Island Sanctuaries might not be instanced housing, simmer your hopes

[OM3GA-Z3RO]

I never hoped for anything that was announced so vaguely on what it is, as a bulky Librarian once said

"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment."

[Avoidy]

I wish I could pull Live Letter content out of my head without having to hunt on youtube for it. When Island Sanctuary was announced, they talked about it on stream like it was going to be an island that everyone gets, with housing elements where your minions can walk around and you can do little farming activities. This, I believe, is where so many people got the "Stardew Valley meets Animal Crossing meets Chao Garden meets XIV" expectations. Almost immediately after this belief began to grab hold, the same devs came out and walked the hypetrain back hard, telling fans to temper their expectations. I remember this vividly, but I wouldn't even know where to begin finding the clips about this.

Basically I have no dog in this fight, but I agree with OP. Everyone's kinda got sky high expectations about island sanctuary. They think it'll solve the housing problem by giving everyone an instanced island. If they could do instanced islands, why didn't they do instanced housing? Whenever they were asked, we were told they couldn't because of technical limitations. Are those limitations gone now? What changed? It seems weird, right? I bet it'll be some top-down minigame looking thing in a completely separate part of the game and you can't even walk around in it with your character. You just click on stuff and play it like Farmville. And knowing modern gaming, they might even work some mobile element into it and try to charge players for microtransactions.

edit:

I suspect that the housing thing comes from an interview last year (Island Sanctuary part starts at about 27 minutes). Which talks about being able to place buildings as part of the customisation process. Which has been taken to mean instanced housing. But I also think it'll be closer to the Mog Garden and buildings be more like the helper NPC you could hire for it

Thank you for finding this interview.

[Ilisidi]

The most likely first reveal would be fanfest last year. Wouldn't it?
Text only interface would indeed be incredibly lame. Mog Garden XIV however would meet my expectations.

(The Mog Gardens in FFXI are even canonically numerous islands left in the adventurers' care. They came with a story line had monsters running around (and filled your inventory like no tomorrow). I was very surprised and delighted when I noticed the groddy pond become less groddy with each level up. I looked forward with great anticipation to see the final pond upgrade.)

[Liam_Harper]

Everyone's kinda got sky high expectations about island sanctuary.

No one has sky high expectations about Island Sanctuary. I don't get why this topic keeps popping up. It's like people don't have enough reasons to bash the community and attack other people, so they fabricate some instead.

[Allegor]

island sanctuary will most likely be a stardew valley meets the chao garden in sonic adventure 2, just a small place to hangout with our minions/mounts and maybe a bit of light gardening (though the crops we can grow will most likely be limited after all gotta keep the expensive crops exclusive for those homeowners)

That's what I'm expecting. It may have housing elements and some form of customization, but without being actual housing, like the GC barracks - it's your personal instanced office with your own selected group of npc you can customize, with a glamour mirror and armoire in it, but it's not "your house"

[EgilTheStressedMage]

That's what I'm expecting. It may have housing elements and some form of customization, but without being actual housing, like the GC barracks - it's your personal instanced office with your own selected group of npc you can customize, with a glamour mirror and armoire in it, but it's not "your house"

gimme all the cat minions curled up in a ball of cute or i unsub and uninstall

[StriderShinryu]

No one has sky high expectations about Island Sanctuary. I don't get why this topic keeps popping up. It's like people don't have enough reasons to bash the community and attack other people, so they fabricate some instead.

I mean, it is pretty silly but there are people who do have silly expectations. We literally had a thread in General Discussion just the other day about people thinking they were the reason why the FC/solo split was the way it was the in recent housing addition, because IS was going to be personal instanced housing.

[Arkanis_Linvail]

My expectations are tempered.

If it works on day one without being a bug riddled mess it'll already have exceeded my expectations.

[Packetdancer]

The Thavnairian Onion market needs to crash, thankyouverymuch.

Honestly, I'd be okay with this myself. I belong to a reasonably-active FC (generally a core group of about 30-40 people active, larger during MSQ patch windows) that's welcoming to newcomers, and one thing we try to make sure to have is Thavnairian Onions for the FC members training their chocobos. As the person who handles the gardening loops to ensure we continue to have a stock of onions, I would be totally okay if I could just use FC funds to buy the onions for the FC chest at rates that were not astronomical, instead of it being more cost-effective to keep gardening loops going.

(I grant that if I were selling said onions rather than stocking the FC chest, I might feel differently...)

More seriously, though, I've long said one of the biggest problems with housing is that it gates participation on entire other systems: FC airships/submersibles, and gardening. So if Island Sanctuary does nothing other than provide access to gardening for people who don't have a house, I'll still consider it a win as a feature.

I will be stunningly shocked if Island Sanctuary were full instanced housing.

As I've noted in a different thread, this game's server architecture does not seem well-suited to open-ended instancing, as opposed to "at most X number of things in use"; their workaround seems to be that anything that is truly open-ended in terms of number of active instances has to be a solo environment that gets run largely (save for interactions with specific systems) on the client-side, rather than allocating a server-instanced environment.

This is why you can have an unlimited number of inn rooms, grand company squadron barracks, copies of the Waking Sands interior, etc., but where you will never see another player besides yourself in that environment: that environment simply does not exist on the server.

If Island Sanctuary is a form of instanced housing, I strongly suspect it would be one where you could decorate and garden and play around... but not invite guests over as that would require server-instanced environments. And that seems technologically feasible within this game's environment... but probably not what folks would want from "instanced housing".

[Shougun]

Honestly, I'd be okay with this myself. I belong to a reasonably-active FC (generally a core group of about 30-40 people active, larger during MSQ patch windows) that's welcoming to newcomers, and one thing we try to make sure to have is Thavnairian Onions for the FC members training their chocobos. As the person who handles the gardening loops to ensure we continue to have a stock of onions, I would be totally okay if I could just use FC funds to buy the onions for the FC chest at rates that were not astronomical, instead of it being more cost-effective to keep gardening loops going.

(I grant that if I were selling said onions rather than stocking the FC chest, I might feel differently...)

Personally at the time they consider this I hope they would consider just changing the Chocobo system in general. The point of abolishing or making cheap the onion, time to dust off the chocobo content. Not looking at it right now, but I'm pretty sure the chocobo still have accuracy boosting skills to purchase -_-''.

Obviously bias'd since I wrote it, but I imagine a chocobo job system with sub-jobs. (/Very/ FFT like). So you can level up jobs and then equip subjobs, there would be no more onion (OR the onion could be used to purchase new jobs- to which when the new content is released your spent onions convert into tokens to buy jobs).

You once commented on one of my longer posts for length, well here is the one on chocobos- KWEH! lol (it's hopefully fine to scan with the tl;dr / hide buttons, but with everything expanded it's fairly big).

More seriously, though, I've long said one of the biggest problems with housing is that it gates participation on entire other systems: FC airships/submersibles, and gardening. So if Island Sanctuary does nothing other than provide access to gardening for people who don't have a house, I'll still consider it a win as a feature.

I will be stunningly shocked if Island Sanctuary were full instanced housing.

As I've noted in a different thread, this game's server architecture does not seem well-suited to open-ended instancing, as opposed to "at most X number of things in use"; their workaround seems to be that anything that is truly open-ended in terms of number of active instances has to be a solo environment that gets run largely (save for interactions with specific systems) on the client-side, rather than allocating a server-instanced environment.

This is why you can have an unlimited number of inn rooms, grand company squadron barracks, copies of the Waking Sands interior, etc., but where you will never see another player besides yourself in that environment: that environment simply does not exist on the server.

If Island Sanctuary is a form of instanced housing, I strongly suspect it would be one where you could decorate and garden and play around... but not invite guests over as that would require server-instanced environments. And that seems technologically feasible within this game's environment... but probably not what folks would want from "instanced housing".

We know the Island Sanctuary will have friends over, unless I made a false memory lol (Yoshida said).

I imagine though that the system is going to be very much node based homely-ness, such that you might be able to get a lot of vibes of growth and ownership but wont be placing a billon objects by hand. Akin to a WoW Garrison using node based ideas, but far more homestead theme'd. Quite a few single player RPGs use this concept, where you purchase upgrades and the whole place changes for you. FFXI also has mog islands so we can look at that for inspiration (as some of the content already confirmed for FFXIV is in FFXI's mog gardens).

I really doubt it will be instanced housing, at least at the start, but I feel like we might be able to get there in the future. For example one suggestion I had for the system early on is allow the player to build a house with prebuilt setup. To save resources it might be akin to the Howel's Moving Castle door (that allows you to change the portal the door connects to), and so you could connect the door of your Island house to an inn room already in the game. This way you have a very pretty, fairly featured, room right away. Later SE might be able to change it to your apartment room and hopefully around that time they've upgraded the system so there is 1:1 # of apartments (surprisingly there is not right now lol), and add a second floor and other concepts. Perhaps a give players some items they can hand place outside (like you've the node system that allows you to make large changes, and then a small allowance for outdoor furnishings).

I can imagine the system could be come instanced housing... Just also highly doubt it'll start that way. Hopefully the features and content the system is planned with is cool. It's not bad they said it's casual and optional, but hopefully that doesn't mean it lacks all elements of rewarding nature lol. (Say WoW's garrisons had too much reward and messed with the economy, and a way too baby-sitting required war table that messed with people being able to be free in the world, but it did do a lot of really neat things that made it pretty valuable with, imo, the biggest issue being they abandoned the content for the most part).

Chocobo raising might be a thing, which also inspires me back to the first part of the post on new chocobo content .

If this content does well I feel like a FC variant would be hamlets, and that could be really fun. I haven't really made a dedicated post to housing outside of my airship one (which uses the node based concepts to reduce server stress), but I have made a few large posts in other threads on it. The TL;DR.. is that of akin to Dark Cloud, industrial Island, still some elements of that Animal Crossing, but for FC. Where the reputation UI (that FC currently has) is greatly expanded and relevant, very long term, projects can be completed by FCs. Including even longer term / continual content around it like Hamlet Defense or Stronghold Assaults (connecting it to PvE, and potentially optional PvP where FC vs FC).