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Long Term Stuff: Housing - Instanced vs NonInstanced

MarcusFromOz

MarcusFromOz

Well-Known Member
I was healing a group today that were talking about how the dungeons are instanced and it reminded me about Instanced vs nonInstanced Housing.

When housing eventually gets implemented (I know this is a long term thing) I would really prefer it not to be instanced.
I loved non-instanced housing in UO and have hated instanced housing in everything else since.
In UO, having vendors in front of your house and keeping them stocked was very cool.
Having people roaming around looking for bargains was very cool.

With this game pretty much becoming my modern UO game (well the Trammel half of UO), I'd love to see it done in a similar way.
We could pay a nominal rent for housing and if you let the rent go for say 3 months your house becomes vacant (with the decorations put in storage).

I'm curious though - do others want instanced or non-instanced housing?
Perhaps I'm the only one that prefers non-instanced.

Assuming we could have 10 zones with say 50 houses in each, would 500 houses per server be enough?
Or maybe a combination of both - instanced apartments in the city and more expensive non instanced houses outside.

Anyway - I'm curious.
 
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I'd much prefer non-instanced but I've not really toyed with housing in MMOs. I just know I'd like to be roaming the landscape and encounter a player house. Not sure zones are big enough for that in Embers though, despite their rather big size. Could work if you used the instances on the zones, house heavy ones get duplicated when > X houses etc. And ofc the city would be FANTASTIC for housing. Imagine climbing to someone's apartment with a wooden balcony.
 
It still blows my mind that this was possible in 1997.


And of course, Valheim has done similar in the Unity engine.
I have another Game Jam coming up soon, I might have to give this a go.
 
So...non-instanced was nice in UO (although you got some pretty messed-up looking places with homes jammed however they could fit) (and it became worse later in the game when people were able to design their own homes). But with UO you also had RECALL and GATE spells. You know, you could go home quickly.

I haven't seen a game since that allows you to do so much with everything as UO did (presumably still does). And I've never gotten much use out of housing since then. I'm betting EA won't let you trap an NPC to spar with and even if they did, you wouldn't get any skill gain from it. :) And they wouldn't let you drop piles of stuff "to be sorted later" on the floor...

Non-instanced housing is great for roleplay, but people have terrible decorating taste. I would hope it would be limited.

(Give me the option of a house or the equivalent bank storage, I'll take bank every time. The server can thank me!)
 
Ever since launch I was curious what player housing would look like in Embers Adrift. I too got my introduction to player housing in UO, and I don't think anyone has done it better since. Non-instanced housing goes a long way to making the world feel lived in. I'm not sure there's enough space in Embers' game world to allow for non-instanced housing, but it sure would be great to see it. Still curious to see how it gets implemented, or if it even does come at all.
 
Just adding my 2 cents here. While I do like non-instanced housings, and it worked well in older games on older tech, it is somewhat impractical nowadays.
I think there is plenty of "space" in the Embers world (zones are quite large and there are large areas that can be quite sparse in terms of mobs/resources) However the bigger concerns are:
- Performance: Non-instanced housing means walking within a certain distance of someone's plot with their hundreds/thousands of decorations, items stored in boxes, etc. can cause serious lag/hitching.
- Visual Pollution: There's nothing like walking through a beautiful forest village to have the senses assaulted with someone's giant rainbow unicorn sparkle dazzle whatever. The intended aesthetic goes out the window, and players WILL always find a way to make things look stupid, write profanity on their lawn using fruit, draw phallic symbols with breadcakes, and so on.

I think games like EQ2 did a good job at splitting the difference - your house was a physical location in the world, a particular doorway or house in a particular city, but you had your own instanced world behind it with all your clutter and nonsense and collection of pine cones and whatever not having to be loaded for everyone walking by. But I echo the sentiment above that housing really needs some sort of recall/teleport/gate/etc. to get to it unless you're just going to stick everyone in the capital. It takes too long to travel around currently for this to be feasible.
 
MarcusFromOz said:
I was healing a group today that were talking about how the dungeons are instanced and it reminded me about Instanced vs nonInstanced Housing.

When housing eventually gets implemented (I know this is a long term thing) I would really prefer it not to be instanced.
I loved non-instanced housing in UO and have hated instanced housing in everything else since.
In UO, having vendors in front of your house and keeping them stocked was very cool.
Having people roaming around looking for bargains was very cool.

With this game pretty much becoming my modern UO game (well the Trammel half of UO), I'd love to see it done in a similar way.
We could pay a nominal rent for housing and if you let the rent go for say 3 months your house becomes vacant (with the decorations put in storage).

I'm curious though - do others want instanced or non-instanced housing?
Perhaps I'm the only one that prefers non-instanced.

Assuming we could have 10 zones with say 50 houses in each, would 500 houses per server be enough?
Or maybe a combination of both - instanced apartments in the city and more expensive non instanced houses outside.

Anyway - I'm curious.
Click to expand...
I would be more than happy with instanced housing like my EQ2 days, especially if you can set up shop in there to sell ya goods. This though really needs an AH, which I would like to see, even if it just tells you who is selling and where if you want to go buy from them. We don't even need to buy from the AH itself, just use it as an advertising board for peoples shops. Hell they could add player shops dotted around in the open world down the line.
 
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