"Housing is Pain", or "Why We Can't Have Nice (Instanced) Things"

[Packetdancer]

Fix: Instance the plots, all in one ward. Each plot can have thousands of owners, and once you go out the front gate, you're on the same street as everyone else. Lotgs more folks in the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, this actually makes the technical issue with instanced housing worse in several ways.

First off, it's still instanced housing. It's instanced housing with an open-world entrance, but it's still instanced housing. So every one of the existing "instanced housing plus this game's server architecture won't play well together" problems still applies; none of that changes. Moreover, if you still have houses and yards separate (which I suspect are very difficult to untangle server-side), you now have actually doubled the number of things that can be instantiated -- not just houses, but yards too.

Even if that part's solved, you've now introduced a new technical/design issue: how do you handle the yards when someone is outside the plot.

My FC has a large house with a lovely big yard, and it actually serves as a very active hub for our FC. While waiting for a roulette to pop or a PF to fill, people will chill around the fire-pit in the yard or sit in the treehouse. They'll use the jumping puzzle we built to get up onto the balcony and do their raid-pot crafting there. They'll run laps around the house on top of the fence. They'll step outside of the yard to go visit the marketboard or retainer bell directly across the street from us.

And they'll have conversations while they do this.

Now imagine your scenario. If you have 5 people in our FC house yard, and 1 person in the yard of another house in the same plot, and one more person walks past... what do they see?

Do they see a yard chosen at random from those in the plot, with six people standing in it (the five from our FC and the one from the other)? Do they see the FC house because there's "more people" there, and the person in the other house is invisible? If there's two people in the other house's yard and they're talking to each other, and five in the FC house yard and they're talking to each other, do the conversations overlap; we hear theirs when we're in our yard, they hear ours when they're in theirs? Or if someone dashes out of the FC yard and over to the marketboard, do the rest of the folks in the FC yard just... disappear, and they can no longer hear the conversation?

Do you just pick a random house exterior to be shown from the outside, and entering the yard is a loading operation (like going into a house already is), so you click on the glowy "Entrance" ball outside the yard before you can see anyone, and have to click on the glowy "Exit" ball to load back outside and get to the market board?

You can absolutely solve all those problems, but not easily. Add a housing score system based on the "value" of decor items, and only show whatever has the highest score from the outside, without any people, and force you to load into the instance to see if there's anyone actually in the yard. Etc.

This is why in games that do have instanced housing with open-world entrances, you rarely really have a front yard in any implementation I've seen. And there's all sorts of caveats as to how the instanced housing interiors co-exist with the open-world exterior.

In Black Desert Online, for instance, I have a couple of homes; one is a small apartment in Calpheon, right along the river. It's lovely. (Despite the horde of NPCs borderline-rioting outside, because my apartment is technically in the slums.) The apartment has two balconies, one overlooking the river, and one overlooking the street (where I can wave to the rioting NPCs). Because both balconies are technically outside of the house itself, as soon as I walk out onto either, if I turn around and look back inside my apartment... I see an empty one. As soon as I step back through the door, all my furniture reappears.

(Hilariously, it reappears by having all the decor literally drop from the sky into the proper positions. Which will never not slightly amuse me.)

If someone else had the same apartment and was on at the same time, and they walked out of their apartment onto the balcony, I would see them through my window standing on "my" balcony. If I walked out, they'd see me walk out the door onto "their" balcony. During the various stretches of time where I'm actually playing BDO, I actually do chill on that balcony; a friend owns the apartment right beside and below mine, which means I can see his riverside balcony from mine. If one of us is waiting for the other to show up to try to do something together, waiting on the balcony is a natural thing to do; when the other shows up, hey, just pop out onto the balcony and wave! I'm certain that if anyone else sharing 'my' apartment was online at one of those times, it would seem weird to them to look out the window and see me pacing around idly on "their" balcony.

In New World, before I gave up on it, I had a lovely little place in Windsward overlooking the main square. It, too, had a balcony... but the balcony was considered part of the instance. If I stood on the balcony, no one in the main square of Windsward would see me; I could see them, but they'd look up and see an unfurnished balcony so far as I know. (I think the housing decor system there was supposed to have the person with the highest decor score have their instance shown to the outside world. So far as I know it never worked right while I was playing, because it only ever showed emptiness when I looked in the windows of houses.)

And while there are houses in New World that have yards, it was always a back yard for the ones I saw. In order to go into that yard you had to go through the house, thus picking which instance of the house you were visiting, and from the viewpoint of anyone wandering around the street, all yards were empty (and all houses were empty if you looked in the windows); you had to actually attempt to walk into the house and then choose an instance from the menu that popped up.

Now, in BDO and New World, the open-world entrance to instanced housing makes sense even with any caveats, because in both cases the instanced housing is inside the buildings you already have in a given open-world hub. BDO is frankly insane inasmuch as they have a few major cities nearly the size of entire FFXIV zones, and you can basically enter every single building in the game (and buy most of them). New World's hubs are very small, but again, most of the buildings at least have interiors you can get.

But in both cases, from the viewpoint of someone walking past (at least in my experience)... every house is empty. You see nothing in the yards, if you peek in a window you see an empty, unfurnished interior. You don't really get that feeling of "neighborhood" because... well, everything's empty. You don't see your neighbors.

FFXIV's open-world entrances are in housing wards already separate from the main world. Even if the instanced housing were practical, going to the housing ward, walking through the streets and seeing nothing but default houses and empty yards... what would be the point? You might as well just go full instanced, with no open-world entrances, and cut out at least a little of the overhead.