Constructions…

Spent an eye opening few minutes visiting the new Tenebrous Island Refuge in EQ2X the other day and found myself quite startled at the scope and scale of the place.

Player housing is something EQ2 has always done very well, even from launch, with its weekly rental Inn Rooms in the various city suburbs and large houses in the central districts. Once inside, any furniture type objects can be placed in the room using a surprisingly intuitive 3D placement system, and then there they are. Standard furniture items can be bought and a whole crafting profession, Carpenter, exists to provide more. Additionally, quests and events offer more trophy related items, and I’m finding that collection aspect of it all very compelling.

In many MMO’s a character’s accomplishments and history are very transitory things. Pieces of armour come and go, moving from aspirational motivators, to prized possessions, to bank storage keepsakes, to vendor trash in a surprisingly short time, and often we’ll end up with only memories, and perhaps blog posts, to remind us that we did anything at all. Player housing then, as implemented by EQ2, can be made to function as an outstanding kind of semi-permanent ‘trophy cabinet’. It’s how Hobbington Crescent uses our Kinship House in LOTRO and very much how I use my Four Room South Freeport residence in EQ2X. It’s an Aladdin’s Cave of curious knickknacks obtained from outlandish places and desperate deeds.

Technically, it’s a very clever way to go too; it’s very difficult to break a game by adding scatter cushions, and I’ve never heard of an instance where a bookcase has needed a forum-enraging nerf to restore game balance. Objects of purely aesthetic value tend to be immune to mudflation or expansion obsolescence, their desirability unaffected by any further changes to the game. Development-wise, I’m sure the overheads are low – much of the placeable furniture I’ve seen existing in-world as scenery anyway, so has often already been modelled and texture in the course of normal world design. And it’s a fun extra dimension to the overall ‘life in EQ2’ experience.

They do a variety of houses to put this stuff in, but lately they seem to have gone crazy with it all. More and more novelty houses are being added, mostly in concert with the EQ2X Station Cash push, and it makes sense. If you’ve moving toward micropayments in a stat-based game, the cosmetics are the area you’re least likely to cause fan-rage in. The vocal hardcore typically don’t care much about mounts, pets and housing, allowing things to be made and sold in relative peace.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more geographically themed dwellings, elaborate housing based on particular zones and styles, but this latest one is something quite new and possibly even game changing:

EQ2Wire: SC Tenebrous Island Refuge

It is indeed, a field. It’s a special magical field on a floating chunk of rock, suspended in an endless evening sky, based on the Tenebrous Tangle region of the Kingdom of Sky expansion, but it’s still just a field. It costs a one-off 1350 Station Cash, ($13.50) and has no in-game upkeep costs. The idea is that you build the _entire house_yourself, out of the various resizable room dividers, floor tiles and assorted other bits and pieces turned out by the Carpenter trade skill profession.

Initially, I thought $13.50 was laughably steep, but the more I thought about it, the more tempting it seems. For starters, that pictured field in the link above is absolutely huge. It’s an unfortunate choice of very distant screenshot, and you have to go ‘Visit’ the portal and have a look for yourself to appreciate the scale – it’s about the size of South Freeport or the inner city bit of New Halas. With a bit of design flair, you could easily build a whole village on that rock, let alone a sizable house.

I find myself comparing it to a Second Life sim, rather than anything MMO-ish, and it’s interesting to look at them side-by-side.

 

On price, the Refuge costs $13.50 to buy and no upkeep itself. Gold level EQ2X or Subscription to EQ2 Live is about $10/mo, but a Bronze EQ2X person could probably use the house too.

A Second Life region on the other hand, as detailed here, which seems to me to be roughly the same kind of area, costs an initial $1000 and a further $295/month to maintain. I’m possibly overestimating the surface area of the Refuge, but not by a factor of 74. (I’m using the ‘Full’ region for comparison. Possibly a ‘Homestead’ region is a closer technical match, but you can’t have one of those unless you already have a Full one anyway.)

On capacity, the Refuge has a placeable item limit of about 1,100. A SL region has a prim count of 15,000, but it’s worth noting that a typical piece of EQ2 furniture is a multi-prim affair. If it takes more than an average of 13 pine cubes to make an equivalently detailed piece of SL furniture, than EQ2 actually gives you more bang per buck here.

On occupancy, a standard SL region has a stated avatar limit of 100 per region, which I personally think is a laughable fabrication. I’d say at 40+ people, things begin to fall apart. EQ2 lists no character limit stats for the Refuge, but I’d guess it’ll be the same as anywhere else in game – turn the detail down for crowds of more than 20, but probably workable at full raid sized groups. 24-man raids on the guild leaders house!

There are fundamental differences of course. SL allows user uploaded assets and, EQ2 has only a fixed inventory to choose from. This is only a problem for content creator types looking to start virtual businesses, and at this late stage I’d say the variety of existing furniture ‘building blocks’ available in EQ2 are probably up to the task of keeping things interesting, allowing exercise of building skill in how you use those blocks. I’m expecting SOE to begin adding many more functional and literal building block type components in due course.

SL allows scripting, which allows people to make things ‘do things’, while EQ2’s furniture is largely static. Still, they have player writable books, and anyway scripting is as much a problem for SL as it is a positive feature, causing lag or simply being made to do bad things by malcontents.

On usability, I’d say EQ2 wins, for the kinds of things folks will be doing with this Refuge. Placing objects in a 3D space is always tricky and SL does have better camera and placement controls, but the depth and complexity of those tools is not always helpful for simple tasks, such as putting up a painting. Working with Stuff in SL is an ever more specialised and arcane set of professions in its own right, much of it carried out in third-party applications like Photoshop, Poser and Blender. In EQ2, you can do less, but do it there and then.

One thing EQ2 does have that SL does not, is a massively multiplayer online game just outside the door of its housing instances. SL just has more houses and shops on the whole, and people have to use, if anything, even_more_ imagination to entertain themselves than in the supposed Role Playing Game of EQ2.

Performance-wise, EQ2 triumphs over SL in things like Walking Around, Running, Seeing Long Distances and Not Using Gigabytes of Bandwidth During Play, so that’s nice. Also, you are unlikely to have your EQ2 floating island bombarded by a cloud of self-replicating todgers all blaring out the crazy frog song. But I think the main reason I’m tempted by the whole thing is that while I am never going to have $1000 + $295/mo to blow on a virtual lego-set sandbox, I might be persuaded to drop a one-off $13.50 on something a little more limited but a lot more accessible.

Incidentally, if you are tempted, I’d wait a little bit longer; The Kingdom of Sky is made up of three differently styled regions, of which the Refuge is only one. I’d expect Barren Sky and Bonemire themed islands along before long if this one sells well.

While not as trendy or fashionable as many other MMOs, I am always fascinated by EQ2’s continual development, expansion and redefinition. To find myself making comparisons to Second Life at all is remarkable in itself. It’s also going to be interesting to see what people create with their 1100 pieces of furniture and massive floating island.