Please don’t make housing available as soon as you enter Sacrament

Wicked Feedback
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First of all, I love the game. Thank you, Moon Studios for an amazing experience.

Before I start my rant, I would like to remind everyone the Early Access version of the game is just a tip of the iceberg for all the content that is to come. Thomas used the analogy in a twitter post saying that EA is just a test screening for their Lord of the Ring trilogy and they will be working on the game for 5- 10 years.

This means the entire Chapter 1 (All the content available in the Early Access) is very early game. Meaning that Housing doesn’t come in “too late” (as it was said in another tweet) when compared to the entire vision of the game.

Reasons why it is a bad idea:

Reason 1: Making housing available from the start hurts the narrative of the game. The in-world ramifications would be insane. At the current time, housing becomes available only when you save sacrament from Darak and Winnick reveals that he was keeping an eye on us the entire time and because we proved ourselves an ally of sacrament is the reason we are allowed to buy a house (completely trusted by people of sacrament) is an amazing way to unlock new content (housing).

Reason 2: Going through the entire sewer section and having to fight a boss with two phases was only made better when I realized that it was all worth it because I could buy a house now. Any reward that replaces this might not feel worth it.

Reason 3: It doesn’t solve the real problem. Inventory Management is not going to get better just because we bought a house early. At this rate the developers just want us to buy a “warehouse” which we fill with chests and not a place to call home.

The problem with inventory management is not primarily lack of space but a lack of knowledge of what the item does or is used for. If the game does a better job at communicating that a certain item is used for let’s say making throwable flasks and the player isn’t interested in it than they can make a decision to discard or sell it.

The way the system stands now players have to try to save all the items they find because they don’t know when they might need that item in the future.

Solution:

  1. Tell the player what the item is used for and improve the QoL.
  2. Give players more community chests or give them 3 separate chests (one for armor/weapons, one for consumables and one for resources). With the increased inventory space coming in the future updates, it will give players three times the space and make inventory management in the early game less of a mess.

This will also train people for one of the most important mechanics in the game:

Inventory Management.

Yes. A game that requires a player to run around and gather resources / save those resources for later use will have Inventory Management as the core part of gameplay.

Therefore, Access to housing early is not going to make the entire experience better for the player (it only hurts the in-game narrative and world). Improve QoL please.

Thoughts?

10 Likes
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Agree with pretty much all of this. I despair when I see so many posts asking for changes that save seconds in the game but are ‘vital’. Please don’t do a Blizzard and dump all the vendors and chests in a lump right by the whisper just to save 2 seconds of running time. I found the community chest just fine until I could get house chests and once vendors can access materials from there most issues are resolved.

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I hope this post won’t be seen and ignored by the devs :rofl: (as you can see no one really wants to comment here to not trigger attention)
I completely disagree and really love the idea of having housing much earlier, story can adapt if this bring better QOL and more gameplay from beginning (house management).
Hopefully, i am killing the idea from the egg

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I think people confuse QoL (making systems easy to interact with and having choices about how you interact with them e.g. keybindings) with just having it easy and getting everything without an investment of time or effort.

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Having more chests and inventory from beginning doesn’t make my play through easier, but will provide me with an inventory management system (QoL).
Plus chests are expensive early game and bigger ones will require upgrades (time and resources).
It is purely QoL and there is no merit for having the option at the second boss instead of first one

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I agree, I think there’s other solutions as well.

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I agree with the OP. The timing of housing is just fine and adding an extra community chest or two helps bridge the gap. My only issue, on my first playthrough, was I didn’t know how to get the house and space was becoming a nightmare. So adding more community chests and/or informing players on what they need to do to get a house would be my solutions.

On my multiple follow up playthrough’s I rushed to unlock the house quickly and didn’t have the nightmare logistical problem I had on my 1st playthrough. I also had a better idea of what could be tossed and what should be kept which helped as well.

Edit: Looks like housing being available early is coming soon. I just hope the locals, who despise me at this stage, don’t vandalize it;P

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I think I like the idea of leaving the point at which you get the house where it is now, too. It really does feel earned, and I think that’s a good thing in a game like this.

I think having inventory issues is alright. You don’t really need to keep everything right away. Feel like a vagabond at the beginning of the game, because … you are!

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After Thomas anounced on X that they want to make items stash on chests 99 or 999, and that next hotfix, chests will have more space, i think the inventory issue we have between first boss and sewer boss will just vanish, so i don’t mind housing coming later as it’s being asked here.

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Can you provide some evidence for this, thanks.

Anyways, I agree with OP but there was already a similar topic to this matter, hence I didn’t feel the need to post here too. But reading this comment made me comment :slightly_smiling_face:

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I agree as well! After the Darak fight, that was a great moment when the character said I am a citizen now and hence can buy a house! But yes definitely, provide more space in community chest or let players buy and have their own chests in the tower but limit it to 2-3. Also reduce the money required to buy a house.

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Lordy these dramatic takes.

I don’t find the current connection between story progression and unlocking player-housing particularly intuitive, compelling, etc. Even if it were, story is the weakest excuse for gating basic gameplay systems.

Also, the Cerim slays Warrick and is a canonical expert / tool for fighting the pestilence. Sounds to me like a person you’d want to provide housing for.

Further, we don’t even know the implementation, so why the complaining? Maybe we just get a tiny house / room in the graveyard or lower district for the start, and then defeating Darak unlocks a larger selection of housing.

If you don’t want player-housing early, then simply don’t engage with it. You don’t need to invent systems-level solutions for personal problems.

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Getting access to housing after that quest was a really good moment. I hope they don’t get rid of it. Inventory management issues can be solved by changing other things.

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I actually think the fact that they don’t do this. And Winnick uses Rattigan as bait to check whether or not we are trustworthy; is amazing character development. It shows insight to Winnick as a person, this also falls in line with his initial meeting with the Cerim. He was mistrusting him, and devised a way to get rid of Falstead and test the Cerim at the same time. That is good writing and makes the housing feel rewarding.

We do, they said so on X and that the price would go down.

Agreed, they don’t have to give player housing early, a system-level solution, because players are complaining, personal problems. Glad you agree with us!

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I think this might reflect two failures.

One, a misunderstanding (or denial) of player inventory management issues. Thankfully, you’re not a Dev but let’s maybe take 2 seconds to think: would Devs implement a systems-level change (providing access to player-housing at start) if the problem was just a few players?

Two, that earlier access to player-housing somehow impacts your experience of the game. Fortunately, I could not care less since you have the very obvious solution: don’t buy / use a house until after Darak.

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Then you thought wrong.

I’ll do you one better and think for more than two seconds. Yes there are inventory management issues. Why are the stack numbers so low? Why do chests not have tabs? Why does the community chest not have infinite storage, If 4 players will want to use it. Does feel very limiting then doesn’t it. Why can’t I search/filter inventory materials. Why can’t I dump similar resources. Why don’t resources auto combine in 1 stack, or why can’t I do this manually.

It does, but it is the wrong solution. And no that wouldn’t be my solution. My solution would be to address the above. So housing becoming available later would be a non-issue.

Maybe take your own advice.

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I agree. Craft from storage and a few more community chests carefully located in town by vendors with increased storage will solve the issue. I

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I agree with not getting the house earlier.

The inventory issue for me was only really with resources. If you have 200 different resources having 20 slots in your inventory or 10 slot chests is just a pain. I would like crafting from chest inventory (mainly because I have a goldfish memory and end up running back and forth to get the things I need!) but also because I may want to do many different things (upgrade weapons, make planks, smelt ore etc.) I assume there is a topic on this but I have just joined and there is so many topics on here!

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Earning the right to own a house feels good. And you are given a room as soon as you show up in Sacrament. Remember, it’s in the Watcher’s tower.

If they expanded your community chest, I’d be fine with that, but that’s enough of a nod to “lodging” when you show up in town. Earning the right to own property in town makes complete sense to me, and is literally a story beat after you knock off Falstead.

1 Like