Free room at the inn?
Soon, owning your own little corner of Tamriel will be a reality. When > Homestead launches in February 2017, you’ll have your pick from nearly 40 unique homes. After completing the Homestead tutorial quest, you’ll be given your first home: a modest room at a local inn. When you’re ready to expand, additional homes ranging from a cozy tree home in Greenshade to a charming villa in Malabal Tor to a sprawling manor estate in The Rift are available across Tamriel.
http://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/2016/12/06/introducing-homestead
The buyable houses go up to ~3 million gold for a castle.
Dayum. Thanks!
The real grind is not just buying a home though (supposedly some of the 800,000 range gold homes are very nice), but getting recipes to craft furniture. From what I’ve read (briefly, so could be wrong), you need to do normal writs, which has a chance to drop master writs, which may demand a random item from a random set in random style, possibly in legendary quality (which would cost tens of thousands just in tempers.) That will give you a certain number of vouchers or tokens to buy furniture recipes with. Or you can buy stuff from guild stores for equally exorbitant prices.
I love ESO, but staying far away.
Got my room. It has a single carved tea table with a candle on it. Very spartan.
Interesting reaction to the Morrowind expansion from some of the ESO Plus subscribers on the official forum. They’re mad that it’s not included in their monthly sub like the other DLC.
A substantial portion of the subscription’s value is bound to the included DLC. I don’t blame 'em one bit.
I kinda get it though, this is a major expansion that likely takes a bit more work than the DLC, so I don’t mind paying for it.
I thought that was curious, too. You can’t purchase this expansion with Crowns, like you could with the other DLC.
Oh, and here’s the big PSA some people have unwittingly stumbled onto: On console at least, if you pre-order the ESO + Morrowind bundle offer, they don’t actually let you play the base game until the expansion launches. It’s treated as one SKU that isn’t launching until June 6th.
Purchase the base game now, then upgrade if you want to play immediately.
I subscribed for 6 months but cannot use the crowns I earned to buy the expansion is annoying.
My feeling as well.
That’s a lot of it, yeah. Crowns in your inventory are like gift certificates. You already paid for them. They want a new revenue source.
For a b2p MMO that you get a huge amount of content for without subbing, I have no problem with paying for a large expansion.
I got ESOplus for three months just for the hell of it. But now, come reup time I’ll be continuing it. The mats bag alone is worth it. And the crowns now, for homes. I think it’s a great game and I want to support it so that it doesn’t go away.
As someone who is about to hit 300 hours in ESO, and has spent a grand total of maybe 15 bucks, I have no problem with them charging. I actually think they are far too generous with their F2P model.
It’s very reasonable for non-subscribers, yes. Subscribers are the only ones upset.
I thought this was the common way to handle it in the MMO space. Is that not true?
(I’m honestly asking. I don’t know how other MMO’s handle expansions.)
There aren’t many B2P MMO examples out there, actually, but yes GW2 handles expansions the same way. The difference is Zenimax set precedent with previous DLC packs by including access in the subscription.
Morrowind doesn’t compare well to the size of a traditional MMO expansion. Vvardenfell is about twice the size of Orsimer.
Also slightly different in that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t offer a subscription that provides in-game premium currency (and also lets you exchange free<->premium), though at last check you couldn’t buy their expansion with Gems either. Another decent comparison would be one of the Turbine MMOs, which IIRC did let you buy the expansions with Turbine points – but they were F2P.
I don’t know of another MMO with the exact model of ESO though, so best we can do is compare the "close enough"s.