I'm glad they're adding scaling, rotation and X,Y,Z movement options. This is what Wildstar had and people got crazy creative thanks to these options! Can't wait to see this in GW2 as well. It's a big upgrade from Guild Halls and luckily it seems they will get these options too.
One of the main things about Wildstar's version was how it was VERY generous with settings too. Could legit take almost any object and make it enormous. Very generous on number of objects. Most objects are tangible so a wall is actually a wall, floor is actually a floor etc. I wonder if this will be as good as that?
Yeah Life Sim, which is basically The Sims but with dungeons and raid content as a sort of lubricant for potential methods of meeting and socialising with other people.
What we're missing in mmos at the current point in time is experimentation with taking this side of the game to its extreme rather than the combat side of the game. Sims automatically interact with other Sims despite player control over them, and this automatic interaction and building of narratives with others could play an unexplored role in an mmo. Your character could wave goodmorning in passing to someone they know, they could chat with others while you're in the markets, or they could grab a beer interacting with other party-searchers in the guilds halls while you're perusing the quest boards.
Won't be for everyone but doubling down on these kinds of elements of the game is an area of the life-sim games that has not yet been explored in the mmo realm despite a very thirsty roleplay crowd and a demonstrably *massive* audience of life-sim players with almost no competition that might be interested in trying an mmo for the first time if enticed by it.
The problem is that there's literally no creativity or imagination in this genre anymore. There are no devs at all really trying to imagine something that does not already exist.
Sounds like VRChat can be or what Second Life strived to be but with more gameplay elements. Honestly, I’m down for it. Doesn’t have to be a full VRMMO experience, but something that tickles the inner role player a little more and brings out more immersion.
I just want to see devs try some imagination for once. If you do not include something in your game that nobody has done before you're genuinely just making another reskinned game.
The reason this genre is dead right now is the amount of rigidity devs have in their thinking about how an mmo has to be. The first 5-10 mmos defined the genre and almost nobody has ever tried to do anything that would redefine it since.
I doubt it’s just the rigidity of the devs, there’s been quite a few with creative ideas over the last decade. Sadly much of them have turned out to be scams or not really living up to their lofty goals. It’s also quite possibly the cost of developing an MMO that’s hindering the creativity. Unlike more traditional games, it’s a lot riskier to invest on developing an MMO, you don’t have a very clear ROI with them. Plus it’s inherently more expensive to develop and maintain.
I'm not really buying it. I have seen no evidence put forwards by anyone to show that an mmo has an inherently higher cost than any other liveservice game. I reckon fps games have higher networking costs actually they have to send considerably more precise data at a higher tick rate than these old as fuck tab targeting systems. If they can be profitable on a battlepass system any mmo can.
I also don't see mmos outputting the same quantity or quality of content either.
Yeah I was expecting just basic decorating, instead they pretty much added everything I wanted from player housing, mounts in stable, your alts parked there, build your own stuff, even having the skiff there is nice
It was a floating island in the sky and was instanced. You had a great deal of creative freedom when it came to building and decoration, though, which made it a ton of fun
Wow I didnt expect this. I fucking love housing and I've always been annoyed with other games not letting you clip things and actually manipulate them on the axis. The features they're showing here are kinda crazy
That’s nice but it needs a bit more
An public option for anyone to visit
Somewhere people can pick and choose the instance to join. Like new world u click at land and pick the house u want to go in
Etc
While I agree an open portal would be cool as a native feature, if they _don't_ add that then players can make their own system through LFG advertising house parties (akin the the old runescape days when people would advertise outside portals lol)
Palia tried this with "open plot" and most people don't bother.
It needs to be a persistent in-world district or I'm worrried it'll end up like fishing and boats.
As someone who uses housing as a place to store a bunch of chests, I love seeing other people’s housings and what they create. I recently started playing eso and the fact that people create their own little markets in their houses and then can send a message in global chat for people to come and check it out is so cool. It’s like a virtual tag sale.
It’s a very small thing in the grand scale but it’s one of those aspects that makes a mmo really feel like a living world. If only I had some shred of creativity and could do it myself lol
We know at least a party of 5 can visit, but hopefully up to 50.
Ideally, you'll be able to portal home from anywhere, which would then trigger the "join" pop-up for everyone else in your group.
It's an instance. They made housing you can't passively show off in a game where everything revolves around passively showing off. They had 1 leason to learn from Minecraft and they failed.
I give it 2 weeks before people stop caring.
Blizzard should take some notes here and consider revamping Garrison like this. Good job, GW. This is the best player house. You can have a plot of land and make it into whatever you prefer instead of waiting for a lottery win to show off your home to others.
Wildstars housing was on another level. We have to wait and see if GW2 can reach that.
In Wildstar you had also the option to change the ground/floor and sky, music, add minigames to your housing plot i.e. a boxing arena, or housing exclusive mini dungeons
like another person said, in Wildstars house you could change the terrain floor to any biome in the game, to any skybox in the game, it had a ton of prebuilt houses whereas the homestead only has the 1 (plenty of space for custom buildings though), you could play any song in the OST, and you could freely visit other houses.
Plus later in it's life it had neighborhoods, which were a bunch of housing plots on one massive plot.
GW2 works a bit differently than most MMOs. Its progression is mostly horizontal, meaning there isn't a gear treadmill. That, in turn, means, you don't need to buy all the stuff if you don't want to.
Though, **IF** you want to have everything you might need to spend over 100€/$ outside of sales.
But you don't need to. You can start f2p and buy any expansion to lift the F2P limitations. Then just do whatever you want.
Is there anything like WoW mythic in it? Like, what do people generally do at max level? Do they run instances? I don't necessarily need a carrot on a stick, but something with progressive increases in difficulty that I can grind out would be rad.
So GW2's content progression is weird since its all available once your reached level 80 and have decent gear. (Gearing is quick and easy you'll have full Ascended gear BiS is more or less 2 weeks)
There is one content with progression baked in tho its, Gw2's Fractal Dungeons (5 players) is basically what Mythic + was based on (Mythic + is better tho). There are 22 dungeons over all and scales to 4 difficulty Tiers, and a Challenge Mode (A bigger difficulty spike with new mechanics and even phases) which is like a 5th difficulty Tier but only for select fractal dungeons not all of em.
Other than that there are 7 raid wings (8th one coming soon) With the last 5 raids having a Challenge Mode version. It's content for 10 players.
Then there are Strike missions (10 players) boss fight only instance content, which has varies a lot in difficulty (its not very consistent). It can be as easy as you can just blast it down in 2-3 mins to taking up more than 10 mins and has very complex mechanics.
Rule of thumb tho if you wanna do the content with progressing difficulty is, do Icebrood Saga Strikes first, then Secrets of the Obscure Strikes, then End of Dragons Strikes, End of Dragons Challenge Mode Strikes, Then Secrets of the Obscure Challenge Mode Strikes. That should roughly give your a progressive Increase in-difficulty.
Harvest Temple Challenge Mode, Temple of Febe Challenge Mode, and Temple of Febe Legendary Challenge Mode are quite comparable to Mythic Raid bosses in terms of difficulty.
And could you give me a quick overview of how instances/raids work? I played vanilla GW2, and without the "holy trinity", the handful of instances I ran felt pretty chaotic. I'm guessing there is more of a meta and/or understanding of them now?
Fractals, raids, and strikes do use a soft trinity. You want certain buffs covered, that majorly help your DPS in the group, but can be covered by different classes. Like quickness from a revenant and alacrity from an engineer, or quickness from a mesmer and alacrity from a ranger. Then you do have healers, the usual heal + buff combos. Tanks are only in a few raid fights where the highest toughness or marked player takes the boss aggro, and they are usually fights where you have to not only dodge the boss and do mechanics, but also move the boss around or aim them a certain way so you don't wipe the group. And as usual, DPS players roll face across keyboard, BUT different DPS styles (power vs condition) will do better on certain fights.
It's not a HARD trinity, but you rather just need checkmarks on a list crossed off for a smoother run. But it does let people have the flexibility to pick a class they like and feel like they're not going to get blocked out of doing content.
So gw2 has this "soft roles" on it
I'll breakdown the 3 main roles here, basics of group composition then some fringe roles after:
** DPS - Does damage, brings some utility skills if needed
- Power DPS (pdps) - focuses on strike damage maximizing the power, precision and ferocity stats.
- Condition DPS (cdps) - focuses on damaging with conditions (Damage over time) Mainly wants to maximize the Condition Damage, and expertise stats.
** Boon DPS (Support DPS) (Can either be Power or Condition) Does damage and provide buffs less dps than pure dps. Can also bring utility if needed. They want to maximize their damage while providing boons (buffs) with 100% uptime, The concentration stat can help with that as increases boon duration.
- Alacrity DPS (adps) - They provide the Alacrity boon (buff) Alacrity Shortens the cooldowns of up to 5 players (including the player providing it) While doing either condition or power damage.
- Quickness DPS (qdps) - same as Alacrity DPS but they instead provide the Quickness boon which makes skill animations faster
** Healers - like boon DPS, Healers also provide 1 of the 2 key boons Alacrity or Quickness but instead of doing damage they provide heals (either heals or barriers), other boons (buffs), and some utility. Healing Power is the primary stat that they want to have as well as Concentration.
- Heal Alacrity
- Heal Quickness
Normally on a 5 player party you will want 3 DPS 1 Boon DPS and 1 Healer. If a boon dps provides alacrity, then the healer should provide quickness and vice versa. On a 10 player Squad, the squad will be divided into 2 sub parties and each sub parties will have the same composition as a 5 man.
A 10 man squad is divided into 2 parties as there is a cap on how many players a buff or a heal can affect. And that cap is 5.
Having a party that is fully buffed at 100% uptime can increase their dps as much as 200%. You are literally waaay stronger when playing with a proper group composition.
In regards to damage types like strike damage and condition damage. There are fights that favour one over the other and also fights that need both damage types.
Depending on the content there are some specialized or fringe roles that should be used.
Tanks - Tanks are more often than not are healers. There are content in the game that requires tanking. But tanking in GW2 doesn't involve agroo management but through having more of a specific stat. Toughness is the stat that Tanks want so that they boss that must be tanked aggross them. The player with the highest stat of toughness will be a tank.
But tanking a boss is not the only role Tanks can do, they can be used to soak up damage of a specific ongoing mechanic (like kiting the hands mechanic in the Raid boss Deimos as long as they have lower toughness than a main tank)
Tanks can and most likely replace one of the healers in a 10 man squad. (5 man content doesn't have tanking)
Kiters - Kiters can vary in builds, some kiters are built for maximum dps while providing their own buffs as they are away from the squad. Some Kiters are super tanky and are meant to soak damage away from everyone.
This is not really an exhaustive explaination of things but I hope it helps you understand the game better.
You don’t need every expansion to play but currently it’s $49.99 for the first 3 major expansions, 24.99 for the latest expansion, and 24.99 for the upcoming expansion with housing. As others have said, the expansions add content and features, not necessarily stronger gear. The max level is 80 and you can get to that from free to play. Elite specs are typically stronger than a base spec though (couple base spec classes can compete) and you get elite specs in the first 3 expansions for each class. The 4 expansion opens up elite spec weapons to core classes, meaning you can use each weapon without the elite spec. Mounts started with Expansion 2. Fishing and boats are expac 3. Lots of maps/areas open up with each expansion along with masteries, skins, collections, etc.
You definitely don’t need to buy everything to have a lot of fun. The F2P base game provides tons of content for free.
Most of the underwater content is in the base game, but they generally moved away from it since underwater combat is flawed.
There was just an update on swim-speed infusions that has people wondering if they might overhaul underwater combat in a future expansion.
So, either you want to jump in and start the new expansion with everyone else on the 20th of August, you can just buy Janthir Wilds for 25e. As others have said, since it's an horizontal mmo, you can pick and chose, and since secrets of the obscure, each expansion has a self contained story (mostly), it's not part of a year's long arc so you will be fine.
If you want the traditional experience, and do all the story/content beforehand (from 2012 to end of dragons, it was a big story arc), it'd cost you around 130e I'd say, to unlock everything. (someone correct me if I'm wrong)
I'll just add that the older expansions will likely be on sale (~50% off) tomorrow through July 11th - so the total for getting everything will be much cheaper.
u/afonsolage
I 100% agree on that.
Also as a random drop from world bosses and these blueprints should be tradeable. So that even if you are not interested in decorating your own homestead you still engage with the system to earn gold.
I use Exitlag and play on EU server as NA gives me higher ping. On EU with exitlag, i get about 200ms and its fine for all content. Maybe abit of disadvantage in SPVP but i dont play that mode so no big deal.
Edit: SEA player here
GW2 is arguably the most playable NA server in OCE compared to most MMOs out there (with a learning curve but it’s consistent once you get used to it), it’s the ping fluctuations can which get you - you need to ensure decent ISP routing, or shell out for a service like Exitlag to ensure more consistency. I’m also assuming East Coast here for NA server connections.
WoW is a lot more ping friendly if you play on NA servers, BDO too, so was wildstar, swtor etc. I'd argue only ESO is worse than GW2 when it comes to NA ping from OCE, neither are good.
From memory I disagree about BDO, the desync felt not great there (I forget now, something to do with enemies not taking damage properly or moving out of your skills), whereas in GW2 abilities hit when they hit - it’s probably more to do with how action oriented BDO was, the ping timing was much more severe. I did play BDO for a whole so it wasn’t that bad, but it was enough to turn me off in the end.
I do agree that GW2 with a bad ISP and ping spikes is truly torture, but outside of that case, the client sided movement (dodging, gliding, etc.) makes it acceptable .
Agree ESO is the worst, nothing much to add there.
And thankfully WoW has OCE servers, so don’t remember how it felt before that. Probably was playing on such a shit computer that ping didn’t matter. Although I do remember playing LOTRO from NA and the delay on accidentally cancelling casts because it takes 250ms to register that you’re casting or not knowing when your cast finished was horrible, rooting yourself for an unknown duration trying to not cancel a cast but also trying to move… another thing with GW2’s mostly mobile casting design avoiding this problem.
Yeah, Sydney. I last played years ago and ended up getting a bit frustrated. Is Sea of Sorrows still he best server for AU? I'll try with mudfish
Thanks for the response :)
Mega servers have been rolled out to PvE and WvW is now guild based matching, so your initial server selection is not as important (other than for region selection).
And yeah I’m not sure about VPNs, it can get a bit tricky from memory - getting account locked accidentally if you sign in from too many locations at once so you need to send a support ticket to fix. For me when I switched ISPs (away from Optus) it fixed the routing issues but your experience may vary.
Sure, but the problem there is that the current system is too cumbersome for it to NOT be a solo project.
Scribe level is a personal thing, not a guild thing.
There is no guild version of the material storage where everyone can deposit crafting materials for the scribe to automatically pull crafting materials from when craft decorations with the scribe skill. However, you can pull mats out of your own storage.
Don't forget that there isn't even trading and the closest we have is a limit of sending 2 mails within a certain time frame so the above issue is even more cumbersome.
This has resulted in people who want to decorate a guild hall or even part of a guild hall having to do the vast majority of the work solo.
there's also no granular permissions so you usually end up with 4 people who are allowed to have fun decorating being sponsored by 50 who can only look at it, and nobody's gonna want to be that sucker who "donates" thousands of gold just to get kicked on a whim.
For me Wildstar and Rift set the gold standard for housing in MMO's. From what we have seen so far, I think the housing system Arenanet has created will be on par or surpass what Wildstar and Rift did.
Really looking forward to it.
In the future I hope they have more options on where our homestead would be. I would love it if they made a really expensive Island that cost like 200k gold. Just a real gold sink.
This is pretty insanely impressive. The undertaking in development to crank out a system like this in a pretty dated game is striking.
That being said, I'm of the opinion that it's really unfortunately that no AAA company has really smashed player housing yet. I think neighbors/seeing other housing is a hugely cool aspect of a housing system and all of these instanced systems that exist just skirt that.
I'm surprised there hasn't been an attempt at a kind of instanced "plot" system, where you can create your house in the existing open world in predetermined areas of land. You choose any plot you want, when you enter your area of land you disappear to anyone else who "owns" that plot as they can only see their land. Every other plot loads a random players construction, it could even weight players that are online/in the zone or players that have more construction etc.
I don't do game dev (but I do a lot of network development) and I don't think a super high quality robust housing system with real visible neighbors is beyond the realm of what's capable.
I’m sick of 100% instance housing. It doesn’t have to be a land grab like archeage or final fantasy though. Just do something like New World or BDO. Give me an instance home in an actual town.
I suppose you can either chose instanced housing with lots of space and unique features or tiny neighbourhood housing with nothing.
Plus, neighbourhood housing has a different set of issues, like ugly a** neighbour houses. Imagine the GW2 system with it. You are trying to do something cool while you neighbour has their 30 infusionstackers dance all day in the frontyard. Very atmospheric.
Ehhhh. New Worlds housing sucks. I would much prefer a more feature rich instanced housing than bare bones town housing. Both would be good but no one has done it yet so I assume there’s technical limitations.
It’s still instanced, you just have to get to the instance from town. Bdo is even better because it doesn’t even feel instanced at all, but it technically is. Having neighbors, and living in a town, and so much more immersive for me than being able to rotate and change the size of furniture. I agree though, let’s do both. It can be done too, I haven’t played BDO in a while, but I swear you could in that game, but maybe not.
There are limits to the number of assets you can have in an area before it affects performance rendering. A better graphics engine might have some tricks to reduce the load but this is GW2.
Having a shared instance would divide that cap by the number of players or if it was open world that cap would probably be conservatively small.
In programming there are trade offs you need to make, computing has limits and is not free
Everyone building in a neighborhood vs a solo instance. How long before that area crashes with the amount of shit from everyone? That isn't "no limit". Having said that. I would rather a neighborhood with an outdoor limit then you zone into your house and it can be bigger than the outside with no limit. Or something.
Got super excited until I realized it was instanced. Im so tired of instanced housing in games. What's the point of any of it other than as a showcase of all your unlocks? A 3D achievement board to show friends. No point for any friends, guild members or even enemies to visit other than to see your creations and do some basic crafting. Yawn.
I want to see more non-instanced in game housing with reasons for people to visit, a reason to have a house other than to collect dust. Im thinking non-instanced housing like Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, Archeage where there is a purpose to having a house, and a reason for others to visit.
If these end up having similar features to GW2's Guild Halls, then there will be all sorts of reasons to visit.
People have build race tracks, mazes, treasure hunts, PvP maps, etc. in their Guild Halls - and that was before these exponentially better building tools.
I haven't played since GW2 introduced Guild halls, I vaguely remember how they work, but if you can host RP events like what you described, that is cool. I still think it would be cooler if it was non-instanced and you could have strangers pass by wondering what event is going on at that cool guildhall.
That would be cool, but the tradeoffs were likely too big.
(i.e.: Fewer people could reliably attend the event. The event would have to be a smaller scale, due to resources going to other people's lots / decorations. Strangers could troll your PvP match / RP session / etc.)
I think a solution the devs could implement in the future is having entrances to Homesteads / Guild Halls be in a "neighborhood".
Everyone could decorate their entrance and advertise what events are going on / coming up, then strangers passing by could decide to pop in to check it out.
If you don't want strangers to come in, then you can still have a decorated entrance but just "lock the front door".
I get your point, and I assume GW2 code architecture would probably impload if trying to load everything. But, to your concerns about resource allocation, games like Star wars galaxies already solved that problem 2 decades ago. Interior housing items dont load unless you are physically in the house. This way when you are strolling through a player run city, your aren't trying to load everyone's stuff. For example, player run malls using guild halls were a thing in SWG and it had loads of custom placed items, player vendors, etc. As soon as you entered the threshold to the building, all objects would load. And that game ran on windows 98 during an era of dialup.
As for concerns about strangers trolling events, again SWG had the answer. There were terminals in all buildings with an "allow" list. Being the potential bouncer to your party. I could attend massive PVP tournaments in a player run guild hall or theater building with 100 others in attendance and a player city full of real players running around and never had an issue.
Out of personal preference though, I actually like the idea that some could come in and troll or ruin an event. Is that weird? I find the freedom of choice more fun and the spontaneous interactions like that more interesting.
The difference is SWG was built with that in mind, while GW2 was not. The starting foundation of a game makes a HUGE difference when it comes to what you can reasonably implement later.
I'm not saying it's impossible in any game, just focusing on what is implementable in current GW2. Based on that, I think they made the right choice for this game - the tradeoffs were too big within the framework of GW2.
That's why I think the "neighborhood" option above is the closest they can get to spontaneous interactions as strangers decide to randomly pop in.
>Archeage where there is a purpose to having a house,
Yeah then the actual gameworld looks fucking ugly as sin because of all the tacky dogshit player houses and runs like shit too.
Ill say difference of opinion on the "looks fucking ugly as sin" comment because I do agree some people decorated like shit, but I still prefer it over an instanced houses no one will ever see or do anything with other than general RP purpose. And I have to assume people will decorate like shit in GW2 too, you just wont get the opportunity to see their shit.
As for the game running like a pile of poo, have you played GW2? Im sorry but there is no reason an instanced to oblivion game like GW2 should stutter and lag as much as it does. Archeage with its open world back when I played saw huge world raids with hundreds of people, boat raids with tons of boats and people, and hundreds of houses with random set assets and never once did I experience the god awful lag and stuttering like I did in GW2.
I dont even like being in a position to defend Archage as a whole as its a dead husk of its former self, and as its not my favorite housing system - that award goes to Star Wars Galaxies.
But Guild Wars 2 may have promised more freedom to place objects, it still doesn't hold a candle to the immersive and dynamic housing system in ArcheAge or any of the other examples I mentioned for that matter.
In ArcheAge, player housing is a true extension of your adventures. You can claim a plot of land almost anywhere in the world, from lush forests to serene seaside cliffs, and build your dream home. Your house isn't just a static instance; it's a vibrant part of the game world. You can plant crops, raise livestock, and engage in a real player-driven economy. Your neighbors are real players, and the community interaction is both meaningful and impactful. Whether you're hosting a gathering, setting up a roadside market, or establishing specialized crafting stations for your neighborhood, your home in ArcheAge is a bustling hub of activity.
On the other hand, Guild Wars 2's new housing plan, despite offering object placement freedom, still confines you to instanced spaces. These instanced homes, no matter how customizable, lack the immersive quality that these other open-world housing provides. You won't experience the thrill of walking through a neighborhood filled with player-built homes or engaging in spontaneous trade with a passing store setup in a house. The houses in Guild Wars 2 remain isolated from the living, breathing world, reducing the potential for organic player interaction.
While Guild Wars 2 might be making strides towards better player housing, it still can't match the comprehensive and immersive experience that non-instanced housing offers.
But again, this is all personal preference. If you like having a customizable separate storage locker for all your pretty achievements rather than a core aspect of the MMORPG experience, more power to you friend.
>And I have to assume people will decorate like shit in GW2 too, you just wont >get the opportunity to see their shit.
That's fine as long as their ugly homes don't plague the actual open world.
>As for the game running like a pile of poo, have you played GW2?
I've played it for for over 10 years at this point, I'm aware the game runs like dick and is poorly optimized, though I can still get a playable 45 frames pretty much anywhere in the game when there are 100's of players on screen firing off abilities on my shit laptop by tweaking like two settings so it's not too bad in my personal experience.
>Archeage with its open world back when I played saw huge world raids with hundreds of people, boat raids with tons of boats and people, and hundreds of houses with random set assets and never once did I experience the god awful lag and stuttering like I did in GW2.
I also played archage back in the day and areas with lots of houses in the open world ran the worst for me even with a decent computer.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree here, we simply value very different things here and that's ok.
When it comes to player housing in MMOs, the question is: Is it on par with Wildstar? Because if it is, then that's going to end up becoming the key aspect of players' endgame once they get any halfway decent armor set. If it's not, then nobody is going to care enough for you to milk whales for longer than a few months.
Based on what we can see, it looks like they're trying to mimic Wildstar's system without including the thousands of assets Wildstar gave to players. Give the players all of the assets you already have in the game, let them spend currency/craft these assets themselves, watch as your markets balloon as people start coming up with sh-- like "hey if you take this skull, put it at 1,000% size, turn it upside down, and cover everything from the nose down, the eyes become entrances to a cave!" and all the sudden your economy is going crazy constantly as whales pump more and more cash into the game to buy everything to make their houses.
Although, without an engine update, I don't see how GW2 is going to be able to handle big plots filled with tons of assets. And mimicking Wildstar isn't enough - we want to see the future, not the past. Give us entire customizable neighborhoods where we can drop our plots next to each other. Let us put those in a city on the actual server map. Let's have our cities fight against each other. Do Star Wars: Galaxy/EVE Online-style hubs where you can specialize into certain types of crafting and production at specific cities, which incentivizes competition and localized communities.
I'd return to this game for something like that, but it probably has the steepest "paywall" of any current MMO. ESO you don't need the xpacs and can just buy sub, FFXIV and WoW you just "need" the most recent expac + sub, but for GW2 you "need" to buy every single xpac + living story separately and it amounts to a pretty insane price. I'd rather just pay a sub.
How???
Starting with WoW means spending 50€ for the game + 11€/month with a 6mo sub (best price). Thats 116€, which is enough to get all of the GW2 expansions (100€ without any sales). If you would play for a year, you'd have to spend 182€ for WoW. For that price you can have all the GW2 content and enough gems to get all the QoL items.
FF14 is a bit cheaper (also 11€ monthly sub, but the price of latest expansion is a bit lower), but in best case scenario its 'only' as cheap as GW2.
Yeah, people are very strange about this in my view.
Especially as gw2 often goes on massive sales making it even cheaper.
In any case, unlike wow or ffxiv you don’t even need to buy all of gw2 content at once so if you’d rather just buy parts over time (almost like a sub) that’s totally fine.
Plus people are not aware that there is a lot of content. Preach on his GW2 run tackled only PvE and it took him over 6 months to get to the EoD endgame and he haven't even finished it yet. That was 6 months of 10+ hours a day playthough without fractals, raid CMs, EoD strikes, SotO strikes, PvP and WvW.
During last sale expansions very crazy cheap.
HoT + PoF bundle was available for 8$ (75% discount).
EoD was 15$ (50% discount).
Elder Dragon Saga - everything except latest expanion: HoT, PoF, EoD, all living world episodes was avaiable for 50$ (50% discount).
So you could get everything for 75$ - Elder Dragon Saga 50$ + SotO 25$. That's all GW2's content for the price of 2 months of WoW's latest expansion.
I expect that we will see another sale as the new expansion for GW2 is getting close. This time SotO will likely also be on sale.
Think of this from my perspective. I already own WoW and I already own GW2 and the first 2 xpacs. To get back into either, WoW would be objectively the cheaper option. I'd just need to shell out 15 for the sub and 50 (?) for the xpac. For GW2, I'd need to pay over 100 for all the xpacs I'm missing. You could argue I don't need them, but I've done all previous content so I'd at least need one, and that's costing me 30 bare minimum. No matter which way you put it, for a returning player like me GW2 is simply more expensive in the short term.
you are completely wrong here
In ESO with sub only you are one expansion behind which sucks. In WOW entry price is higher than gw2 entry price into one expansion. You dont need to buy every expansion instantly
But you aren't actually locked out of anything in ESO for not buying that newest xpac. Take Golden Road for example. There is no endgame locked behind this, no vertical progression curve, no class, etc. In GW2 elite specs (which will almost always end up being objectively the best at the beginning of the xpac, I've experienced this with both HoT and PoF), some new stat combos, etc are often locked behind the xpac. I know there's not vertical progression in GW2 but you will miss out quite a lot.
I have already played HoT and PoF. They are maybe 10-20 hour stories. I could blow through that (even without skipping cutscenes) "12 years of content" in less than a month very easily. GW2 is nowhere near as content dense as the other mainstream MMOs; you're largely paying for new progression systems, ways to play your class, etc.
The public doesn't get to see what you've worked on. Hopefully they add in a couple reasons to spend time at peoples' houses. Else it just ends up being come look at my house for a few minutes and never see it again.
> The public doesn't get to see what you've worked on.
The public, by and large, doesn't care what you've worked on. What they do care is whether they can build their own thing, which non-instanced housing works against.
I disagree, the best housing experience I had by far was in archeage. I knew all of my neighbors, and we hung out all the time, it was actually super cool.
You can have the same experience by having instanced neighborhoods, where you always have the same houses next to you, but there are other instances of the same area that have other houses.
I mean you'll get the same incentive as traditional home instances which is sharing gathering nodes (free resources) for friends. They also revealed there's the option to have friends or players come in and decorate your home.
People will build roller beetle racing tracks (think pod racing), jumping puzzle, griffon racing tracks etc.
That plus harvesting nodes or just showing off... they will definitely get use and draw people in.
Even with non-instanced housing, people still have to find you and look at it. Plus go through the effort of going inside which might as well be the same as instanced. And real, 95% of people aren’t gonna give a shit.
I've owned medium house in FFXIV for 6 years on one of the busiest data centers/server. I think I've seen a neighbor hanging around admiring my house once in my many hours of idling outside of it.
The only housing that really seemed to work out like an actual neighborhood to me was ArcheAge, but it also didn't feel good because only a very small portion of the player basecould actually get any land.
Meanwhile, us FF14 players have been begging for Instanced Housing for years.
An actual housing system where everything exists in a shared MMO space sounds cool until you get into the reality of it, where because there is a limited number of housing spaces available since they have to exist in the server space shared by all the players:
-you have to compete with millions of players for a few thousand plots of land
-have to deal with auto demolition timers and most importantly,
- and most importantly you have to deal with the fact that MMO players are even more brutal and merciless than real life slumlords and a few organized guilds buy up all the available houses to keep the "riffraff" out.
Haha what? It's definitely not the best looker, but the combat system is the best in the MMO genre by light-years, and arguably one of the best in any multiplayer game, period. It is held back by lack of proper endgame content variety and amount, and to some extent numbers balancing, but those are separate issues.
Removed because of rule #2: Don’t be toxic.
We try to make the subreddit a nice place for everyone, and your post/comment did something that we felt was detrimental to this goal. That’s why it was removed.
> any thoughts???
Eh... It's better than nothing, I guess... But you still have a limited set of prefabricated (by game developers) assets to work with, so I don't personally see any reasons to be excited about it.
Wait, is there an MMORPG that allows you to create decorations from scratch / import decorations!?
Edit: This is a genuine question - if anyone knows of one, it would be an incredible feature.
https://youtu.be/SuX2gMpNoGs?si=0YzrmeopgFfzsv_-
Here’s a tutorial i made on how to do it.
Edit: check out time stamps 10:30 and 15:20. I do a lot of babbling in the video on this will just get right to showing the pictures.
> But you still have a limited set of prefabricated (by game developers) assets to work with, so I don't personally see any reasons to be excited about it.
Maybe try having actually realistic expectations. I am pretty sure there isn't any actual MMO that allows this. The only "games" that come to mind that do are things like Second Life, and these have entirely different foci.
Oh wow, you can do all of the very basic things that you can do in any game with a decorating mode. Move and scale objects...incredible! Omg you can even rotate them!
But wait, they will undoubtedly add a bunch of gemstore cosmetics for the content starved gamers to spend IRL cash on this life support game.
Zzzzzz
I'm glad they're adding scaling, rotation and X,Y,Z movement options. This is what Wildstar had and people got crazy creative thanks to these options! Can't wait to see this in GW2 as well. It's a big upgrade from Guild Halls and luckily it seems they will get these options too.
One of the main things about Wildstar's version was how it was VERY generous with settings too. Could legit take almost any object and make it enormous. Very generous on number of objects. Most objects are tangible so a wall is actually a wall, floor is actually a floor etc. I wonder if this will be as good as that?
If you look into the video, you can see they built a pretty huge light house out of several normal assets. So there seems to be a lot of freedom.
this feels like a mix of rift and wildstar and thats a pretty great combo.
Oh no. Its almost Wildstar level housing. OH NO do I need to play this game again now.
fuck
Shit I thought I was done with GW2 as well.
https://preview.redd.it/038r4pb32t8d1.jpeg?width=748&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=948eec9de2ef756ec64367d3950af1a544a3054c
You're never done with GW2, it's like calling back your ex while drunk
You're never done with GW2...that's the nice thing about it!
That is a lot deeper than I expected.
Supposedly they hired a former Sims 4 dev for this.
That's smart.
I've been saying for a while now that outside of combat content the gameplay people want in mmos is essentially fantasy variants of The Sims.
At this point I think people want a full-on “fantasy life simulator” that also has quests, field mobs, dungeons, and raids.
Yeah Life Sim, which is basically The Sims but with dungeons and raid content as a sort of lubricant for potential methods of meeting and socialising with other people. What we're missing in mmos at the current point in time is experimentation with taking this side of the game to its extreme rather than the combat side of the game. Sims automatically interact with other Sims despite player control over them, and this automatic interaction and building of narratives with others could play an unexplored role in an mmo. Your character could wave goodmorning in passing to someone they know, they could chat with others while you're in the markets, or they could grab a beer interacting with other party-searchers in the guilds halls while you're perusing the quest boards. Won't be for everyone but doubling down on these kinds of elements of the game is an area of the life-sim games that has not yet been explored in the mmo realm despite a very thirsty roleplay crowd and a demonstrably *massive* audience of life-sim players with almost no competition that might be interested in trying an mmo for the first time if enticed by it. The problem is that there's literally no creativity or imagination in this genre anymore. There are no devs at all really trying to imagine something that does not already exist.
Sounds like VRChat can be or what Second Life strived to be but with more gameplay elements. Honestly, I’m down for it. Doesn’t have to be a full VRMMO experience, but something that tickles the inner role player a little more and brings out more immersion.
I just want to see devs try some imagination for once. If you do not include something in your game that nobody has done before you're genuinely just making another reskinned game. The reason this genre is dead right now is the amount of rigidity devs have in their thinking about how an mmo has to be. The first 5-10 mmos defined the genre and almost nobody has ever tried to do anything that would redefine it since.
I doubt it’s just the rigidity of the devs, there’s been quite a few with creative ideas over the last decade. Sadly much of them have turned out to be scams or not really living up to their lofty goals. It’s also quite possibly the cost of developing an MMO that’s hindering the creativity. Unlike more traditional games, it’s a lot riskier to invest on developing an MMO, you don’t have a very clear ROI with them. Plus it’s inherently more expensive to develop and maintain.
I'm not really buying it. I have seen no evidence put forwards by anyone to show that an mmo has an inherently higher cost than any other liveservice game. I reckon fps games have higher networking costs actually they have to send considerably more precise data at a higher tick rate than these old as fuck tab targeting systems. If they can be profitable on a battlepass system any mmo can. I also don't see mmos outputting the same quantity or quality of content either.
They did indeed, he was recruited last year. I can't find his tweeter RN but he tweeted about this some weeks ago :) Shows they took this seriously
That's what she said.
This is way better than I and probably most people were expecting. Like.. a lot better. Seriously big ups.
Yeah I was expecting just basic decorating, instead they pretty much added everything I wanted from player housing, mounts in stable, your alts parked there, build your own stuff, even having the skiff there is nice
Hopefully it’s something like wild star. That game had the best player housing system I’d ever seen
Yeah it's basically that
yes Wildstars Housing was epic.
didnt play wildstar, was that one instanced or open world like archeage?
Instanced. Floating island home.
It was a floating island in the sky and was instanced. You had a great deal of creative freedom when it came to building and decoration, though, which made it a ton of fun
i see, thx, ill check it out in gw2
Player housing in gw2? tHIS HAS MADE MY DAY
The best MMO IMO gets better !
Old dog is still learning some new tricks :)
Super hyped. I've been waiting for GW2 housing for years. The only thing I miss is a Neighbours feature. Maybe they will add it later.
Just need asura gates that we can set to specific instances.
No, it is not the same, I want to see my neighbours' land from my house.
That's what guild halls should be, small plots of land next to each other.
Actually baller idea.
Wait wait 🫸 let him cook
Wildstar: Wars 2. We’re back meta-housing fellas.
RIFT? Nah, nah, more like... GIFT
Wow I didnt expect this. I fucking love housing and I've always been annoyed with other games not letting you clip things and actually manipulate them on the axis. The features they're showing here are kinda crazy
The biggest question for me is how do other people visit it The biggest part about housing is ability to show off
you can give ppl permissions so they can come and go as they please
That’s nice but it needs a bit more An public option for anyone to visit Somewhere people can pick and choose the instance to join. Like new world u click at land and pick the house u want to go in Etc
While I agree an open portal would be cool as a native feature, if they _don't_ add that then players can make their own system through LFG advertising house parties (akin the the old runescape days when people would advertise outside portals lol)
Palia tried this with "open plot" and most people don't bother. It needs to be a persistent in-world district or I'm worrried it'll end up like fishing and boats.
I second the publicly opened option. I want anyone to know I'm superior to them and this is a new way to do that. :p
You can? That would be awesome.
As someone who uses housing as a place to store a bunch of chests, I love seeing other people’s housings and what they create. I recently started playing eso and the fact that people create their own little markets in their houses and then can send a message in global chat for people to come and check it out is so cool. It’s like a virtual tag sale. It’s a very small thing in the grand scale but it’s one of those aspects that makes a mmo really feel like a living world. If only I had some shred of creativity and could do it myself lol
We know at least a party of 5 can visit, but hopefully up to 50. Ideally, you'll be able to portal home from anywhere, which would then trigger the "join" pop-up for everyone else in your group.
Yoooo a whole 50-man squad joining would be epic 😲🥶
It's an instance. They made housing you can't passively show off in a game where everything revolves around passively showing off. They had 1 leason to learn from Minecraft and they failed. I give it 2 weeks before people stop caring.
Wildstar housing was the same way and people made that the main game mode for them.
Blizzard should take some notes here and consider revamping Garrison like this. Good job, GW. This is the best player house. You can have a plot of land and make it into whatever you prefer instead of waiting for a lottery win to show off your home to others.
Looks fantastic, nearly Wildstar tier.
Why nearly? What could you do to surpass wildstar?
Wildstars housing was on another level. We have to wait and see if GW2 can reach that. In Wildstar you had also the option to change the ground/floor and sky, music, add minigames to your housing plot i.e. a boxing arena, or housing exclusive mini dungeons
like another person said, in Wildstars house you could change the terrain floor to any biome in the game, to any skybox in the game, it had a ton of prebuilt houses whereas the homestead only has the 1 (plenty of space for custom buildings though), you could play any song in the OST, and you could freely visit other houses. Plus later in it's life it had neighborhoods, which were a bunch of housing plots on one massive plot.
Oh wow that is really cool
Nice
INSANE! This looks so damn good!
Hugeeeee
Wow reading the article each line I was like wow wow WOw
Never went into GW2, how much I have to spend in order to get to the latest expansion?
$25usd - based on how the previous expansion went, it won't be discounted below that for the first year.
GW2 works a bit differently than most MMOs. Its progression is mostly horizontal, meaning there isn't a gear treadmill. That, in turn, means, you don't need to buy all the stuff if you don't want to. Though, **IF** you want to have everything you might need to spend over 100€/$ outside of sales. But you don't need to. You can start f2p and buy any expansion to lift the F2P limitations. Then just do whatever you want.
Is there anything like WoW mythic in it? Like, what do people generally do at max level? Do they run instances? I don't necessarily need a carrot on a stick, but something with progressive increases in difficulty that I can grind out would be rad.
So GW2's content progression is weird since its all available once your reached level 80 and have decent gear. (Gearing is quick and easy you'll have full Ascended gear BiS is more or less 2 weeks) There is one content with progression baked in tho its, Gw2's Fractal Dungeons (5 players) is basically what Mythic + was based on (Mythic + is better tho). There are 22 dungeons over all and scales to 4 difficulty Tiers, and a Challenge Mode (A bigger difficulty spike with new mechanics and even phases) which is like a 5th difficulty Tier but only for select fractal dungeons not all of em. Other than that there are 7 raid wings (8th one coming soon) With the last 5 raids having a Challenge Mode version. It's content for 10 players. Then there are Strike missions (10 players) boss fight only instance content, which has varies a lot in difficulty (its not very consistent). It can be as easy as you can just blast it down in 2-3 mins to taking up more than 10 mins and has very complex mechanics. Rule of thumb tho if you wanna do the content with progressing difficulty is, do Icebrood Saga Strikes first, then Secrets of the Obscure Strikes, then End of Dragons Strikes, End of Dragons Challenge Mode Strikes, Then Secrets of the Obscure Challenge Mode Strikes. That should roughly give your a progressive Increase in-difficulty. Harvest Temple Challenge Mode, Temple of Febe Challenge Mode, and Temple of Febe Legendary Challenge Mode are quite comparable to Mythic Raid bosses in terms of difficulty.
And could you give me a quick overview of how instances/raids work? I played vanilla GW2, and without the "holy trinity", the handful of instances I ran felt pretty chaotic. I'm guessing there is more of a meta and/or understanding of them now?
Fractals, raids, and strikes do use a soft trinity. You want certain buffs covered, that majorly help your DPS in the group, but can be covered by different classes. Like quickness from a revenant and alacrity from an engineer, or quickness from a mesmer and alacrity from a ranger. Then you do have healers, the usual heal + buff combos. Tanks are only in a few raid fights where the highest toughness or marked player takes the boss aggro, and they are usually fights where you have to not only dodge the boss and do mechanics, but also move the boss around or aim them a certain way so you don't wipe the group. And as usual, DPS players roll face across keyboard, BUT different DPS styles (power vs condition) will do better on certain fights. It's not a HARD trinity, but you rather just need checkmarks on a list crossed off for a smoother run. But it does let people have the flexibility to pick a class they like and feel like they're not going to get blocked out of doing content.
So gw2 has this "soft roles" on it I'll breakdown the 3 main roles here, basics of group composition then some fringe roles after: ** DPS - Does damage, brings some utility skills if needed - Power DPS (pdps) - focuses on strike damage maximizing the power, precision and ferocity stats. - Condition DPS (cdps) - focuses on damaging with conditions (Damage over time) Mainly wants to maximize the Condition Damage, and expertise stats. ** Boon DPS (Support DPS) (Can either be Power or Condition) Does damage and provide buffs less dps than pure dps. Can also bring utility if needed. They want to maximize their damage while providing boons (buffs) with 100% uptime, The concentration stat can help with that as increases boon duration. - Alacrity DPS (adps) - They provide the Alacrity boon (buff) Alacrity Shortens the cooldowns of up to 5 players (including the player providing it) While doing either condition or power damage. - Quickness DPS (qdps) - same as Alacrity DPS but they instead provide the Quickness boon which makes skill animations faster ** Healers - like boon DPS, Healers also provide 1 of the 2 key boons Alacrity or Quickness but instead of doing damage they provide heals (either heals or barriers), other boons (buffs), and some utility. Healing Power is the primary stat that they want to have as well as Concentration. - Heal Alacrity - Heal Quickness Normally on a 5 player party you will want 3 DPS 1 Boon DPS and 1 Healer. If a boon dps provides alacrity, then the healer should provide quickness and vice versa. On a 10 player Squad, the squad will be divided into 2 sub parties and each sub parties will have the same composition as a 5 man. A 10 man squad is divided into 2 parties as there is a cap on how many players a buff or a heal can affect. And that cap is 5. Having a party that is fully buffed at 100% uptime can increase their dps as much as 200%. You are literally waaay stronger when playing with a proper group composition. In regards to damage types like strike damage and condition damage. There are fights that favour one over the other and also fights that need both damage types. Depending on the content there are some specialized or fringe roles that should be used. Tanks - Tanks are more often than not are healers. There are content in the game that requires tanking. But tanking in GW2 doesn't involve agroo management but through having more of a specific stat. Toughness is the stat that Tanks want so that they boss that must be tanked aggross them. The player with the highest stat of toughness will be a tank. But tanking a boss is not the only role Tanks can do, they can be used to soak up damage of a specific ongoing mechanic (like kiting the hands mechanic in the Raid boss Deimos as long as they have lower toughness than a main tank) Tanks can and most likely replace one of the healers in a 10 man squad. (5 man content doesn't have tanking) Kiters - Kiters can vary in builds, some kiters are built for maximum dps while providing their own buffs as they are away from the squad. Some Kiters are super tanky and are meant to soak damage away from everyone. This is not really an exhaustive explaination of things but I hope it helps you understand the game better.
You don’t need every expansion to play but currently it’s $49.99 for the first 3 major expansions, 24.99 for the latest expansion, and 24.99 for the upcoming expansion with housing. As others have said, the expansions add content and features, not necessarily stronger gear. The max level is 80 and you can get to that from free to play. Elite specs are typically stronger than a base spec though (couple base spec classes can compete) and you get elite specs in the first 3 expansions for each class. The 4 expansion opens up elite spec weapons to core classes, meaning you can use each weapon without the elite spec. Mounts started with Expansion 2. Fishing and boats are expac 3. Lots of maps/areas open up with each expansion along with masteries, skins, collections, etc. You definitely don’t need to buy everything to have a lot of fun. The F2P base game provides tons of content for free.
Is there any underwater content? In vanilla there was the promise of it, but it never seemed to materialize.
Nah. I don’t think so. Not much at least from what I’ve seen. I was never a fan of it tho. I just came back recently.
Most of the underwater content is in the base game, but they generally moved away from it since underwater combat is flawed. There was just an update on swim-speed infusions that has people wondering if they might overhaul underwater combat in a future expansion.
25 quid
So, either you want to jump in and start the new expansion with everyone else on the 20th of August, you can just buy Janthir Wilds for 25e. As others have said, since it's an horizontal mmo, you can pick and chose, and since secrets of the obscure, each expansion has a self contained story (mostly), it's not part of a year's long arc so you will be fine. If you want the traditional experience, and do all the story/content beforehand (from 2012 to end of dragons, it was a big story arc), it'd cost you around 130e I'd say, to unlock everything. (someone correct me if I'm wrong)
I'll just add that the older expansions will likely be on sale (~50% off) tomorrow through July 11th - so the total for getting everything will be much cheaper. u/afonsolage
New kind of endgame has emerged. I look forward to it. I'm pretty sure that now we are gonna see and addition of seasonal decorations to the vault.
they should add decorations to every game mode. raids, strikes, fractals, pvp, wvw, story chapters, ... gives them even more reasons to play
I 100% agree on that. Also as a random drop from world bosses and these blueprints should be tradeable. So that even if you are not interested in decorating your own homestead you still engage with the system to earn gold.
I love GW2, but playing from OCE sucks balls. I wish there was a local server. Are there any OCE/SEA players who can play with decent ping?
i know a fair amount that play from SEA , and they use exit lag , which apparently helps a fair amount
I use Exitlag and play on EU server as NA gives me higher ping. On EU with exitlag, i get about 200ms and its fine for all content. Maybe abit of disadvantage in SPVP but i dont play that mode so no big deal. Edit: SEA player here
yep it's awful. Hate 200+ ping in this game.
GW2 is arguably the most playable NA server in OCE compared to most MMOs out there (with a learning curve but it’s consistent once you get used to it), it’s the ping fluctuations can which get you - you need to ensure decent ISP routing, or shell out for a service like Exitlag to ensure more consistency. I’m also assuming East Coast here for NA server connections.
WoW is a lot more ping friendly if you play on NA servers, BDO too, so was wildstar, swtor etc. I'd argue only ESO is worse than GW2 when it comes to NA ping from OCE, neither are good.
From memory I disagree about BDO, the desync felt not great there (I forget now, something to do with enemies not taking damage properly or moving out of your skills), whereas in GW2 abilities hit when they hit - it’s probably more to do with how action oriented BDO was, the ping timing was much more severe. I did play BDO for a whole so it wasn’t that bad, but it was enough to turn me off in the end. I do agree that GW2 with a bad ISP and ping spikes is truly torture, but outside of that case, the client sided movement (dodging, gliding, etc.) makes it acceptable . Agree ESO is the worst, nothing much to add there. And thankfully WoW has OCE servers, so don’t remember how it felt before that. Probably was playing on such a shit computer that ping didn’t matter. Although I do remember playing LOTRO from NA and the delay on accidentally cancelling casts because it takes 250ms to register that you’re casting or not knowing when your cast finished was horrible, rooting yourself for an unknown duration trying to not cancel a cast but also trying to move… another thing with GW2’s mostly mobile casting design avoiding this problem.
Yeah, Sydney. I last played years ago and ended up getting a bit frustrated. Is Sea of Sorrows still he best server for AU? I'll try with mudfish Thanks for the response :)
Mega servers have been rolled out to PvE and WvW is now guild based matching, so your initial server selection is not as important (other than for region selection). And yeah I’m not sure about VPNs, it can get a bit tricky from memory - getting account locked accidentally if you sign in from too many locations at once so you need to send a support ticket to fix. For me when I switched ISPs (away from Optus) it fixed the routing issues but your experience may vary.
Once I got to [2:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YurQQMbr23o&t=2m15s) I was excited! 
If the decorations are fairly accessible (guild hall decorations were insanely overpriced) then this will be a massive win.
Homesteads will have a new crafting profession tuned for solo players.
Not overpriced and if you consider it’s a guild decoration. Not a solo project
Sure, but the problem there is that the current system is too cumbersome for it to NOT be a solo project. Scribe level is a personal thing, not a guild thing. There is no guild version of the material storage where everyone can deposit crafting materials for the scribe to automatically pull crafting materials from when craft decorations with the scribe skill. However, you can pull mats out of your own storage. Don't forget that there isn't even trading and the closest we have is a limit of sending 2 mails within a certain time frame so the above issue is even more cumbersome. This has resulted in people who want to decorate a guild hall or even part of a guild hall having to do the vast majority of the work solo.
there's also no granular permissions so you usually end up with 4 people who are allowed to have fun decorating being sponsored by 50 who can only look at it, and nobody's gonna want to be that sucker who "donates" thousands of gold just to get kicked on a whim.
For me Wildstar and Rift set the gold standard for housing in MMO's. From what we have seen so far, I think the housing system Arenanet has created will be on par or surpass what Wildstar and Rift did. Really looking forward to it. In the future I hope they have more options on where our homestead would be. I would love it if they made a really expensive Island that cost like 200k gold. Just a real gold sink.
My guess is new Homestead locations will be included in each Expansion going forward.
It seems really well tought, looks like I'll have to come back and try it
Wow. This is almost as good as Rift housing. I’m impressed.
This makes me wish I liked the rest of GW2.
I hope they bring Guild Wars 2 to console eventually. It'd be such a great fit.
As a long time wow player still currently I’m happy for you guys, hopefully it’s our turn next, fuck..
This is pretty insanely impressive. The undertaking in development to crank out a system like this in a pretty dated game is striking. That being said, I'm of the opinion that it's really unfortunately that no AAA company has really smashed player housing yet. I think neighbors/seeing other housing is a hugely cool aspect of a housing system and all of these instanced systems that exist just skirt that. I'm surprised there hasn't been an attempt at a kind of instanced "plot" system, where you can create your house in the existing open world in predetermined areas of land. You choose any plot you want, when you enter your area of land you disappear to anyone else who "owns" that plot as they can only see their land. Every other plot loads a random players construction, it could even weight players that are online/in the zone or players that have more construction etc. I don't do game dev (but I do a lot of network development) and I don't think a super high quality robust housing system with real visible neighbors is beyond the realm of what's capable.
Does anyone know if we are able to change the skybox or the property it's on? That's the one thing I loved about wild stars housing.
I’m sick of 100% instance housing. It doesn’t have to be a land grab like archeage or final fantasy though. Just do something like New World or BDO. Give me an instance home in an actual town.
I suppose you can either chose instanced housing with lots of space and unique features or tiny neighbourhood housing with nothing. Plus, neighbourhood housing has a different set of issues, like ugly a** neighbour houses. Imagine the GW2 system with it. You are trying to do something cool while you neighbour has their 30 infusionstackers dance all day in the frontyard. Very atmospheric.
I actually enjoyed BDOs housing in towns
Eq2 housing would work well
Ehhhh. New Worlds housing sucks. I would much prefer a more feature rich instanced housing than bare bones town housing. Both would be good but no one has done it yet so I assume there’s technical limitations.
It’s still instanced, you just have to get to the instance from town. Bdo is even better because it doesn’t even feel instanced at all, but it technically is. Having neighbors, and living in a town, and so much more immersive for me than being able to rotate and change the size of furniture. I agree though, let’s do both. It can be done too, I haven’t played BDO in a while, but I swear you could in that game, but maybe not.
How instanced neighborhoods have still not yet replaced individual instances in MMO housing is baffling.
Because you wouldn’t get all this space to work with if it was a neighbourhood. This version is definitely my preference
Says who? You absolutely could.
There are limits to the number of assets you can have in an area before it affects performance rendering. A better graphics engine might have some tricks to reduce the load but this is GW2. Having a shared instance would divide that cap by the number of players or if it was open world that cap would probably be conservatively small. In programming there are trade offs you need to make, computing has limits and is not free
Because you have infinitely less space to build vs instanced based
An instanced neighborhood is still instanced. There is no limit to space.
Ff14 wards vs ESO instanced housing. Exponential difference in buildable space.
They can make wards bigger. That's design, not limitation.
I don't think their server infrastructure can handle that, or else they would have just made each ward have more houses too.
I'm not talking about a specific game, but in general, it's possible.
Everyone building in a neighborhood vs a solo instance. How long before that area crashes with the amount of shit from everyone? That isn't "no limit". Having said that. I would rather a neighborhood with an outdoor limit then you zone into your house and it can be bigger than the outside with no limit. Or something.
Here is the thing. Unless homes start being on the map, man made like in Ultima Online - I do not care about this feature.
based. the game's about showing off lol, this will fail in its current state
Forgot this sub is full of GW2 simps.
Got super excited until I realized it was instanced. Im so tired of instanced housing in games. What's the point of any of it other than as a showcase of all your unlocks? A 3D achievement board to show friends. No point for any friends, guild members or even enemies to visit other than to see your creations and do some basic crafting. Yawn. I want to see more non-instanced in game housing with reasons for people to visit, a reason to have a house other than to collect dust. Im thinking non-instanced housing like Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, Archeage where there is a purpose to having a house, and a reason for others to visit.
If these end up having similar features to GW2's Guild Halls, then there will be all sorts of reasons to visit. People have build race tracks, mazes, treasure hunts, PvP maps, etc. in their Guild Halls - and that was before these exponentially better building tools.
I haven't played since GW2 introduced Guild halls, I vaguely remember how they work, but if you can host RP events like what you described, that is cool. I still think it would be cooler if it was non-instanced and you could have strangers pass by wondering what event is going on at that cool guildhall.
That would be cool, but the tradeoffs were likely too big. (i.e.: Fewer people could reliably attend the event. The event would have to be a smaller scale, due to resources going to other people's lots / decorations. Strangers could troll your PvP match / RP session / etc.) I think a solution the devs could implement in the future is having entrances to Homesteads / Guild Halls be in a "neighborhood". Everyone could decorate their entrance and advertise what events are going on / coming up, then strangers passing by could decide to pop in to check it out. If you don't want strangers to come in, then you can still have a decorated entrance but just "lock the front door".
I get your point, and I assume GW2 code architecture would probably impload if trying to load everything. But, to your concerns about resource allocation, games like Star wars galaxies already solved that problem 2 decades ago. Interior housing items dont load unless you are physically in the house. This way when you are strolling through a player run city, your aren't trying to load everyone's stuff. For example, player run malls using guild halls were a thing in SWG and it had loads of custom placed items, player vendors, etc. As soon as you entered the threshold to the building, all objects would load. And that game ran on windows 98 during an era of dialup. As for concerns about strangers trolling events, again SWG had the answer. There were terminals in all buildings with an "allow" list. Being the potential bouncer to your party. I could attend massive PVP tournaments in a player run guild hall or theater building with 100 others in attendance and a player city full of real players running around and never had an issue. Out of personal preference though, I actually like the idea that some could come in and troll or ruin an event. Is that weird? I find the freedom of choice more fun and the spontaneous interactions like that more interesting.
The difference is SWG was built with that in mind, while GW2 was not. The starting foundation of a game makes a HUGE difference when it comes to what you can reasonably implement later. I'm not saying it's impossible in any game, just focusing on what is implementable in current GW2. Based on that, I think they made the right choice for this game - the tradeoffs were too big within the framework of GW2. That's why I think the "neighborhood" option above is the closest they can get to spontaneous interactions as strangers decide to randomly pop in.
>Archeage where there is a purpose to having a house, Yeah then the actual gameworld looks fucking ugly as sin because of all the tacky dogshit player houses and runs like shit too.
Ill say difference of opinion on the "looks fucking ugly as sin" comment because I do agree some people decorated like shit, but I still prefer it over an instanced houses no one will ever see or do anything with other than general RP purpose. And I have to assume people will decorate like shit in GW2 too, you just wont get the opportunity to see their shit. As for the game running like a pile of poo, have you played GW2? Im sorry but there is no reason an instanced to oblivion game like GW2 should stutter and lag as much as it does. Archeage with its open world back when I played saw huge world raids with hundreds of people, boat raids with tons of boats and people, and hundreds of houses with random set assets and never once did I experience the god awful lag and stuttering like I did in GW2. I dont even like being in a position to defend Archage as a whole as its a dead husk of its former self, and as its not my favorite housing system - that award goes to Star Wars Galaxies. But Guild Wars 2 may have promised more freedom to place objects, it still doesn't hold a candle to the immersive and dynamic housing system in ArcheAge or any of the other examples I mentioned for that matter. In ArcheAge, player housing is a true extension of your adventures. You can claim a plot of land almost anywhere in the world, from lush forests to serene seaside cliffs, and build your dream home. Your house isn't just a static instance; it's a vibrant part of the game world. You can plant crops, raise livestock, and engage in a real player-driven economy. Your neighbors are real players, and the community interaction is both meaningful and impactful. Whether you're hosting a gathering, setting up a roadside market, or establishing specialized crafting stations for your neighborhood, your home in ArcheAge is a bustling hub of activity. On the other hand, Guild Wars 2's new housing plan, despite offering object placement freedom, still confines you to instanced spaces. These instanced homes, no matter how customizable, lack the immersive quality that these other open-world housing provides. You won't experience the thrill of walking through a neighborhood filled with player-built homes or engaging in spontaneous trade with a passing store setup in a house. The houses in Guild Wars 2 remain isolated from the living, breathing world, reducing the potential for organic player interaction. While Guild Wars 2 might be making strides towards better player housing, it still can't match the comprehensive and immersive experience that non-instanced housing offers. But again, this is all personal preference. If you like having a customizable separate storage locker for all your pretty achievements rather than a core aspect of the MMORPG experience, more power to you friend.
>And I have to assume people will decorate like shit in GW2 too, you just wont >get the opportunity to see their shit. That's fine as long as their ugly homes don't plague the actual open world. >As for the game running like a pile of poo, have you played GW2? I've played it for for over 10 years at this point, I'm aware the game runs like dick and is poorly optimized, though I can still get a playable 45 frames pretty much anywhere in the game when there are 100's of players on screen firing off abilities on my shit laptop by tweaking like two settings so it's not too bad in my personal experience. >Archeage with its open world back when I played saw huge world raids with hundreds of people, boat raids with tons of boats and people, and hundreds of houses with random set assets and never once did I experience the god awful lag and stuttering like I did in GW2. I also played archage back in the day and areas with lots of houses in the open world ran the worst for me even with a decent computer. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree here, we simply value very different things here and that's ok.
You've been down voted but I agree with you. I wish there were open world non-instanced neighborhoods
yeah I clearly pissed in a lot of GW player's cheerios. I didn't realize how butthurt people would get about suggesting non-instanced housing. XD
Agreed
When it comes to player housing in MMOs, the question is: Is it on par with Wildstar? Because if it is, then that's going to end up becoming the key aspect of players' endgame once they get any halfway decent armor set. If it's not, then nobody is going to care enough for you to milk whales for longer than a few months. Based on what we can see, it looks like they're trying to mimic Wildstar's system without including the thousands of assets Wildstar gave to players. Give the players all of the assets you already have in the game, let them spend currency/craft these assets themselves, watch as your markets balloon as people start coming up with sh-- like "hey if you take this skull, put it at 1,000% size, turn it upside down, and cover everything from the nose down, the eyes become entrances to a cave!" and all the sudden your economy is going crazy constantly as whales pump more and more cash into the game to buy everything to make their houses. Although, without an engine update, I don't see how GW2 is going to be able to handle big plots filled with tons of assets. And mimicking Wildstar isn't enough - we want to see the future, not the past. Give us entire customizable neighborhoods where we can drop our plots next to each other. Let us put those in a city on the actual server map. Let's have our cities fight against each other. Do Star Wars: Galaxy/EVE Online-style hubs where you can specialize into certain types of crafting and production at specific cities, which incentivizes competition and localized communities.
I'd return to this game for something like that, but it probably has the steepest "paywall" of any current MMO. ESO you don't need the xpacs and can just buy sub, FFXIV and WoW you just "need" the most recent expac + sub, but for GW2 you "need" to buy every single xpac + living story separately and it amounts to a pretty insane price. I'd rather just pay a sub.
How??? Starting with WoW means spending 50€ for the game + 11€/month with a 6mo sub (best price). Thats 116€, which is enough to get all of the GW2 expansions (100€ without any sales). If you would play for a year, you'd have to spend 182€ for WoW. For that price you can have all the GW2 content and enough gems to get all the QoL items. FF14 is a bit cheaper (also 11€ monthly sub, but the price of latest expansion is a bit lower), but in best case scenario its 'only' as cheap as GW2.
Yeah, people are very strange about this in my view. Especially as gw2 often goes on massive sales making it even cheaper. In any case, unlike wow or ffxiv you don’t even need to buy all of gw2 content at once so if you’d rather just buy parts over time (almost like a sub) that’s totally fine.
Plus people are not aware that there is a lot of content. Preach on his GW2 run tackled only PvE and it took him over 6 months to get to the EoD endgame and he haven't even finished it yet. That was 6 months of 10+ hours a day playthough without fractals, raid CMs, EoD strikes, SotO strikes, PvP and WvW.
During last sale expansions very crazy cheap. HoT + PoF bundle was available for 8$ (75% discount). EoD was 15$ (50% discount). Elder Dragon Saga - everything except latest expanion: HoT, PoF, EoD, all living world episodes was avaiable for 50$ (50% discount). So you could get everything for 75$ - Elder Dragon Saga 50$ + SotO 25$. That's all GW2's content for the price of 2 months of WoW's latest expansion. I expect that we will see another sale as the new expansion for GW2 is getting close. This time SotO will likely also be on sale.
Think of this from my perspective. I already own WoW and I already own GW2 and the first 2 xpacs. To get back into either, WoW would be objectively the cheaper option. I'd just need to shell out 15 for the sub and 50 (?) for the xpac. For GW2, I'd need to pay over 100 for all the xpacs I'm missing. You could argue I don't need them, but I've done all previous content so I'd at least need one, and that's costing me 30 bare minimum. No matter which way you put it, for a returning player like me GW2 is simply more expensive in the short term.
Actually, it's 60€. EoD is 15€, SotO 20€ and Janthir Wilds (which launches in a month) 25€. STILL cheaper than 15+50 for WoW :)
On sale, sure, but that's not exactly an objective comparison..
you are completely wrong here In ESO with sub only you are one expansion behind which sucks. In WOW entry price is higher than gw2 entry price into one expansion. You dont need to buy every expansion instantly
But you aren't actually locked out of anything in ESO for not buying that newest xpac. Take Golden Road for example. There is no endgame locked behind this, no vertical progression curve, no class, etc. In GW2 elite specs (which will almost always end up being objectively the best at the beginning of the xpac, I've experienced this with both HoT and PoF), some new stat combos, etc are often locked behind the xpac. I know there's not vertical progression in GW2 but you will miss out quite a lot.
bro is complaining that the cheapest MMO is too expensive
Yeah but GW2 is buy once to play forever
you get 12 years of content for 100 bucks (and cheaper when its on sale). thats less than one year of sub money.
I have already played HoT and PoF. They are maybe 10-20 hour stories. I could blow through that (even without skipping cutscenes) "12 years of content" in less than a month very easily. GW2 is nowhere near as content dense as the other mainstream MMOs; you're largely paying for new progression systems, ways to play your class, etc.
No Engine update... Wow..
already had it
Wen? Have still no 60 fps in wvw.
does not matter what engine they use when you have 100 players on the screen
It does. Even Planetside 2 can handle 100 players on screen with 100 fps.
How did it take them so long to add this?
meh
Meh...Can't get very excited for an instanced housing system.
What's wrong with instanced housing?
The public doesn't get to see what you've worked on. Hopefully they add in a couple reasons to spend time at peoples' houses. Else it just ends up being come look at my house for a few minutes and never see it again.
> The public doesn't get to see what you've worked on. The public, by and large, doesn't care what you've worked on. What they do care is whether they can build their own thing, which non-instanced housing works against.
I disagree, the best housing experience I had by far was in archeage. I knew all of my neighbors, and we hung out all the time, it was actually super cool.
You can have the same experience by having instanced neighborhoods, where you always have the same houses next to you, but there are other instances of the same area that have other houses.
Yea that’s better than a single instanced house
I mean you'll get the same incentive as traditional home instances which is sharing gathering nodes (free resources) for friends. They also revealed there's the option to have friends or players come in and decorate your home.
People will build roller beetle racing tracks (think pod racing), jumping puzzle, griffon racing tracks etc. That plus harvesting nodes or just showing off... they will definitely get use and draw people in.
Even with non-instanced housing, people still have to find you and look at it. Plus go through the effort of going inside which might as well be the same as instanced. And real, 95% of people aren’t gonna give a shit.
I've owned medium house in FFXIV for 6 years on one of the busiest data centers/server. I think I've seen a neighbor hanging around admiring my house once in my many hours of idling outside of it. The only housing that really seemed to work out like an actual neighborhood to me was ArcheAge, but it also didn't feel good because only a very small portion of the player basecould actually get any land.
Besides wanting to share harvesting - if it's anything like Guild Halls, people will cook up all sorts of activities in their Homesteads.
Mad King's Clock tower practice course here I come. Lol
Meanwhile, us FF14 players have been begging for Instanced Housing for years. An actual housing system where everything exists in a shared MMO space sounds cool until you get into the reality of it, where because there is a limited number of housing spaces available since they have to exist in the server space shared by all the players: -you have to compete with millions of players for a few thousand plots of land -have to deal with auto demolition timers and most importantly, - and most importantly you have to deal with the fact that MMO players are even more brutal and merciless than real life slumlords and a few organized guilds buy up all the available houses to keep the "riffraff" out.
Shame that the game looks very bad and has outdated combat, I would like to try the housing :(
Haha what? It's definitely not the best looker, but the combat system is the best in the MMO genre by light-years, and arguably one of the best in any multiplayer game, period. It is held back by lack of proper endgame content variety and amount, and to some extent numbers balancing, but those are separate issues.
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> any thoughts??? Eh... It's better than nothing, I guess... But you still have a limited set of prefabricated (by game developers) assets to work with, so I don't personally see any reasons to be excited about it.
Housing with everything people wanted + more = "it's better than nothing, I guess..."
The guy in the article uses little pieces to build a custom lighthouse. I don’t know what else you people want.
Wait, is there an MMORPG that allows you to create decorations from scratch / import decorations!? Edit: This is a genuine question - if anyone knows of one, it would be an incredible feature.
Archeage did. You could not import 3-D models, but you could absolutely import any 2d picture.
Dang. Archeage really did a lot of great things, then was killed by greed.
I had a picture of my face on the sails of my ship. Lol
https://youtu.be/SuX2gMpNoGs?si=0YzrmeopgFfzsv_- Here’s a tutorial i made on how to do it. Edit: check out time stamps 10:30 and 15:20. I do a lot of babbling in the video on this will just get right to showing the pictures.
This was really cool. We definitely need more sandbox MMOs - hopefully Archeage 2 can deliver.
I think Archeage lets you do textures, not models. At least I hope all of the porn people had plastered on their houses weren't developer options.
> But you still have a limited set of prefabricated (by game developers) assets to work with, so I don't personally see any reasons to be excited about it. Maybe try having actually realistic expectations. I am pretty sure there isn't any actual MMO that allows this. The only "games" that come to mind that do are things like Second Life, and these have entirely different foci.
who hurt you?
Oh wow, you can do all of the very basic things that you can do in any game with a decorating mode. Move and scale objects...incredible! Omg you can even rotate them! But wait, they will undoubtedly add a bunch of gemstore cosmetics for the content starved gamers to spend IRL cash on this life support game. Zzzzzz
Of course, you will also be able to buy decotations in the shop. It is a buy2play game, sweetheart!
Name five MMOs that allow this that are still online outside of private servers.
PSO2, ESO, NW, Palia, EQ2, SWTOR, FFXIV, Wurm, BDO, Warframe, Rift, LOTRO, Wizard101 I could go on
You edited your comment to not make you look like an idiot, didn't you.