I feel that for some of these cities to be viable, they can't be copy-pastes of windsward. Mind you some have been overhauled, but others like cavalry are out of the way and offer no benefit besides a free teleportation point. Considering that you can have a max of three houses, that means you're putting one in windsward, one at a place with a gypsum kiln in an area that you farm often, and one in the area with the most up-to-date content for the meta. So really for two and three you're looking at Brimstone, Ebonscale, Cutlass, Edengrove, technically Reekwater but it's super far from the action. Meanwhile Mourningdale? Windsward but in a archeology pit. Brightwood? Paranoid Windsward. First light? Razed and paved because they couldn't think of a good idea apparently. Even Cutlass just more or less got a lot pile stuck in the middle and they called it a day. When 4 of your total 12 cities are effectively copypastes of each other, that means that a whole 1/3rd of them are derivative and don't even really offer up much in the way of interesting quests or worldbuilding. This wouldn't be so bad if there were more settlements in general, but when the game is set up to be a vast island with dots of civilization, those dots really stick out if they all start looking the same. On top of that there's no way to build walls or doors to make rooms, and nothing much to DO inside of your houses besides decorate. I'd dump more time into them and actually care about tricking out my houses if they did anything other than be a place for my chests and trophies to hang out and be another teleportation point.
I'm happy we get 9k off a first home, but since we need a whopping 30 regional renown, it makes it hard to justify getting that 5k home, missing out on 4k or that 10k home that only accepts the bare minimum. Because of this unintuitive system pulling my desires in two directions, I've simply ignored the housing for much of the game. I feel this is an area worth taking another look at - perhaps a voucher for 9k off instead of wasting it on a first house that you'll replace as soon as you can. The second tier house absolutely should not need 20 renown, and if you ask me, there should be easy access as you grow: 1st tier, 5k, 5 renown; 2nd tier, 10k, 10 renown; 3rd and 4th tier following the trend. What's the game design reason for gating housing off when they're primarily used to support leveling?! Like, why in the world should I have to wait until I'm max level to be able (and reputable enough) to afford a decent home? Especially if there are gripes about "end game" content, because who the heck is buying a 2nd tier home at max level when they could just take a little more time and grind out 10 more reputation points? They should be able to look forward to getting the highest tier house at max level which includes new trophies that don't give xp, but instead, give gold or massive increase (relative to lower tier trophies) for their end game reward. This system needs work because right now, I don't feel it's worth the mild to moderate benefits of the current trophies with access to only one at tier 1 - especially not when it's such a breeze to reach max level. By the time you're being tasked with buying a house, it should be cheap, accessible, not requiring a severe discount (because who the heck is buying more than one at the start of their adventure). You could also just limit housing quantities and sizes to level: 5-15: 1; 16-30: 2; 31-50: 3; 51-79: 4; 80: 5 and there's access to a special vendor who converts lame, obsolete trophies into a new system, one where you can choose 1-5 types of end game benefits: gold; faction xp; regional xp; maybe add different types of communities like the riders' guild, the hunters' guild, the antiquities guild, etc; increased rare drops with options like: general luck increase; expedition luck increase; raid luck increase; chest/ monster luck increase; etc. The vendor offers a special time-gated crafting material to incrementally increase trophies' effectiveness. Maybe at levels 5-15, your options are scarce in town with only a few "studio-sized" accommodations with restrictions to boot, but there are some options out in the woods. You get less total faction rewards the further away from the settlement you go, but one can find studios, 1-beds, 2-beds, even a coveted (expensive) 3-bed manor furthest from the settlement, but it has some of the best offerings for in-house benefits, including a large yard. "Yeah, I live in that dilapidated home surrounded by the Lost in southern Brightwood. But, I get access to that special well that gives Lost a chance to drop special unique Lost items on death, including some new recipes, patterns, and gear!" This is the first game like this where having a house is functionally relevant, but right now, it's insignificant. Some features to add to the housing experience to include going back to your home regularly in the gameplay loop: a bathtub (and/or bed) that, when used, increases vendor/ reputation gains temporarily - like for 8 hours, and if you sleep to end your game session (accessing the bed could open the Menu), you'll gain a "refreshed" xp bonus at a fixed rate for a time relative to how long since you've last played with a cap (similar to WoW xp bonus if you end your session in a town). This xp bonus can be modified with crafting to be changed to offer a different benefit similar to the vendor who can help change the effects of trophies. A kitchenette or a full-blown kitchen, if afforded, could be a personally leveled cooking station with, once again, customization offerings at max level like the ability to store certain types of goods right at it like a quasi-storage chest only for perishable ingredients like proteins and herbs. Water and manufactured goods like spices and the like get stored as normal. No one needs hundreds of prepared dishes at once, so having them rot is not a problem - plus, it'll reduce weight - ooh! Rotten food is crafting material for a compost to get vittles and other sundry material to manage domesticated farm animals! You could also add a mannequin system where you can save loadouts, but you need to go back to your house to change - each player can keep one extra loadout on their person, and even though I think this should be a player-crafted economy, you can change the mannequins to a micro transaction if you feel it's important enough to extort your robust player base of hyper-loyal fans. This is already long, but I'm happy to riff on this idea more if it gets a lot of votes (or if I'm contacted personally by AGS- contact me, AGS! I'm a concept artist without a working portfolio, but I'm an idea machine!).
I believe the point was to give you end goals to work towards. Those rep 30 houses are suppose to be something you work towards, and honestly you don’t need to use the discount because you don’t need a house for a long long time. If you want to be impatient and use the discount on a low level home that’s on you mostly
@NightshadeDE "I believe the point was to give you end GOAL[_] to work toward." FTFY. But that's my point: "...you don't need a house for a long long time." Yet, the trophy system has a function that would benefit leveling up. I'm curious though, it sounds as though you're taking an opposite viewpoint to mine: do you think the housing aspect of the game is fine as is? You don't have any issue with any part of it? Let's say that's true. Dream bigger! Allow yourself to imagine how the game could be better because, based on your comment, if I were a developer I would think, "Players are fine with the current restriction on buying houses; and no one buys tier 1 or tier 2 houses." Then why have them? Why not make _every_ house a tier 3 house that requires 30 rep? Heck, why call it a Tier 3 when it's pretty much the one and only house size that's worth owning?
Again, such a crazy bad piece of marketing content. There are much more beautiful houses/furniture to show. Your furnishing and housing system is really neat. You're making it look bad.. Come on!
Those Brimstone houses have so many opportunities to be uniquely furnished!
no shot this dude has the goldfish.
He’s been there for 100s of years. He’s had some time XD
I feel that for some of these cities to be viable, they can't be copy-pastes of windsward. Mind you some have been overhauled, but others like cavalry are out of the way and offer no benefit besides a free teleportation point. Considering that you can have a max of three houses, that means you're putting one in windsward, one at a place with a gypsum kiln in an area that you farm often, and one in the area with the most up-to-date content for the meta. So really for two and three you're looking at Brimstone, Ebonscale, Cutlass, Edengrove, technically Reekwater but it's super far from the action. Meanwhile Mourningdale? Windsward but in a archeology pit. Brightwood? Paranoid Windsward. First light? Razed and paved because they couldn't think of a good idea apparently. Even Cutlass just more or less got a lot pile stuck in the middle and they called it a day. When 4 of your total 12 cities are effectively copypastes of each other, that means that a whole 1/3rd of them are derivative and don't even really offer up much in the way of interesting quests or worldbuilding. This wouldn't be so bad if there were more settlements in general, but when the game is set up to be a vast island with dots of civilization, those dots really stick out if they all start looking the same.
On top of that there's no way to build walls or doors to make rooms, and nothing much to DO inside of your houses besides decorate. I'd dump more time into them and actually care about tricking out my houses if they did anything other than be a place for my chests and trophies to hang out and be another teleportation point.
That's not right teasing the goldfish. I've been looking for that for 3 years, lol
I'm happy we get 9k off a first home, but since we need a whopping 30 regional renown, it makes it hard to justify getting that 5k home, missing out on 4k or that 10k home that only accepts the bare minimum. Because of this unintuitive system pulling my desires in two directions, I've simply ignored the housing for much of the game.
I feel this is an area worth taking another look at - perhaps a voucher for 9k off instead of wasting it on a first house that you'll replace as soon as you can. The second tier house absolutely should not need 20 renown, and if you ask me, there should be easy access as you grow: 1st tier, 5k, 5 renown; 2nd tier, 10k, 10 renown; 3rd and 4th tier following the trend. What's the game design reason for gating housing off when they're primarily used to support leveling?! Like, why in the world should I have to wait until I'm max level to be able (and reputable enough) to afford a decent home?
Especially if there are gripes about "end game" content, because who the heck is buying a 2nd tier home at max level when they could just take a little more time and grind out 10 more reputation points? They should be able to look forward to getting the highest tier house at max level which includes new trophies that don't give xp, but instead, give gold or massive increase (relative to lower tier trophies) for their end game reward.
This system needs work because right now, I don't feel it's worth the mild to moderate benefits of the current trophies with access to only one at tier 1 - especially not when it's such a breeze to reach max level. By the time you're being tasked with buying a house, it should be cheap, accessible, not requiring a severe discount (because who the heck is buying more than one at the start of their adventure). You could also just limit housing quantities and sizes to level: 5-15: 1; 16-30: 2; 31-50: 3; 51-79: 4; 80: 5 and there's access to a special vendor who converts lame, obsolete trophies into a new system, one where you can choose 1-5 types of end game benefits: gold; faction xp; regional xp; maybe add different types of communities like the riders' guild, the hunters' guild, the antiquities guild, etc; increased rare drops with options like: general luck increase; expedition luck increase; raid luck increase; chest/ monster luck increase; etc. The vendor offers a special time-gated crafting material to incrementally increase trophies' effectiveness.
Maybe at levels 5-15, your options are scarce in town with only a few "studio-sized" accommodations with restrictions to boot, but there are some options out in the woods. You get less total faction rewards the further away from the settlement you go, but one can find studios, 1-beds, 2-beds, even a coveted (expensive) 3-bed manor furthest from the settlement, but it has some of the best offerings for in-house benefits, including a large yard. "Yeah, I live in that dilapidated home surrounded by the Lost in southern Brightwood. But, I get access to that special well that gives Lost a chance to drop special unique Lost items on death, including some new recipes, patterns, and gear!"
This is the first game like this where having a house is functionally relevant, but right now, it's insignificant.
Some features to add to the housing experience to include going back to your home regularly in the gameplay loop: a bathtub (and/or bed) that, when used, increases vendor/ reputation gains temporarily - like for 8 hours, and if you sleep to end your game session (accessing the bed could open the Menu), you'll gain a "refreshed" xp bonus at a fixed rate for a time relative to how long since you've last played with a cap (similar to WoW xp bonus if you end your session in a town). This xp bonus can be modified with crafting to be changed to offer a different benefit similar to the vendor who can help change the effects of trophies.
A kitchenette or a full-blown kitchen, if afforded, could be a personally leveled cooking station with, once again, customization offerings at max level like the ability to store certain types of goods right at it like a quasi-storage chest only for perishable ingredients like proteins and herbs. Water and manufactured goods like spices and the like get stored as normal. No one needs hundreds of prepared dishes at once, so having them rot is not a problem - plus, it'll reduce weight - ooh! Rotten food is crafting material for a compost to get vittles and other sundry material to manage domesticated farm animals!
You could also add a mannequin system where you can save loadouts, but you need to go back to your house to change - each player can keep one extra loadout on their person, and even though I think this should be a player-crafted economy, you can change the mannequins to a micro transaction if you feel it's important enough to extort your robust player base of hyper-loyal fans.
This is already long, but I'm happy to riff on this idea more if it gets a lot of votes (or if I'm contacted personally by AGS- contact me, AGS! I'm a concept artist without a working portfolio, but I'm an idea machine!).
I believe the point was to give you end goals to work towards. Those rep 30 houses are suppose to be something you work towards, and honestly you don’t need to use the discount because you don’t need a house for a long long time. If you want to be impatient and use the discount on a low level home that’s on you mostly
@NightshadeDE "I believe the point was to give you end GOAL[_] to work toward." FTFY. But that's my point: "...you don't need a house for a long long time." Yet, the trophy system has a function that would benefit leveling up. I'm curious though, it sounds as though you're taking an opposite viewpoint to mine: do you think the housing aspect of the game is fine as is? You don't have any issue with any part of it? Let's say that's true. Dream bigger! Allow yourself to imagine how the game could be better because, based on your comment, if I were a developer I would think, "Players are fine with the current restriction on buying houses; and no one buys tier 1 or tier 2 houses." Then why have them? Why not make _every_ house a tier 3 house that requires 30 rep? Heck, why call it a Tier 3 when it's pretty much the one and only house size that's worth owning?
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz…more quests.
Again, such a crazy bad piece of marketing content. There are much more beautiful houses/furniture to show. Your furnishing and housing system is really neat. You're making it look bad.. Come on!