[QUOTE=Skyward;44643923]Every MMO is getting player housing nowadays...[/QUOTE]
And they're always shit. SWG worked because it was made as an integral part of the game (originally houses were going to be destroyable/raidable on PvP servers too), not something "they needed to have" to keep up with demands or as side attractions like Wildstar is. The entire economy functioned off player vendors, which were in your house, which were usually located within a player city, which (if headed by intelligent people) were placed at strategic locations such as close to Starports, common/major POI, or close to a mass of quality resource nodes. It took them an ungodly amount of years before player city placement became important for PvP and the GCW, but eventually that was another added aspect.
The other important aspect is customization of houses. SWG had thousand of items you could collect, many of which were literally worthless as far as any importance to game mechanics were concerned; however [I]all[/I] of them had world models for housing and this led to widely varying house decor (people used to pay millions of credits on my server for items that literally had 0 value, purely because the world model they had was sought after). The problem with games like EQ2, which has housing closer to SWG than probably anything else "modern", is that they did not show the same level of dedication to their customization (although EQ2 does have the superior [I]tools[/I] for decorating, with their scaling ability) and instead have a list of things you're [I]allowed[/I] to put in your house and fuck all else. This leads to stagnation as people reach the limits of tool flexibility to make up for the lack of item quantity (people have made some cool shit in EQ2 and I give them credit, but outside of those that abused the builder items like crazy to create castles and shit the interiors always looked mostly the same due to the limited decor items).
Housing was built as one of the foundations of SWG working as a whole; other MMO's, as of right now, do not follow their design and they suffer boring ass housing systems that always have people saying "[I]I want(ed) housing like SWG[/I]". Proper housing is one part mechanics and one part customization to coexist with the mechanics; it adds investment and ownership in the house by the player beyond making money from their vendors and thereby increases longevity from the same developer resource. I had one specific house all through my main characters life, a large tat house, that I redecorated from top to bottom every half a year or more. I spent a lot of weeks sprucing that place up with stuff that had mostly been in the game since launch; that's getting developer hours from their work.
Lastly, something unrelated to housing specifically but one of the reasons it worked so well in SWG, you have a game that heavily encouraged socialization for the sake of socializing. Often that could be rewarded with buffs from said people, but otherwise I have never seen a game with so many people literally doing nothing but hanging out. No fighting, no farming, no grinding, nothing but being social (and houses [guild halls by extension] played key roles in this if you were in a big guild). MMO's today put all their focus on the strict gameplay of an MMO and leave the social aspect in the dust. People that played SWG back in the days when it was popular can attest that the community is what set it apart from other games that came later. People call SWG a Sandbox MMO but that's incorrect, it was more akin to a Virtual World MMO than anything. SWG was born from a different generation of gaming, with different ideals about gameplay, is all it comes down to in the end.
I gave up on another SWG or housing system on par with it. That generation of creative, intelligent, and original designers is gone, moving on to bigger and better ventures. Other genres have things going for them still, but the MMO genre is dead to me and I think it's becoming that way for an increasingly larger number of people.
eve will be the last survivals pay-per-month MMO and even then you can use in-game cash (which is easy to get) to pay for your gametime.
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