Hey 'Scapers!
It's been a long time coming, but the Player Owned Housing system is getting reworked and the Construction Skill is being bumped up to 120 as part of this year's roadmap! As a brief reminder, here's what we previously said about this update during our RS Ahead back in January.
We want to help build a picture of what this update is setting out to achieve, by setting out some foundational design details, as these have started to come together. With the update being slated to launch later this year, today serves just as an early insight into where we're heading. There's plenty of stuff to preview, though some things may change as we continue through development. Today also includes a couple of opportunities to take community discussions on board to help shape aspects of this update, so do stick your oar in on those matters.
As with our general approach to RuneScape these days, it is our intention to update or implement things in such a way that they can easily be expanded and built upon for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, the upcoming changes to the Player Owned House will enable us to keep this aspect of RuneScape integral to the experience and relevant for many years to come.
What is our vision for Construction as a Skill and the Player Owned House?
Let's start here - everything that follows will tie into this fundamental vision:
Construction as a skill should remain rooted in the game as the 'housing' skill. We simply can't see a world where the construction skill exists but housing does not. The clue's in the name after all! It's the skill that allows you to best express your creativity, wealth, and personalisation.
Our existing Player Owned House (henceforth referred to as PoH) system is one of creating your house and then largely ignoring its existence, barring the occasional niche use cases, such as Gilded altars or armour storage.
As part of the rework, we're setting out to create a housing system that you will want to return to on a repeated basis and throughout all your adventures in Gielinor, regardless of whether you're taking it easy or are maximising efficiency. Your visits may be brief, but they should always be worthwhile, and such loops should not just integrate into, but perhaps even embody the very heartbeat of your play session. The house should offer your high utility features with functionality that is useful to tap into in between most of your other activities in RuneScape. It will also offer you the chance to build and collect hundreds of items for your PoH from across the game.
But what does that mean!? Think about it this way: when completing a "run" in an activity - be that slayer, farming, archaeology (or others), - the house could be a place to drop in briefly at before using it to also more speedily access the next part of your run. Importantly, the idea here is to simplify your game experience, rather than add a layer of complexity to it.
But wait, there's more! The PoH should be the embodiment of your personal journey through RuneScape, able to display the achievements or the things you have earned that matter to you.
Finally, an important consideration with the PoH is that its current existence is very solo-play oriented. Social aspects (house parties) exist(ed) but no longer really link into a wider gameplay cycle. With the new housing system, we want to ensure that the PoH isn't a cut off part of the game that pushes you away from hubs. Instead, we want to ensure that making use of the PoH can be a more social experience. Bearing that in mind, we're not looking to add full bank access to the house or create new workbenches that would enable skill-training as a solo-activity.
We'll get a little more into all of the above in the following paragraphs. Now that we've cemented the foundations, let's get into the exciting details!
Hyper Customisable
VERY excitingly, we want to offer a much greater degree of personalization and customization for how you place your rooms and furniture, along with a much more modern and easy-to-use build system.
We're decoupling furniture from specific rooms! No longer are you forced to have your larder in your kitchen... enjoying quick access from the bedroom for a midnight snack (we won't judge)? Now possible.
Of course, as with anything there might just be some rulesets we've got to put in place, just to stop you putting trees in the bathroom, but for now we're seeing how our own JMods get to decorating before cementing these too heavily.
The overall intent is to give you the freedom you need to create something awesome. This does also mean that you could theoretically mix and match house styles, perhaps merging the feel of a cosy mountain cabin with that of a beach house with palm trees.
The system we're developing will allow you to click on any tile to place an object, but then also be able to click-and-drag it to anywhere else (or swap it with another object). Walls would also be implemented in a way that you could place objects on them. This system won't be limited to just furniture or objects either... it should extend to being able to easily and quickly shift entire rooms (or groups thereof)!
On top of free placement, you'll be able to rotate many of your objects to how you see fit, just for that extra personal touch.
Room Shapes
One pain point that we're keenly aware of is how restrictive the current PoH system can feel. You're mostly limited to a single square room shape that has largely predefined furniture slots in it.
Let's get rid of that old limitation! We want to offer new room shapes beyond the simple single sized square: By adding corridors, octagons, larger and smaller sized squares along with cross pieces (which offer a more transitionary room to different parts of the house) we really want to unlock your creativity and let you create something incredible that feels matches your vision of an in-game dream house!
Furniture
You better sit down for this bit. We've reconsidered the way Construction is trained, as the old format doesn't work within the new system (especially considering the decoupled furniture slots). If the old (current) way of training Construction is largely focused on building a "spot", the new system will instead focus on building an "object". Think of it like creating furniture objects that are placed into your PoH "inventory" (perhaps called furniture trunk?), which you can then place wherever you want in the house.
Not happy with where you've placed everything? No worries. Pull it all up and send it back to your furniture trunk to start over... without having to shell out 25 million GP for another demonic throne! And if you decide that instead of just that one throne, you want to tastefully scatter loads of them across your house? No one is going to stop you; you'll be able to place as many of the same furniture types as you'd like.
Functional Furniture
The new PoH will continue to offer existing functional furniture that you may already be using, but we do plan to add a good number of new functional furniture to really help the PoH become the heartbeat of your game sessions.
Let's paint a few pictures:
- A Portal Nexus (Inspired by Old School RuneScape's nexus) to help get you to the places in Gielinor that matter most to you.
- An Artefact storage unit to help Archaeologists better organize themselves during excavations while also freeing up some bank space.
- A Potion cauldron, which would store your potions - by drinking directly from the cauldron you might be able to benefit from extended durations for the associated effects.
The above are just some early work-in-progress ideas (and we can't yet guarantee that they'll be feasible), but we've got plenty more ideas for awesome new functional furniture. Today's blog does, however, give us the opportunity to see conversations unfold around the following question:
What kind of functional furniture would you find truly useful to be able to access with the new PoH? Have a think about this bearing in mind that the PoH should be a transitional aspect of gameplay, rather than something that removes you from the world and cloisters you away.
Decorative Furniture
Alongside the functional there is of course also the more decorative and "flavour-some" furniture, that really allows your personal character to shine through. The PoH will be the embodiment of your journey through RuneScape, celebrating your adventuring achievements and victories. Think of roaming throughout the lands and visiting different areas in order to find, unlock or purchase furniture for your PoH!
As with the functional furniture, we've got a lot of great ideas for what the PoH will already include in order to become that embodiment, but this is another opportunity for us to check in with community conversations around this question. What are the things that you genuinely care about displaying in your PoH, whether for yourself or to impress the occasional visitor with. What are the moments in the game that have mattered the most to you and that you would want to be able to proudly place in your PoH?
Decommissioning the Old PoH
When the new arrives the old must depart, and we will be decommissioning the old PoH when this update launches later this year. You will of course be wondering what happens to everything in your old PoH at that time...
With the move to the new system of creating, editing, placing and moving, we want to provide you with an opportunity for a fresh start.
While the room layout of your old PoH will not be preserved, most of your furniture will. If your old PoH has furniture that exists in the new PoH system, it will be automatically converted into an associated object. For example, if you built a Demonic Throne in your old PoH, you will have a Demonic Throne object in your new PoH's furniture trunk, which you can freely place using the new system.
Shared Community (Final Name TBC)
We don't want the PoH to be a singled-off silo. Shared community spaces (we're still working on the final name) are a hugely important part of the Construction rework and will be the main way we're aiming to make this the skill sociable.
So what are shared community spaces!? Consider getting together with your friends, showing-off and enjoying each other's homes, all as though you were visiting your friend who just happens to live right around the corner. Imagine being able to see your house nestled in among all your friends' houses!
This aspect of the update warrants its own larger blog a little later down the line though, so we won't go much further than that for now. We just wanted to mention it today given the emphasis we want to place on how the PoH should not be a silo-ed off part of the game. This does of course also affect the PoH's placement within the world of Gielinor... more on that next time!
That's all for today - Head on over to the official threads on Discord and Reddit and get stuck in the conversation!