Maintenance for the week of March 25:
• [COMPLETE] ESO Store and Account System for maintenance – March 28, 9:00AM EDT (13:00 UTC) - 12:00PM EDT (16:00 UTC)

Still can't bring myself to buy a house

Morgha_Kul
Morgha_Kul
✭✭✭✭✭
Again, I'm one of those that loves to have a house in the games I play... but I can't bring myself to do it here, and I hope the explanation will be of some use to the developers.

First and foremost, the reason to have a house (for me) is to become part of the world. Star Wars Galaxies had several ways for me to do this. I would plant a house somewhere and watch the world go by while chatting in the zone. Players would wander past, perhaps stop and look in on what I was doing, socialize and so forth.

Here, there's none of that. The house is completely isolated from the rest of the world. There's no one to watch (often because you can't see over the walls), and there's no zone chat because it's an isolated zone not actually part of the world, and no one can actually just turn up and visit unless they happen to be on my friends list (which is very small indeed). So the main reason to HAVE a house doesn't exist for me.

Now, the houses themselves have problems.

The largest houses, like the Ebonheart Chateau or the Daggerfall Overlook, are so huge, and so EMPTY. They're CASTLES, which would ordinarily be populated by other people... servants, at least. Here, they're completely sterile, with no other life within. This is true of all the houses, but the big ones suffer the most as a result of it.

Many of the houses are decent for one reason or another, but lack in critical ways. I'll admit here, much of this objection is based on personal bias.
For example, there are several houses I rather like... but don't like, at the same time.

The Gardiner House in Wayrest, for example, has a great location, and as a result the somewhat limited yard still lets you feel like you're IN the world, as the neighbouring buildings tower overhead and around you. However, the house interior is underwhelming. Each level is basically a big empty room. There's no corridors, no separate rooms... I'd love to have a separate bedroom upstairs, perhaps a couple of distinct rooms in the basement. WALLS and ROOMS inside.

The Cyrodiilic Jungle House has a lovely yard, and the interior is nice, if small. However, its location is disappointing.

The Old Mistveil Manor (outside Riften, I think that's the name...) has a good location and nice yard, and the interior is quite nice too. It even has a glorious balcony... but you can't SEE anything from the yard because the walls are so high and what view is blocked by trees.

Perhaps the best house is the Strident Springs Demesne. It has a fantastic yard with a beautiful waterfall, and the interior is very nice indeed, with several rooms upstairs and down. The only things it's missing are a nice balcony (which I really like in any house) and a nice front porch (which many houses are missing). The problem with this one is its location again. If the Gardiner House was set up like THIS, I'd probably scoop it up right now... but it's not.


Perhaps the biggest problem is that we can't have the house we want WHERE we want it. If I want to live in Wayrest, I have only one option. If I like the Strident Springs house, I HAVE to live in that province, even though my character has never BEEN to that province.

Note that I am not even going to get into the pricing, which is pretty ridiculous.


I don't know if there's anything that can be done about any of this, but I hope the points I'm making are useful to the devs.
Exploring Tamriel since 1994.
  • VaranisArano
    VaranisArano
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    For me, the fun of housing is creating a space for my characters.

    My Strident Springs house is the home/workshop/classroom of my clockwork mage. So there's walking paths through the gardens, a outdoor eating area, a massive forge out back, a lecture hall inside, a clockwork workshop, and tons of loot she's dragged back from her delving for research supplies scattered all around the place. The only "life" about the place is her Dwemer spider assistants.

    My biggest criticism is that the ESO+ housing slots are necessary to fill out the bigger homes.

    My Humblemud, on the other hand, is the lair of a daedric cultist living in the middle of Dhalmora. My backyard is in the process of slowly being pulled into Coldharbor, and the house itself is perfect for an aspiring witch or necromancer.

    With a small house, its much easier to make the house feel full.

    Its an expensive hobby, I'm not going to lie, but I enjoy it.
  • Morgha_Kul
    Morgha_Kul
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Part of my problem is having 12 characters, each of whom should really have a house of his own.

    Another part is that I don't see what benefit I get from buying a house, when I can simply preview one to much the same effect, or simply claim an existing house in the world. My Telvanni Mage is currently the master of Tel Branora (since Mistress Dratha isn't actually in the tower at the moment), and resides in an unoccupied house in Mournhold. Living in those kinds of spaces does pretty much everything I want (apart from having nice balconies), as I can be in the house, but chatting in zone, meeting people who are passing through, and so on.

    So I don't feel the pressing need to have a house from the store.
    Exploring Tamriel since 1994.
  • Anethum
    Anethum
    ✭✭✭✭
    I want to be able to see all my characters in one place.
    Like npc's inside the house for example
    @Anethum from .ua
  • Morgha_Kul
    Morgha_Kul
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Anethum wrote: »
    I want to be able to see all my characters in one place.
    Like npc's inside the house for example

    That would be nifty. The Old Republic sort of does that. You can populate the "home" with holograms of the various companions your characters have (and if you unsummon your current companion, they will appear as themselves, not a hologram). Of course, they don't move around or do anything.
    Exploring Tamriel since 1994.
  • Alexsae
    Alexsae
    ✭✭✭
    I understand what you're saying about the emptiness that can happen. In another game I played, there was a central broker for sales, and we tapped into that by placing sales crates in our home. It was fun seeing the odd shopper drop by.

    That wouldn't work in ESO, but there are other ways around the emptiness. We can have a merchant, banker, crafting stations, target dummies, dueling areas, and convenient locations to entice our friends to visit. I also enjoy touring the homes of people who post here.

    The addon, PortToFriendsHouse, makes visiting non-friend, non-primary homes easy. I would like to see zos add that function to the game, as well as adding other house actors.
  • Rylai
    Rylai
    ✭✭
    I am very sad as well that most houses have 2 big rooms which could be a house of 5 rooms or even more, hard to make it a home. And I'd love to be able to have NPC in my homes, at least the bigger ones. When I don't RP (what I very rarely do) I almost feel lost in it, for the size and the emptiness. Yeah I can put my banker in, but I'd like working NPCs like a caretaker or a maid!
    I'd love to see that in the future. NPCs for your house, with gold, crowns or thu quests I dont care, just somehow! :D

    With what house is in what location I got to say, I can see both sides. If you want to life in the city you usually can't just bild a new house there but take whats already there for example. Of course as this is not the real world though, we'd like to pick what we want and where we want.

    The zone problem, boy was I disappointed when I first saw that. I totally agree with you.


  • Morgha_Kul
    Morgha_Kul
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    When I played Star Wars Galaxies, I would hang around in my house, or go off exploring the countryside looking for cool houses to look in on. Whole communities would spring up. It was wonderful.

    Of course, the market system worked to promote this. You would buy vendors to put in your house (ie. NPC shopkeepers), and then put goods into their inventory. Such goods were searchable on a universal market found on most planets. You would find the item you want, then actually GO to the planet and vendor to buy it. That encouraged people to travel around to other worlds and visit homes. Sometimes you would find a vendor in a home who had something you wanted but hadn't thought to search for. It was pretty cool.
    They could (should) do something like that for THIS game. That is, have a central market we can search to find which vendor in which location has an item we want. Then we could actually go to that vendor to make the purchase. As it is, it's very difficult to buy anything, and nearly impossible to sell anything, unless you happen to be in one of those lucky guilds with a vendor, or a lot of needy members. But, that's another thread.

    Another thing I'd like to see is NPCs in the house we can interact with. Specifically, one of the coolest things about The Old Republic Online was that we could interact with our NPC crews, and even ROMANCE some of them. Now, we don't have NPC companions like that, but I've often wished we could romance some of the NPCs in the game.

    Morgha Kul, for example, took a shine to Sergeant Seyne on Bleak Rock. He even carries around the dagger she gave him, even though he's max level and the dagger decidedly is not. How cool would it have been to have a romance option for that character... even to the point of allowing us to marry and have them as non-combat pets and in our homes.

    There's a lot of potential in ideas like this. I'd love to seem them reach for it.
    Exploring Tamriel since 1994.
Sign In or Register to comment.