Lord of the Rings Online MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

by Cody "Micajah" Bye

In the United States, there's nothing more sought after than the chance of owning your own home. Many (at least in the States) even call it "the American Dream." We desperately want to own something that is completely ours and decorate it how we want. It's our own space in a world where space has been an exclusive commodity. This "American Dream" even prompts us to take out huge loans and incur sometimes crippling debt to show that what we own is the best that money can buy.

This is the inside of a Hobbit home that's already in the game. Player housing will probably have a similar feel.

The same sort of desire also has found its way into MMOGs, with players of established MMOGs often declaring their absolute need for a place to call their own in their massive virtual worlds. Since the introduction of the player housing option in Ultima Online, MMOG players have been totally thrilled with the idea of owning their own space - or at least having the option of doing so. And it shows, almost every game since UO has tried to incorporate a form of housing in their games on a player or guild level. Although Everquest didn't incorporate player housing into their successful title, they did eventually include a guild-housing option. Everquest 2, however, did sport player owned apartments that could be decorated. Star Wars Galaxies, Vanguard, and Dark Age of Camelot have all included some form of in-game housing. Even if a game doesn't necessarily include player housing, it's often an option that is continually discussed in their content meetings. As the WoW Insider has pointed out, even the developers behind World of Warcraft have been giving thought to introducing housing into their game.

Game developers often struggle with ways that they can accomplish this task without covering their world in fields of empty houses and abandoned shops. It's a tough shell to crack, but the developers at Turbine have been attempting to break that code and bring a functional form of housing to gamers in their recently released MMOG, Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Not only are the LOTRO developers pursuing player-housing, but they've also been working on the development of kinship (guild) housing as well. As a part of a 45 minute phone interview (that you read a portion of yesterday), Ten Ton Hammer's Cody "Micajah" Bye and Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle discussed the upcoming housing additions with LOTRO's executive producer, Jeffrey Steefel, and public relations manager, Adam Mersky. During the talk, we discussed the varying levels of housing, the items players could expect to buy, and sort of impact introducing player housing could have on the game. If you need more background on what's already been said about Book 11 housing, make sure you check out Stacy "Martuk" Jones's article that is running on our LOTRO community site.

To start, we wanted to make sure we had all the basic foundational details down pat. Although there will be different sort of houses you can purchase, there are three "main" tiers of housing: basic, deluxe, and kinship. I wondered aloud whether the beginning players would be buying "Elven shacks or mansions," which brought the entire group to laugh.

"There will be lots of different levels of housing to buy," Mersky stated.

"I don't know if we're calling them shacks and mansions, though," Steefel added.

"You have a basic house," Mersky continued. "And you have a deluxe house – it's larger, more storage, more opportunity for customization, just bigger. The third tier are the kinship houses, which are quite large. [The kinship houses are] significantly bigger, with multiple-stories in some cases."

Some  racial neighborhoods will be very close to already established NPC cities.

"I was running through an early demo of it in one of the dwarven neighborhoods," Steefel said. "Whereas a house would be a small house that you would recognize, the kinship hall looks like the big church in town – a giant central building, whether it's a church or the city hall. That seems to be the scale of kinship houses over regular houses."

"[And] there's more than one per neighborhood," Mersky concluded.

At this point my mind was whirling with the possibility of actually being able to walk through actual LOTRO neighborhoods and see the homes of my guildmates and rivals. It was a heady thought, and I wanted to make sure I'd heard Steefel correctly when he mentioned it. Would players actual be able to wander through these neighborhoods?

"Correct, it's not a cul-de-sac," Steefel confirmed. "It's not an apartment house – it really is like going into a town. There will be multiple instances of that type of town – they'll all be different from each other because the players will make them different from each other. There are four types of towns based on the four races, and they're located near the major social centers for those races. So, for example, the Dwarven housing neighborhood is located in Thorin's Gate, right near Thorin's Hall. It feels like it's in the right part of the world."

"It really is a whole other town that you go into," Mersky echoed. "There are opportunities to hang out, to do things with other people. There's large seating areas for people to congregate at. What we're hoping people will get a sense of when they come in here is that, first of all, yes, I can get a house, I can customize it, do the stuff I would expect to be able to do to make this house really feel like mine – increase the persistent space that belongs to me and that I can share with friends. But we hope that people start to see that, wow, this is a whole other town. There's a lot that can happen in here over time – this is the beginning of something that has a huge opportunity for growth. Our plans obviously include how that growth actually works."

 "But it's like a whole other [player] community," Steefel concluded. "You've got fellowships, you've got kinships, and now you'll have townships."