The last time I played Wildstar, Carbine's upcoming MMO, I had a decent time but I was left anxious about how close it stuck to the numbers, numbers, numbers model and why its Explorer path was so much like a late 90s platformer. Now it's increasingly looking as though they might just have been sitting on the good stuff, like a hen made of veteran MMO developers incubating an egg of semi-sandbox play. Er.
Best forget that analogy. Instead, take a look at this player housing video - while the numbers, numbers, numbers stuff is very much in evidence, so is tantalisingly freeform DIY.
WildStar DevSpeak - Housing Watch on YouTube
Ooh. Ooh. In light of that, my interest in Wildstar has escalated from 'I suppose I should play that' to 'ooh, I want to play that.' The housing stuff reminds me of Star Wars Galaxies - a game with more flaws than the Empire's firearms training programme, but also more ideas and ambition than most of the last decade's worth of MMOs put together. I fondly remember building and owning a small house of my own, inside which I kept a poor, trapped Bantha who filled every square inch of it.
Granted, Wildstar seems more about houses-as-function rather than houses-as-expression, but hopefully the former begats the latter.
