Player Housing

Reddit user newbloodtaste fired a series of player housing questions at Raph during the /r/MMORPG AMA:

Question: Can you speak more about player cities? If I already can build a village in a survival game with my friends, why would we want to do the same thing in this game?

Answer: Your village in your survival game isn't tied into a large scale economy with all the other villages. It doesn't have unique goods and resources that other villages can't provide. Your village probably has substantially the same environment, too.

Question: What will be unique about building settlements?

Answer: We aren't trying to reinvent everything. In fact, we make a point of not doing so. A LOT of this game is pulling in "greatest hits" from lots of games and putting them in this MMO context.

Question: Can we build a city anywhere?

Answer: Yes, you can build anywhere. That includes out in space.

Question: Do we need to own the planet? Can other people move in near us?

Answer: We'll talk more about how the rules around governing planets will work eventually, but not yet.

Question: How big can they be?"

Answer: Right now, planets are aimed at being a few kilometers on a side. The Servitors have placed a force field bubble around the area they are letting humans settle, in order to preserve the planetary ecologies. From a gameplay point of view, we feel that more but smaller areas let us do things like:

• more variation
• clustering players more
• clean dividing lines between rulesets from player governments (taxes, pvp systems, etc)