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

Now that we've ascertained the fact that LOTRO will have kinship housing, we wanted to know exactly what sort of options the kinship houses will have in the game. Jeff Woleslagle chimed in at this point (more of his conversation with the two individuals will come later this week) saying, " As far as the kinship houses, will there be crafting stations, travel portals, standard guildhall stuff with those?"

Your kinship will probably want to have its own house before long..

"We're still playing around with what we want to do there," Steefel responded. "It's going to be fairly sparse in the beginning; not because we can't, but because we're trying to figure out what's the right balance between locating those kinds of resources in the town that is a neighborhood as opposed to towns that are out in the landscape. As far as things that a kinship has access to- special teleportation, special crafting nodes or special crafting workbenches or things that only that kinship has access to – we're not going to launch with that. Not that we can't, but we really want to see how the puzzle pieces fit together. It's a lot easier to add than to subtract from a system; especially when you've got it live in front of an audience, because people tend to get attached to what is there."

"What we do have, however, is the ability for you to teleport back to your house from anywhere in the world," he continued. "Similarly for kinships, to teleport at any time back to their kinship houses. There are other benefits that you will derive elsewhere in the world from owning a house that we probably won't talk about yet, but that's something we wanted to make sure is there too."

With that sort of set-up, it seems like players have almost everything they need to truly start making a player-run town. However, the developers assured me that there wouldn't be a whole lot of mechanics integrated into the game at the time of release, simply because they want to make sure the basics work before they start creating complicated player-controlled functions.

"Currently, it's pretty basic in that as far as the neighborhoods are concerned," Steefel said. "Partially because we don't want to throw a whole bunch of functionality in there all at once and get it all jumbled up in players' heads. We want to make sure that we get the housing part right, we get players in there buying houses, using them, decorating them, figuring out what they need that we haven't already given them to make sure that that's rock solid. By the same token, making sure that kinships have the right kind of permission control and all the stuff we know that they want to have, making sure that's rock solid."  

Crafting stations for kinship and player houses may end up finding their way into the final version of housing.

"At the same time, we've built these neighborhoods keeping in mind that we need to have a space that would support the kind of communal stuff you're talking about," Steefel continued. "There's a whole spectrum of it. You could have town-owned resources- forges and things like that- or public building space that we start using our event system that allows control of that space to change. Or, to your point, even more sophisticated things like designating someone that has some kind of uber-permission. But that's all stuff down the line. The point of building out housing now – the way were doing it, it's ready for that, so that we can begin expanding the functionality between houses, between players, between kinships as we move past the initial launch of housing."

But what about player permissions? Jeff and I were both curious about how the Turbine developers were handling the idea of introducing crazy player permissions into their system, and Jeff asked, "How will the permission system work at launch? Will a burglar be able to break into a house or anything crazy like that?"

"No, no break-ins yet," Mersky answered. "I imagine our players will find a way. We'll have the permissions that you would expect. You can basically choose a person, a group of people, your friends list, and apply all kinds of permissions to that- I have permission to enter the house, I have permission to pay upkeep on the house and maintain it, I have permission to use the storage, I have permission to give permission. And then in the kinships, you can address the permissions in the same way, but you can also address them by kinship rank, kinship role. So you have different appointed officers, you can basically assign permissions based on role, and then if you change that person in that particular role, you're not having to go back and change permissions to your kinship house, it's just that a different person is fulfilling that role at this point."       

According to the developers, when it comes down to buying their houses, players mostly need to concern themselves with getting enough money to buy the house. Leveling won't be a huge factor, if any at all.

You'll be able to transport directly back to your kinship or player house, just like you can with  towns. .

"It's mostly about money," Steefel said. "And again, the whole purpose of having tiers is so that there's a lot of things you can aspire to. But we don't want housing to be inaccessible to lots and lots of people, so it's going to be fairly accessible."   

For the final question of our housing segment, we asked the developers how many pieces of decoration will be available to players when Book 11 launches. The answer was short and to the point. As far as items available for players to purchase when they're looking to decorate their house, the two LOTRO developers said that there would be lots of items to buy but they didn't know the exact numbers.

"We know that people want variety; that's the whole point," Mersky said. "So we're trying to create as much depth and variety as possible - starting with what we launch with, and then obviously this is just another system to feed. By the way, it comes with a lot of recipes, so a lot of the items you're going to be able to put in your house, people are actually going to be crafting."

You read that right crafters, you'll now have even more opportunities to sell your wares to other players!

That concluded our conversation with the LOTRO developers on the details of housing and how it will affect the players in the game. If you're interested in other interesting facts about Book 11 - like a ny information on Balrogs - make sure you check out all of our content over the next few days as we'll be giving you a weeks worth of LOTRO Book 11 information! Check back in with us tomorrow to learn even more about the Balrog and find out why the LOTRO developers decided to introduce another of the fearsome beasts into the lands of Middle Earth!

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