Homes All The Rage: Player Housing In Wildstar
The last time I played Wildstar, Carbine's upcoming MMO, I had a decent time but I was left anxious about how close it stuck to the numbers, numbers, numbers model and why its Explorer path was so much like a late 90s platformer. Now it's increasingly looking as though they might just have been sitting on the good stuff, like a hen made of veteran MMO developers incubating an egg of semi-sandbox play. Er.
Best forget that analogy. Instead, take a look at this player housing video - while the numbers, numbers, numbers stuff is very much in evidence, so is tantalisingly freeform DIY.
Ooh. Ooh. In light of that, my interest in Wildstar has escalated from 'I suppose I should play that' to 'ooh, I want to play that.' The housing stuff reminds me of Star Wars Galaxies - a game with more flaws than the Empire's firearms training programme, but also more ideas and ambition than most of the last decade's worth of MMOs put together. I fondly remember building and owning a small house of my own, inside which I kept a poor, trapped Bantha who filled every square inch of it.
Granted, Wildstar seems more about houses-as-function rather than houses-as-expression, but hopefully the former begats the latter.