It really would not take allot, yes, it would be a dedicated project for the developers. But as far as the "what it brings" it will bring community, and a staying one at that. This would be the number 1 reason most new mmos have player housing and city/town building. It make your subscriber base stick, because of the "invested" time, friendships and even a sense of loyalty to the others in your community (the one you build with the tools).
And no, it doesn’t have to be done like SWG.
1. Upkeep would be only calculated while you were online, not during the time you are offline. (money sink) This make it so the system doesn’t force you to log in to pay upkeep, technically, if it only tally’s the time your online then you would only need to pay the upkeep when you are already online. Don’t play…don’t pay. play a lot.. Need to pay it.
a. Or the other option is to just not include Upkeep, I would recommend that.
2. You can only build town in pre designated areas.
3. Make it an object of PvP, the towns and the areas can be captured and burned down. Don’t flip out yet. Lol When this happen the previous citizens do not loose there things. They just loose accesses to them until a time they can rebuild there house (by retaking or by building some were elese). This makes PvP sting, but you don’t loose progress or time invested, it just makes the need to defend them that more important and necessary, and makes PvP viable.
4. The attacking force can also be event spawned invasions.
5. Add the ability to have your own NPC venders in your house (not linked to the main market). Everyone loves a player run crafting shop, and the designer label that goes with it =p
6. Make sure the town areas are NOT instanced, they must be apart of the mainland or you kill the coumminity factor dead.
m1nion wrote:Would require lots of patches tho , as everytime something was built everyone would require the new information , so new patch :/
This isn’t how that stuff works. All it would be after the initial patch of the resource (meshes and textures) would be just the dynamic positional data and what it is. it would already be on your HD so it would not be "streamed" or patched down to you. That part is the easy part, you just ghost down the information of what, and where. Infact it done realtime, no patching, or reboots or anything, its just a small string of data passed when you encounter it.
Technically they already have allot of the "building" in game, they just need to make the functional and remove the huge collision boxes on them and make some real ones... you can either have the house portaled off so its seamless (and have the info on its contents only sent once you are inside the building), or even go so far as to instance the abode, if having interiors is a problem for the engine. Some of the houses I realize were never constructed to have interiors, that why I suggest maybe a quick loading screen to get "inside". ( I think the current apartments act this way.)
Since the terrain in this game is a mesh and not generated by height map, pre-placement of structures would be key, without the use of the hightmap, real-time deformations would be almost imposable, so the areas would need to be pre sculpted to allow for nice looking placements.(im 100% sure this is the technique used in R2)
They already have the tools to do most of the placement and decoration, all it would take is a few changed to the tools already being developed for R2.
Technically there is nothing stopping them from making a town building, player created and decorated towns...they are already developing the tools.