Gholein an instanced housing principle like from EQ2. There would then be the boxes in it for the Acc so that you can save 20 Mule Chars. Simple, functional, but that’s it …
But it should not touch D2 otherwise… And D2 is otherwise from a cast and works in the important areas yes well, at least in D2 Classic.
In an aRPG I do not need a house simulation. Who wants to have that, there are the appropriate games for it.
And if here vast amounts of resources are spent and the world of D4, immersive class systems with matching guilds, etc. does not come across well and what it all still makes, then housing is just a block on the leg.
Housing, as in literally having a house in the game, seems wildly unfitting for an A-RPG.
However, having some kind of town/camp/castle/whatever you could improve, could ponteially be a fine endgame system. Taking some of what PoE does with its Atlas system and applying it to a different setting. Or what Wolcen does with its town system.
A place where you can enhance your crafting power, unlock new features and abilities, open up access to new areas/bosses etc. (“your workers dug a tunnel to an underground dungeon, because you brought in a million gold to pay for it, wohoo”)
And of course, like housing, such an environment would allow for cosmetics and all that stuff people expect from housing.
But there should be a significant gameplay aspect to it, otherwise it is a waste of development resources imo.
There’s a difference between releasing content we don’t like, and releasing content that is broken, buggy, or of otherwise poor quality. Blizzard does take pride in their work, even when it gets behind bad decisions. And they have cancelled projects like Starcraft: Ghost for not being able to deliver on the kind of experience they felt was up to snuff.
It’s not an issue of “running from a challenge.” It’s an issue of deciding this feature requires too much work to get right and doesn’t bring enough value to the players of our game; we have higher priorities to spend developer time on. Imagine you’ve got a year before you need to have this game ready to deliver. You have whole parts of the world to create, dungeons to balance, you haven’t fleshed out the boss fights yet and started playtesting and balancing the mechanics, you’re still working on the skill trees, haven’t figured out the loot table, are still considering add some new monsters if you can get that one new zone in in time. Your story team has their main quest line done at this point, script approved, and ready for voice-over, but you have potentially hundreds of quests and content from the open world potion of the game which is entirely optional which still needs to be verified for story/lore cohesion and coordinated with the map team, etc, etc, etc. If you’re in that situation, now, how much do you want player housing? Because you might not get other work done if you choose to work on that feature.
My hero prefers to be out adventuring, not hanging around town checking real estate futures.
stunning and brave.
I think it would add a great new feature to game Diablo Sims lol. I would play.thanks for sharing.
If I want to play Animal Crossing, I can go do that. I would rather have the Dev’s put time into creating a fun and engaging world I can go slash and kill demons in and loot their corpses. I want to play an ARPG not a Sim game.
Some people enjoy virtually slaying demons as conquering heroes.
Some people enjoy virtually living in their mom’s basement.