That would mean creating potentially multiple millions of instanced locations across the entire game. I can’t see any way that would be possible. You can’t just plop a house down anywhere, it has to have an area set up to activate it.
The TARDIS in fantasy. ESO has multiple house sizes, from single room apartments up to huge mansions but they still require specific locations where they can be placed due to the difference in area.
I can’t see why you couldn’t do that. Build an area with raised seating and invite people along to duel. If that’s your thing.
They have previously said that they are not adding anything likely to take people away from city hubs. I doubt we will see anything that does that.
I get it. We all wanted our favorite zones before neighborhoods or anything of the sort. But WoW is still one of the most popular if not the most popular MMOs to this day. Even if you hate that reality.
They cannot add a feature like this and not instance the houses out. That would be asking for trouble. I am impressed that the game will generate constant neighborhoods anyway, so you will get your preferred plot. Also, we know this is being added to, probably forever. The general positive reception outside of these forums can tell you that the investment is worth it. We will eventually see more neighborhood zones, and hopefully, they will utilize better locations.
They’re releasing a foundation to be built upon(literally).
That comparison does not work for several reasons.
Garrisons were locked to one plot in one specific zone
Everyone of the same faction shared the exact same Garrison
Garrisons were never built with customization in mind, they were a gameplay system first and foremost
Garrisons did not exist in the open world, they were always a separate instance
This is completely different from e.g. placing 30 buyable plots of land into the Arathi Highlands and then opening up different phases based on player demand. That’s exactly how the current system works, just applied to a different zone. There’s nothing inherently unfeasible or impractical about that solution. The technology is already in place.
And I don’t even particularly mind having these island zones dedicated to houses (even if they seem a bit bland and harmless) but claiming that there’s some sort of technical barrier that prevents them from using real places is simply false.
There’s probably more to it than just that. I’d imagine houses take up a lot more resources and data and to have them on top of people questing in these zones or just hanging out especially in Elwynn Forest and Arathi Highlands, which will have a new experience for returning players, might be too much.
Whoever decides to do Cata through Chromie time. I’ve seen people leveling in all sorts of random zones not so much now though cause of Remix of course but also a lot of these questlines in these zones have phases themselves so you’re asking them to put phases on top of phases. I don’t doubt we’ll eventually get other new zones for housing in the future but they probably need to set up these zones to work specifically for housing and the way phasing works for them. It isn’t as simple as just copy and paste and they stated they’ve only just got the technology to do housing and that’s why they’re doing them now and it took 20 years for it to happen.
We already have phases on top of phases on top of phases in the game. You can play warmode Chromie time and then there’s different phases depending on quest progress and world state (pre vs post BfA Arathi for example) on top of that. If you play Chromie time, you’re also never going to see another player in the vast majority of places. It’s a new player trap that essentially baits them into playing a singleplayer game. It also shouldn’t be hard to disable housing specifically for chromie time phases.
And housing probably has a different kind of phase that doesn’t work well with those phases. We’ve never had housing before and if they could have just put them in these zones they would have.
you clearly dont know how eso housing works, you dont get to put a house in your favorite map, you pick a pre-designed place in a pre-set location that you cannot reshape in any way at all, and its instanced as well.
The one real benefit is that there are a huge number of possible locations. Every zone has multiples. Imagine if WoW had that. Of course it can’t because our houses aren’t individual instances, they are plots in a neightbourhood.
My hope is that, if the system is succesful and popular, they will create some hoods in other areas of the game. Even more ideally, if you had the choice of setting a new house in a neutral zone hood, you could have Horde and Alliance sharing the same area. As it would be a choice, people could hardly get their undies in a twist about that idea.