Another Housing Rant

Kashya_Vulano

Yeah, you've seen these rants a million times before. I'm frustrated, though. So, here's another one.

With the release of Bastion Sanguinaris today, Zenimax has one again failed to listen to the overwhelming demands of the housing base. The biggest offender here is, ironically, the size of the housing itself. Most community members have been wanting smaller housing for a cheaper price, because they quite literally cannot decorate the overwhelmingly large houses with the minuscule furnishing capacity. I cannot comprehend for the life of me why Zenimax is ignoring this basic request when it would be less intense on them to decorate a fairly modest-sized housing in comparison to a gargantuan manor that you have to pay $75+ for during a Crown Sale, and potentially upwards of $100+ outside of the sale duration. I find it perplexing that their business model can survive on charging people $100 for a virtual house, but I'm not in charge of finances.

The Bastion Sanguinaris also has another blatant issue that I find to be a complete middle finger to those that requested it: Many people have been suggesting to instance the larger houses into different rooms, so that each room can have their own furnishing limit. This could potentially increase the number of housing spaces if Zenimax were to take advantage of it. That didn't happen, though. Instead, over five instances were put in this one building that definitely did not need it. Not only that, some of these instances are essentially just through a glorified hallway. They could have been cut through and still performed just as easily, but instead, we're left having to go through multiple doors with no real benefit or noticeable purpose other than to be slight hindrances.

There's my rant. Feel free to add onto it.

(Side-note, it's insane that we still have literally no combat-related furnishings in a combat game. Target dummies, archery targets, sword/shield/staff racks, etc. It's absolutely nutty.)

Rizi

Totally agree! This was a failure of a drop and I hope Zenimax learns from it. I hope it backfires on them to say the least. Ive been wanting some more smaller houses that I can comfortably decorate for a while, but it feels less and less like we're being listened to. I'm still fuming over the whole "Sorry we can't raise the furnishing limits, that's that" thread they posted and then IMMEDIATELY abandoned.

(And I'm just as bewildered as you that there's no combat furnishings. )

Langdon64

I like to rant too! Yes, I agree the house is too big, and it is lacking any details that help justify the price. It looked so grand on the outside, and then not much inside. Please more medium sized homes.

dcam86b14_ESO

Only gripe is that they gutted the best parts of this home.
If you've played through the story you'd know there were better parts of the castle that could've been showcased.

I'll admit there's an audience and buyers for this home and as long as people are willing to drop those crowns, these massive homes will continue to be a staple.

SickleCider

I went to look at it again today, because it does look lovely from a distance. Then. . . sigh.

Okay, so, my issues are as follows:

• Size versus furnishing cap (as you said)
• An annoying number of doors inside (as you said); the "secret" passage in the withdrawing room takes an awkwardly long time to enter, too
• Layout consists of two linear paths to a dead end
• Interior is too dark and dour, with no windows to add interest
• Exterior suggests more rooms (with windows!) that are curiously just non-existent
• Interior fog
• Being able to preview with furnishings turned me off, because it really showcases how awkwardly out of scale all the furniture is going to look in the main hall
• Speaking of, the presentation when previewing that way is very brown and yellow--this can be fixed with furnishings, but it's icky
• Exterior space is much smaller than it first appears
• The amber grass doesn't glow like it does in the rest of Blackreach
• The yawning faces in the pillars (I just don't like them)

So, I don't know. Could it be built onto and into to create a more interesting layout? Can the outdoor area be reasonably expanded? Will multiple Stained Glass of Lunar Phases add life to the main hall? I can't imagine the possibilities yet.

TheSixth

I also noticed while inside the Bastion house, perma Vampire Lord ultimate isn’t working as it did on the PTS.

Zypheran

I have come to the conclusion that the regular player was never, and never shall be the target market segment for housing.
Housing has always seemed to be aimed at the player who will pay grossly over-inflated pricing for exclusivity or artificially maintained scarcity.
Why sell 10 houses for €10 when you can sell 1 for €100 thus saving server capacity

Ruhlf

I play a werewolf mainly, but if I were playing a vampire, I’d be bummed out by the lack of a crypt.

No crypt in a vampire castle. Really?

Did I miss it? Or is it possible the house unlocks more wings, similar to Lunar Champion?

Tigerseye

Zypheran wrote: »

I have come to the conclusion that the regular player was never, and never shall be the target market segment for housing.
Housing has always seemed to be aimed at the player who will pay grossly over-inflated pricing for exclusivity or artificially maintained scarcity.
Why sell 10 houses for €10 when you can sell 1 for €100 thus saving server capacity

Maybe, but I can't help feeling there is a middle road between hardly anyone owning something and so many people owning it that it affects server capacity.

MajThorax

Housing is not sophisticated in eso. The devs pick up assets from the game/expansion and mix them together without any planning. The result is disproportionate rooms, extravagantly huge spaces and a furnishing cap that doesn't allow players to make most of their spent money. We need more slots so everyone gets compensated, including those who have purchased huge houses in the past 3 years.

Ultravylence

I had been waiting to drop $$$ on Bastion Sanguinaris for months now. Logged in excited to take a look, o boy, the disappointment. $130 for a boring grouping of giant open areas with no variation or creativity, nope. Not to mention the need to "zone" into each separate section of the home; feels disjointed and cumbersome. This would pass as a "Free" home you could earn in-game, but not a product worth close to what is being charged.

Veinblood1965

On a side rant here. The home in Solitude, I forget the name but its like 1 million gold. No windows to speak of at all, inside it just feels plain. I've noticed that on most homes there is a surprising lack of windows! Everything just feels so bland without them.

StabbityDoom

MajThorax wrote: »

Housing is not sophisticated in eso. The devs pick up assets from the game/expansion and mix them together without any planning. The result is disproportionate rooms, extravagantly huge spaces and a furnishing cap that doesn't allow players to make most of their spent money. We need more slots so everyone gets compensated, including those who have purchased huge houses in the past 3 years.

I can't help but wonder if the devs hands are somewhat tied by saving money for management. IE use an asset you already made instead of a new house from scratch.

As a builder, who spoke to many other builders about this, most of us are really excited about antiquarian. I have to say, in both Bastion and Antiquarian they gave us such a great building box (chef's kiss to devs) but the feel of bastion is so strong to overcome. If you don't like vamp, there's no way you can redo the whole thing with 700 items in that size. You'd have to close most of it off. *shrug* some people love it. Good, I'm glad zos made people happy I'm sticking to my dreamhouse antiquarian....

Scion_of_Yggdrasil

Cant agree more. If you want it all to be one instance, then let me walk through the entire home. Don't give me doors that port me to another area, skipping the hall/stairs that I would have otherwise used. It feels like you're taking parts of the home away, and only giving me pieces of a completed product.

IF you instance the home, truly make it separate, and raise the furnishing caps. I'm not asking for 700 per room either, maybe raise the "total limit" to 1000. So around 200-300 per separate room. Of course, we don't want to have to sit through a long loading screen every time we change rooms, but a few seconds is not big deal, especially if it means that room will be superbly decorated to our liking.

I would much rather devs take a break from creating new homes, and instead work on features to improve the already impression lineup of homes. i.e. weather toggle, keys (like mementos) that can be attuned to homes and given to friends that when activated port you to the home, daylight toggle, etc.

StabbityDoom

Scion_of_Yggdrasil wrote: »

Cant agree more. If you want it all to be one instance, then let me walk through the entire home. Don't give me doors that port me to another area, skipping the hall/stairs that I would have otherwise used. It feels like you're taking parts of the home away, and only giving me pieces of a completed product.

IF you instance the home, truly make it separate, and raise the furnishing caps. I'm not asking for 700 per room either, maybe raise the "total limit" to 1000. So around 200-300 per separate room. Of course, we don't want to have to sit through a long loading screen every time we change rooms, but a few seconds is not big deal, especially if it means that room will be superbly decorated to our liking.

I would much rather devs take a break from creating new homes, and instead work on features to improve the already impression lineup of homes. i.e. weather toggle, keys (like mementos) that can be attuned to homes and given to friends that when activated port you to the home, daylight toggle, etc.

the only problem there is that unless it can be monetized (like guests) the higher ups will be very unlikely to approve it. That's why new houses are done so often, it's money.

but the thing is they even repeated back to us what we wanted on some of the eso lives, with "smaller houses," actual dwarven home, etc, and yet... bastion and another ice dwarven home. I guess they are trying to please everyone. I know a lot of non-housing people who want Bastion, maybe it's a good seducer into housing.

bluebird

TheSixth wrote: »

I also noticed while inside the Bastion house, perma Vampire Lord ultimate isn’t working as it did on the PTS.

Not sure what platform you are on, and whether you actually bought the house or just trying to transform in the preview, but unlimited Vampire transform does work in Bastion.

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1) Regarding OP, I actually find the item limit quite all right for Bastion. There isn't that much living space there that would necessitate more slots - there's barely enough vampire furniture variety as it is. (Now if someone wanted to furnish it as an actual living quarter with some other furnishing style and lively knick-knacks, sure they might run into slot issues).

But there's barely enough Vampire furniture to fill the space without looking repetitive.[/i] There are no Vampire torture devices, none of the blood vials and bloody experimental equipment that we saw in Graymoor, no vampiric crypt pieces, barely any vampiric feast items (goblets... just goblets - no bowls or plates or counters or 'snacks'). No structural items apart form 1 pillar, no decor, no tapestries, nothing. So as it is, the Bastion's item limit is far better than other Notables like Grand Psijic Villa or Princely Dawnlight Palace or anything like that.

2) Now, I'm not saying the house doesn't have issues, but it really isn't that bad. It has a large hall and 4 medium sized rooms, and the rest is just winding open-air corridors and awkward looking cliffs and orange corals. The layout and the terrace areas are pretty awkward. And there are missing textures at the waterfall in the front garden.

3) It would have been far better if they converted the Grayhome model from the Q4 Prologue as our 'vampire player house' not the Graymoore Keep model from the Chapter. Grayhome would have had a much better layout, like a proper vampire castle. with floors, side rooms, a gothic garden and a large hall. It also has actually working windows that break up the monotony of the stone and metal that Bastion's interior ended up with, despite the lit up windows it has in the upper part of its exterior. Grayhome would have been located on an abandoned island too, which would have fit the vampire and gothic aesthetic more than the awkward flora of Blackreach.



4) Cause the mish-mash of concepts is another issue that bothers me a lot about housing. Of course, there will be a player out there who will find Bastion perfect for their vampire-alchemist-who's-studying-Blackreach-plants character, but in general... the mashup of cave with glowing mushrooms and orange corals with a dark vampiric mansion makes little sense. We know that there are vampiric castles above ground (Castle Thorn dungeon, Grayhome prologue quest island), so choosing Bastion is a little questionable.

Instead of pleasing both the 'I want a gloomy Gothic vampire castle' and the 'I want a cave with glowing mushrooms in Blackreach' folks, ZOS ruins the theme for both. Because the ugly bumpy unremovable orange corals that they recoloured from the blue Elsweyr moonrealm corals totally ruins the vampire aesthetic with bloodfountains and gargoyles. And I'm sure that people's enchanted fungal garden and cavern exploration builds are ruined by the huge vampire castle plopped straight in the middle of the glowy orange and glowy blue Blackreach bits.

Same as the Dwemer-ice fixation they seem to have. Instead of releasing a proper Dwemer home, just a Dwemer ruin with Dwemer coloured stone, they released an ice-covered Dwemer ice cave in Frostvault Chasm. And now they will release a white-and-gold Dwemer recolor room leading to an ice lake in Stillwaters Retreat... Instead of appealing to both demographics, it only applies to their overlapping fraction.

5) A lot of the housing designs aren't the housing team's doing as they get the assets from the art team, they just convert them into housing. What they are responsible for however, is choosing and prioritising which assets are chosen for player housing and which aren't. For example 6 different basic wood Solitude benches (in addition to the 5 fancy Solitude benches, and the basic Nord and Breton benches we already had) but no Vampiric blood vials and containers that do exist in Graymoor.

Or choosing the most awkward parts of Graymoor Keep to convert into Bastion, when there are much better vampire assets (such as the upper rooms in Graymoor Keep, or Castle Thorn, or Grayhome). Same with Jode's Embrace which had the side and back chambers that were present in Rimmen palace removed in favour of 2 identical oversized halls.

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Ruhlf wrote: »

I play a werewolf mainly, but if I were playing a vampire, I’d be bummed out by the lack of a crypt. No crypt in a vampire castle. Really? Did I miss it? Or is it possible the house unlocks more wings, similar to Lunar Champion?

Well to be honest, most of Bastion feels like a crypt by default. it has the typical arched vaults you'll see in Gothic churches, and those side chambers with the grates are reminiscent of gated of crypts inside churches too. It also has no windows which lends itself to the underground crypt vibe (even though the whole structure is exposed and free-standing on ground level in Blackreach).

kaisernick

Kashya_Vulano wrote: »

The Bastion Sanguinaris also has another blatant issue that I find to be a complete middle finger to those that requested it: Many people have been suggesting to instance the larger houses into different rooms, so that each room can have their own furnishing limit. This could potentially increase the number of housing spaces if Zenimax were to take advantage of it. That didn't happen, though. Instead, over five instances were put in this one building that definitely did not need it. Not only that, some of these instances are essentially just through a glorified hallway. They could have been cut through and still performed just as easily, but instead, we're left having to go through multiple doors with no real benefit or noticeable purpose other than to be slight hindrances.

As i said when the idea was dropped i think that us a horrible idea, if a house had multiple loading screens for parts of it i would not buy it regardless of how it looked or cost, having to have loading screens even fast ones between them would be a horrid idea.

Scion_of_Yggdrasil

kaisernick wrote: »

Kashya_Vulano wrote: »

The Bastion Sanguinaris also has another blatant issue that I find to be a complete middle finger to those that requested it: Many people have been suggesting to instance the larger houses into different rooms, so that each room can have their own furnishing limit. This could potentially increase the number of housing spaces if Zenimax were to take advantage of it. That didn't happen, though. Instead, over five instances were put in this one building that definitely did not need it. Not only that, some of these instances are essentially just through a glorified hallway. They could have been cut through and still performed just as easily, but instead, we're left having to go through multiple doors with no real benefit or noticeable purpose other than to be slight hindrances.

As i said when the idea was dropped i think that us a horrible idea, if a house had multiple loading screens for parts of it i would not buy it regardless of how it looked or cost, having to have loading screens even fast ones between them would be a horrid idea.

I half agree, but when it makes sense.... i.e. Alinor Crest Townhouse. I don't want a loading screen to open a door to another room WITHIN the house. But sitting through a short loading screen between the inside of the house and the terrace.... That is just fine. Similarly, with any homes that have an interior and exterior, making those two separate instances just makes sense, especially if it means I can place all the trees imaginable, without having to cut out decor inside.

SickleCider

You're all right about Stillwaters, too. I've been begging them to release a snowy area to build on, but knowing I'd have to traverse through the pointless Dwemer hall every time I want to access it has 100% crushed the interest. Well, that and the fact that it's mostly a big sheet of ice limits the logical building potential.

volkeswagon

I don't buy houses with large interior space. An example of a great notable home is the grand Topal Hideaway. Not a lot of buildings just glorious exterior so I was able to decorate that nicely within the cap. If they want to sell expensive homes then make ones with smaller structures that have very nice and lush exteriors that need little decorating.

volkeswagon

the classic homes such as Proudspire are better because you can decorate that nicely with 600 slots

kargen27

"Most community members have been wanting smaller housing for a cheaper price, because they quite literally cannot decorate the overwhelmingly large houses with the minuscule furnishing capacity."

I was going to say I would be willing to pay same price for a smaller but well done house. I only spend ESO+ crowns though so I am probably not their target market.

If they start allowing the gifting of homes though I have a lot of gold to spend. Not sure I would spend it on the huge houses though. Would spend quite a bit on a good medium sized one though.

On an aside I decided to stick all the antiquity furniture in Proudspire until I decide where I might want to use it. That was a mistake. Some of those pieces are huge and Proudspire doesn't have room for them. Eventually I'll move them to a place with more room. I am close to having at least one of each except the maps.

I'm guessing some of these items are so huge to make the large homes they sell look more full with less items so kind of a double whammy for people that want smaller homes.

Raideen

Smaller homes with increased item limits would go a long way imo.

I recently decorated the Snowmelt suite and maxed out as an ESO+ member the home still feels somewhat barren. I could easily fit in 20-30 more furniture items without making it feel cluttered.

idk

I would suggest avoiding the talk of demands as we do not demand Zos to do anything as that is not permitted in the forums. We request and we can even have constructive, well-thought posts if we put our mind to it.

Basically, I would suggest some people want smaller homes for smaller prices because they want to pay less. Let us call it what it is since the number of furnishing slots is increased as the size of the house increases.

And no, I am not disagreeing that Zos should release some smaller homes here and there for those who do not want to spend the large sums of cash on the larger homes. After all, I am one that will not waste my money on any of the homes. I think it makes good business sense to release a smaller home from time to time to milk the money from those who are only willing to pay the smaller price tag for a home.

Chinspun

Personally I think the following needs to happen: -

Either: -
1. Increase the furnishing limits; or,

2. Create smaller houses commensurate with the furniture limit; or,

3. Create houses that can be easily subdivided into smaller areas accessible from the portal rather than linear designs (see Bastion or GPV, which cannot be easily subdivided). Obviously a relocatable portal would also solve this issue.

In all houses: -

4. Avoid more than 2 instanced areas because it breaks all immersion constantly travelling through loading screens (see Bastion).

5. In all cases pointless foyers that just act as slot sinks that detract from the main house should be removed (see Sillwaters or Portentate's Retreat).

In my opinion Moonsugar Meadow was a high point in housing and Bastion a new low.

katanagirl1

That domed entry in Potentate’s gave me grief at first but now it is the most spectacular area in the whole house and my most creative work yet.

The house there is much smaller than other notable houses so I don’t expect the number of slots to be a problem there for me.

volkeswagon

Though your delivery was a little dramatic I think you"ve made some good points about housing sizes being too big for the slot limit and its interesting to see if seperate instances for different sections would allow for an increased limit. The lunar Champion house is all set up for that. Perhaps they can test that theory out on that. So for example each section could have a 400 limit bringing the whole house to a possible 1600 slots. Each wing would load as a separate house, load screens and all. So for the Psijic Villa that could have 700 slots outside and 700 slots inside.

Chinspun

I would rather have 700 slots total and only use one wing than be limited to 400 per wing.