Housing in LOTRO

In einer aktuelle Gamestar-News wird berichtet, dass in einem weiteren großen Inhaltspatch, der im Herbst erscheinen soll, das Housing ein großes Thema sein soll. Der Turbine CEO Jeff Anderson spricht dabei von den kommenden Möglichkeiten des Housing Systems. Ich zitiere mal die wichtigsten Passagen:

Shack: I know you haven't announced anything specific about player housing, but could you share some of the possibilities you are considering in terms of how you plan to integrate that into the current game? Will they be instanced houses inside a sort of demarcated "player housing zone"?

Jeff Anderson: Well, it's something that we're currently kind of still working at and designing, but there's a couple of different things that we do know. There will be some cross-section of landscape housing and instance housing, and I think it depends on whether it's for a kinship, or whether it's an individual player. When we talk about Lord of the Rings, we're talking about a really successful game right now, where we have maybe over 10,000 people per world. And when you start doing the math, that's a lot of homes to have on the landscape. You don't want it to feel that it's gone from Middle Earth to suburban sprawl. [Laughs] So we need to kind of maintain some balance there, and to achieve that, let people have homes and feel like they've got that part of Middle Earth. Instancing is a way to do that. But we've come up with some pretty innovative ways to do instancing as groups, so that you're not just alone in your house. I think we're going to be doing neighborhoods, and letting people have multiple homes in the instanced area so that you can actually have that sense of publicness to the space.

Shack: I assume the player will be able to do standard things like customize the appearance and contents of their house?

Jeff Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. We want to give players the ability to do upgrades and visual appearance upgrades. But you know, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about that over the next couple of months too. Players love housing. I think of housing as kind of your second avatar, because when you're in the game as your character, everyone gets to see who you are, but then when you log out you're gone. Homes are one of those persistent avatars that exist even when you're not online, and people can see by looking at your home the amount of energy that you've placed into it, the commitment you've had to the game. You can express a lot of your persistence through that.


Einer der schönsten Sätze, der mich wirklich glauben lässt, dass ich mit der Gründungsmitglied-Option bei LOTRO goldrichtig lag ist der hier: "I think of housing as kind of your second avatar". Ich mag das Gefühl, mehr zu schaffen als eine mit schwerer Rüstung und großartigen Waffen herumstolzierende Kampfmaschine. Jeder Held braucht auch sein Refugium. Mich würde es freuen, wenn unsere kleine Sippe sich tatsächlich eine kleine "Villa" oder eine Burg in der fernen Zukunft erbauen kann. So etwas kann auf lange Sicht sehr verbindend sein, da man viel Zeit und Energie in so ein Projekt stecken kann.

Die Ideen, die Mr. Anderson (sorry, der musste sein) da erzählt, klingen goldrichtig. Keiner will einen Mexico City oder Shanghai Look haben, wenn er nach Michelbinge kommt. Es wird also instanziertes Housing für Einzelspieler und einzelstehende große Häuser für Sippen geben, das lese ich zumindest heraus.

Ich bin sehr gespannt, wie das nachher wird.