The “Open House” preview on the Roheryn server is over and the devs are asking for feedback on the forums.
For the unaware, the Roheryn server is a “preview server” (not a test server, I’ve been told) for Lord of the Rings Online. It’s the staging ground for the big enhancements they have been introducing into the game since it was launched last April (has it really only been six months?!), and usually it’s not the final version that actually goes into production. As they are getting ready to publish the Book 11 expansion, which includes player housing, the changes are in Roheryn but no houses were on sale except for a limited period of time yesterday afternoon (1-4 PM EDT). Judging from the turnout at the “Open House” event, considering that it was held during working hours on a working day, a great number of people must have been as excited about the new feature as I was. Here are a couple of pictures to show you what I mean.
Turbine didn’t announce the mechanics of the open house but in this case, the early birds caught the proverbial worm because there was a finite number of homes on sale. Supposedly, in the live version, new neighborhoods open up as old ones fill up but no new neighborhoods appeared on the list yesterday. Within a few minutes after the elf houses went on sale, the deluxe homes were gone. A few minutes later so were the standard houses. I imagine not too many testers bothered creating a kinship so there were quite a few of those available.
Now, let me tackle the housing features one by one.
Housing Purchase
You can buy houses in one of two ways: visit a housing broker (there is one outside the housing portal in each of the four homesteads - see my sneak peek for locations) or go into any of the neighborhoods and look around, just as you would if you were house hunting. Of course if you are competing with 100 other buyers like I was yesterday, you would just grab the first available one from the broker. Or if you know the layout and have your eye on a specific address, you can go to the broker and see which neighborhood has that address for sale. Now if you’re the type who wants to see what you’re buying, you can walk (or run or ride) around a neighborhood and look. Houses that are for sale have a (guess what!) “For Sale” sign on the front lawn and you can go in and look around before you buy it - I suppose by clicking on the For Sale sign. It’s a great option for someone who’s buying for the first time and to whom location is important. I’m easy to please, I think the feature is perfect as it is.
Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods, as we all know, are instanced. There’s a portal near each of the races’ major towns leading into the housing area. When you zone into the portal, you get a dialogue box asking which neighborhood you want to visit and a list comes up from which you can pick one. The neighborhood layout is the same for each homestead. In other words, if you go into the Falathlorn Homestead, no matter which neighborhood you choose you will see the same buildings laid out in exactly the same spots as all other elf neighborhoods. That makes it boring and I wish there was a little more variety in the layout. On aesthetics, I don’t think it’s possible to design an ugly elven neighborhood and the one they have is just gorgeous.
As for the human homestead, I wish they would liven up the landscape a little and give us something that looks more like Bree-town, rather than this.
I can’t wait to see what the hobbit holes and neighborhood looks like!
Each neighborhood has 16 standard homes, 10 deluxe homes, and 4 kinship houses. Considering how fast the deluxe homes went during the first few minutes of the open house, unless they adjust the prices upward, they probably need to think about adding more deluxe homes in the market.
Prices
Now, I’m pretty sure the prices we saw on Roheryn are not what they will be when the feature goes live. I noticed that the price varied according to location, too. But on the average, here’s what they were:
Standard House: ~1 gold (upkeep ~50 silver/week)
Deluxe House: ~7 gold (upkeep ~75 silver/week)
Kinship House: ~17 gold (upkeep ~110 silver/week)
You can also unlock up to 3 chests for additional storage in each house. In Roheryn it cost 100 silver to unlock the first one and 500 silver to unlock the next, but based on their survey questionnaire, that will definitely go up in the live version.
Since the minimum level to buy a house is 15, I think 1 gold for a standard one-bedroom house makes sense. While I don’t think I had 1 gold at level 15, it’s certainly possible to get it and is consistent with Turbine’s view that housing should be accessible to the most casual player. And because I’ve always had problems hanging on to my ingame gold (ie. I spend it faster than I earn it), I can’t offer an opinion on the rest of the pricing scheme.
Decorating
In each neighborhood, there is a Housing Furnisher who sells the basics. Here you can get tables, chairs, rugs, etc to furnish your home. Each type of furniture has a classification, ie. large furniture, large wall, small wall, wall paint, and so on. To decorate your house, you need to enter a “decorate” mode in which you will see slots, like so…
As you can imagine, each slot is also labeled accordingly (large furniture, large wall, etc) so you are limited to placing specific types of furniture in very specific spots. There isn’t even a way to rotate the items and I don’t know how much thought was put into which slot went where because I couldn’t figure out how to place a dining table with chairs around it anywhere in my house! Unless they improve the location of static placements, or give us a lot more choices for each slot, I just don’t know how I can make it look like a real house and not a collection of mismatched furniture haphazardly thrown into a room. I’d really like to see the picture of the room that was in the devs’ mind when they designed this! And I bet every house will end up looking exactly like the other once we manage to figure out which piece goes where. I am just so disappointed with the decorating options and I do hope that there will be some changes in this aspect before it goes live.
All things considered, I am happy that the player housing feature is at last in the game. Now to go kill some orcs and get some badly needed cash for that piece of Middle Earth real estate…
