Account house

This is part 2 of the “Housing in MMOs” series. Part 1 was looking at Lord of the Rings Online. Today’s MMO is Aion. This blog post was largely written by thevalliant and edited by me in some parts. While I did play around with my free studio in Aion, I really don’t know that much more about housing in the game, so I asked somebody who does. When reading this article, please keep in mind that we both play on the European servers which are handled by Gameforge while the US servers are still handled by NCsoft. There may be differences in details like item shops, etc. between those two versions. There are 5 types of residences in Aion: studios, houses, mansions, estates and palaces, in order of grandeur. These can be found in three areas for each race (Elyos and Asmodians): two ‘contested’ areas (where PvP may occur) and one ‘neutral’ area, that is the main ‘residential area’ for each race, Oriel (Elyos) and Pernon (Asmodians). … [Read more...] about Housing in MMOs: Aion

There are many things I want and expect from MMOs and one thing is housing. I love feeling as if I was in a virtual world and for me, having a little home in there that I can customize is just part of it. I’ve been what I call a “housing tourist” in some MMOs… this is like an MMO tourist who travels through MMOs always looking for “the perfect one”, only that I did not check out the MMOs themselves, but mainly the housing features, hoping to find an MMO that satisfies my needs when it comes to player housing. So I decided to start this little series giving short introductions to housing in some of the MMOs I’ve been playing. I will try to give relatively short overviews of how housing works in each of those MMOs. The first one will be the first MMO with housing that I played: Lord of the Rings Online. This is my house. I had first played Lotro during their open beta for a short bit. The setting was great, but it didn’t offer me more than … [Read more...] about Housing in MMOs: Lord of the Rings Online

This is part 3 of the series “Housing in MMOs”. After looking at Lord of the Rings Online and Aion, I will focus on Rift today. The most important difference to other games is that you do not get a “house” in Rift. You get a “dimension“. This dimension is a small instanced map of a region that exists in the actual game. So, you will not be able to get just any region in the open world. But you can buy a dimension version of it – as long as Trion Worlds added it as a dimension, of course. Not all areas are available, as you can probably imagine, since the world maps of MMOs are usually very large. Before I get into any details, let me point you to the video I made. I have found two very pretty “Shoreward Island” dimensions. The first part of the video shows the dimension “Shoreward Island” in its empty state (I have a few items in there, but they’re not shown as they are inside the tower). The second part shows … [Read more...] about Housing in MMOs: Rift