Yeah, the fact that garrisons were strictly a one-expansion feature is what really makes them “not player housing” for me. When people think of player housing they think of a place they can always come back to and update with new memories from their adventures or whatever, not… an unchangeable fort which is canonically locked away in an alternate dimension you cannot access.
This is a problem across the whole game really, where there are a lot of systems in place that are uninteresting because they are built to be temporary. A new class, race or profession is always more interesting than artifacts, garrisons, class halls or covenants, because they can’t take away a new class at the end of the expansion.
Maybe if garrisons were treated as a permanent new feature rather than one of many single patch/expansion borrowed power deleted-at-the-end features, they could have been cool? If each patch added new customization items and buildings and locations to build them and so forth, they could have eventually developed into something that you could actually call player housing.
But that didn’t happen. The only part of garrisons that has been consistently updated and maintained in every expansion since WoD is mission tables… the part that nobody liked in the first place.
It’s really hard to get excited about… well… anything new in any expansion now because it’s just going to be a fleeting bolt-on that we have to dramatically give up or just outright abandon once the content is over if not sooner.
Like, as I look for reasons to get pumped and want to re-sub (I genuinely do miss the game as a concept) I just can’t get excited about the Covenants or any of the lore around them because as soon as we stick a cork in whatever seething leak of unreality we’re up against this time we’ll peace out and never see them again other than whoooooa this blue angel lady / vampire elf / hot topic gothlord from last expansion has made a stunning re-appearance in one side thing completely unrelated to anything! Sweet!
EQ2 and Wildstar probably had the best housing systems I’ve ever seen in an MMO. I think I’d prefer the EQ2 system slightly because it gave you such a diverse selection of plot sizes, biomes, etc. It would be nice if it didn’t have to be instanced but with how many players are on each WoW server and the complications of sharding combining so many realms, it would be a nightmare.
EQs system had starter apartments accessed through the in-game inns. You’d go upstairs and could see several doors which lead to apartments of varying sizes, anything from a single room studio to a 4-5 room apartment. Then you could buy actual outdoor plots (or underground, floating, etc) to build your own custom house on instead of just having an interior to decorate. Different expansions meant new furniture sets, new housing plots, new building blocks, etc. I used to make bank building houses and guild halls for people on my server. And people are so creative that the things people end up making custom far exceed any of the cookie cutter offerings provided by most developers.
Like they could use an island exploration for housing.
For example, as the island exploration goes horde and the alliance found a new continent where there’s no sentient beings hasn’t colonized yet (except for quilboars gnolls and etc…).
And player can make a house or village like a strong hold from WoD.
And hey since war between the horde and alliance has ended by then maybe cross faction village are possible or a land dispute.
(Sorry if anyone has posted something like this already.)
I might actually prefer instanced housing, if only for one reason. The sense of community in FFXIV is great, but playing on a populous server the likelihood you actually get a house is very low. Granted, adding apartments has mitigated this a bit, and they can always add more districts (or at least sometimes) but the scarcity leaves the system open for abuse. In one case, a couple players had bought out an entire district, and when the server got popular that meant there were like 30 houses being controlled by 2 people. Plus the people who resell houses for absurd amounts of gil.
Nothing that can’t be worked around, really, but making instanced housing would probably solve a lot of that even if it would be a bummer to not have the same sort of neighborhood feel.
Ideally, with the size of the island, remove the hostile mobs, have various Garrison-like plots where you can put down a building or a series of buildings to create a village, and then you can re-arrange the positioning, and then start decorating the insides.
As mentioned before, furniture becomes drops from older Raids and Dungeons, some can be store-bought, and your first tier of housing is Orcish/Human, but everything after that?
All those tokens dropping from the Raid and Dungeon Bosses?
Those can be turned in to any faction you are Exalted with.
Like the rustic hide and wood look but Alliance? Go hit up the Earthen Ring. Love the gothic charm of Brill? Go talk to the Forsaken or the Ebon Blade. Want the sturdy construction of the Dwarves for your militant outpost? Go talk to the Brotherhood of Iron and see what they’ve got to spare.
Best of all, being able to buy cross-faction buildings, depending upon Exalted reputations and which factions you’re aligned with, you can make anything and roleplay your island as being the site of a last-minute brawl between the Alliance and Horde, or built to your personal standards rather than your racial ones.
Yeah I feel this a lot. Covenants are being treated as the core feature of shadowlands, which is depressing because they are destined to be removed or made irrelevant by the end of the expansion. And unless we pop back and forth between the real world and the afterlife throughout the expansion, the story will not meaningfully advance either.
The new customizations are the interesting feature on offer, because they are permanent.
Instanced housing would also allow us to take advantage of the old world;
how many “closed” houses are scattered across the world? It’d be an endless trickle of potential.
I won’t believe this until the cosmetic changes last into the next expansion at this point. It’s a stretch but they’ve really impressed me lately with their bad decisions!
)