Chapter Feature: (re)build your own personal town

phaneub17_ESO

This isn't a home you purchase, but a feature in a future chapter where you come across a poor, broken town where the inhabitants have nearly given up. You the adventurer come along and offer aid to help them rebuild, bring new life and prosperity. The growth and development of the town is up to you. It gives you the option of what kind of layout the town will have, the design of the structures, the overarching theme, you go out into the world to invite NPCs to become its townspeople.

It won't be the same as housing, you don't place furniture or houseguests, you can only influence how it will turn out rather than having complete control. You direct NPCs from different areas of the game to come and depending on who you invite and their occupation drives the look and development. You find master architects who dictate the layout and how your town's structures will look like. If you invite a high number of craftsmen, then it attracts the daily crafting hub. If you invite multiple scholars it becomes a place for enlightenment, you will attract the Mages Guild. If you recruit a high number of warriors and mercenaries, you then attract the Undaunted Enclave. If you happen to invite a lot of unsavory and outer worldly individuals, it brings the Fighters Guild. You can choose a diverse mixture of inhabitants or only specific races, these too influence the overall outcome.

Would you want to see such a feature in the game?

Kendaric

Hell, yeah. If that would become reality, I wouldn't hesitate to buy it. That would basically be a dream come true...

AVaelham

An interesting proposition. There was something like this in lord of the rings online, where you could help rebuild the settlement of Hytbold in Rohan. Perhaps we could help rebuild a destroyed town in post-war Cyrodiil.

opalcity

I think this would be a great way to revamp guilds. Everyone in the guild pitching in to rebuild a small town to call their own.

LunaFlora

would be fun!

LanteanPegasus

I'd absolutely love something like this!

Would be a neat combination with a PvE Cyrodiil, where you end the war and start to rebuild. But it could work in other regions as well, of course.

It could be done as a feature, like you described. Or it could be part of the chapters quest arc, similar to the old Couldharbor zone, where all the people you rescue/find/meet in the side quests take up residence in the Hollow City. Of course on a bigger scale - from "ruins with campfires" to more and more intact buildings, shops, guilds or whatnot, depending on how many quests you completed, and who or what resulted from them. And in the end you drove evil/chaos/problems from the zone, and leave it with a working "capital" city.

The problem with it being a feature, and its look and composition depending on your choices, would of course be that the town itself would have to be a completely separate instance for your character alone. I'd be fine with that, too. And they could allow inviting other players like they do with houses, so you could visit and look at other players' cities. That would be one hell of a feature!

Seminolegirl1992

The only issue with this is the sheer number of players in eso- and if the servers had to handle each individual player's adjustments to the town- I don't think the game could handle it.

phaneub17_ESO

Seminolegirl1992 wrote: »

The only issue with this is the sheer number of players in eso- and if the servers had to handle each individual player's adjustments to the town- I don't think the game could handle it.

It's handling my dozens of homes just dandy like cotton candy. The difference here is you're not picking out every aspect of the town just certain styles and the people who you choose to live within. I would say each town layout plans would be limited to a few different setups then you choose what kind of building goes where, but they would already be built and fully furnished. Say you hire a bunch of Khajiit architects it would look like Reaper's March or If you hired Dunmer architects it be more like Deshaan. Roads and building location are predetermined, as to what will go into that slot is up to you.

Combinations are not endless, but enough to get some individuality between players design choices. It becomes your own personal hub add what you like to see, how they stack up together, and how things interact out of your control.

TaSheen

No thank you. I've done something like this in other games, and it was the introduction of something similar (keeps or whatever they were called, long time back now) in WoW's WOD expac that was the final straw with that game for me.

Also, this sort of "settlement building" is one of the reasons I've never played any of the Fallouts. I have good friends who have played them, and the nit-noidy messing about with the settlers, settlements etc. annoys them so much that only one of the 7 who used to play quite a bit is still playing.

Now, if it gets added as an option, fine, though I expect that would cut by more than half the content I personally enjoy, and that might send me back to Skyrim until they got back to normal story questing.

Braffin

I like the idea and would participate in rebuilding if realized.

But given the actual state of the game, I don't want to see resources used for such additions.

Maybe in a few years, if the more recent issues are settled meanwhile.

wolfie1.0.

Not sure that ZOS would be able to pull it off in an MMO game. Single player sure. just not here.

Danikat

It's definitely something ESO can do. If there's few enough variants it could be a public map with instancing to split out different versions. They don't use that as frequently as they used to, because it caused problems with splitting up groups and making maps seem emptier (especially for people who made unpopular choices) but the technology to do it is already in the game. If that wouldn't work for whatever reason it could be a private instance like housing.

We've even got a simplified version of this - the Hollow City in Coldharbour, which starts out mostly empty and gains new services along with more residents as you bring people in while completing quests. (I think there's even some quests where you have to choose between two outcomes and that changes who appears in the city.) The city itself doesn't change, beyond more buildings unlocking, but it's a lot more lively after all the quests are completed.

I think this works best in games where you're building your main hub city, so you have a reason to keep going back and an incentive to unlock everything because you can't use those services until you do. In ESO it could easily become something most players rush through once then forget about, or never finish because you can get the same services elsewhere. To prevent that happening (or reduce it) I think it would ideally need to be tied into the chapter's main story (like the Hollow City in Coldharbour) so there's an additional incentive to complete it.

Maybe it could work well if they ever set a chapter in Akavir. We could be building a new trade outpost (either on the Akaviri mainland or on an island between the two continents) and bring in representatives and services from around Tamriel as well as recruiting Akaviri representatives during quests. That would have the added benefit that Akavri would need several chapters to do it justice (it's supposed to be at least as big as Tamriel), so this outposts could be something we keep returning to and building up in subsequent releases.

So my answer is a maybe. In some games I've found it interesting and looked forward to finding out what had changed each time, in others I did a bit and then lost interest because it took too much time and/or resources and was pretty much a novelty or a one-off area I never had a reason to go back to.

If ZOS can make it worthwhile then I'd be in favour, if it's basically just a time or gold sink then I'd rather they spend the time on something more interesting.

McMasterx

Camlorn, Firsthold, All of Bleakrock Island, Half of Riften. Zos has plenty of Pre-existing cities to choose from if we ever get an Updated Basegame Story progression Chapter.

Dr_Con

Managing your own town is one of the best additions you can put into this game, and could be a great gold sink too.

Good poll

chessalavakia_ESO

I thought it might be interesting to do something like that with Bravil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SgvtMMJFHA

DreamyLu

There are so many things this game would need... Some that are - for me - important are still pending and generally, so little gets implemented...
I wouldn't like that resources and costs disappear in a feature that creates an additional content to the existing one, that is a different type of game.

If a new content should be added, priority should - for me personally - rather go to those "missing" contents that are -for some - standard in other MMORPGs, like flying, underwater , jumping , mounting and such, still in line with the basic concept that is fighting/exploring with mounts available.

Dr_Con

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

I thought it might be interesting to do something like that with Bravil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SgvtMMJFHA

Bravil should be a quest daily town like Chorrol and Cheydinhal, and should have small tasks/quests or its own new gear

Tyrant_Tim

Look up “The Elder Scrolls: Blades” on your phone.
It’s a first person TES mobile game where you build your own town in-between missions.

mocap

Im totaly not familiar with Elsweyr Dragonhold chapter, but wasn't there something like this? You have to build/rebuild some kind of fortress there.

Hapexamendios

No, thanks. Had enough of settlement building in Fallout 4.

amig186

Only if I can make it into a wretched hive of scum and villainy. But if it's anything like that awful mobile game, no thanks.

TX12001rwb17_ESO

Maybe one day we will get a chapter where the Vestige becomes the King/Queen of the region with maybe a royal suite given to them upon ascension in the palace of the main hub town that would act as a player home.

But building a full of town would be unlikely.

kaushad

Depends on where it’s set. I don’t think there are enough towns in chapter zones as it is and one that we can custom build in different ways could only have so much character, unless they write a lot of dialogue for NPCs who may or may not be in our game.

Now it it were somewhere mostly uninhabited by humans like Blackreach, Oblivion or even the moons, that would be different.

Anumaril

As long as it's done well. If it's like World of Warcraft's garrison system in Warlords of Draenor, or like Pribyslavitz in Kingdom Come Deliverance, I would rather it just not happen at all.

Ruling over a settlement is (i.e., should) so much more than investing a couple thousand gold to build a structure, and then once a day getting to settle a pre-scripted "dispute" between two inhabitants that gets recycled by the 5th dispute because there are no other variants anymore.

This would be a cool thing to do, but ZOS would have to think long and hard about how to make it interesting beyond the first few buildings you choose to build. They need to ask themselves how they can make it something that would still be interesting to still come back to 3 years later, and make it actually require some level of commitment so it's more genuine as a building project.