Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest (and ostensibly greatest, depending on your perspective) installment of Choose My Adventure. This week, we’ll be bidding adieu to the wild world of WildStar, but that time hasn’t come just yet, so let’s save the tearful farewells for later and go ahead and recap last week’s vote: As I’m sure you recall, with your minds from which nothing escapes, last week I asked y’all to choose where I would focus my efforts during my playtime over the weekend: PvP, PvE, or player housing.
The PvPers in the crowd were roundly shouted down, with PvP pulling in only a paltry 9% of the total vote, but the contest between PvE and housing was a heated one, indeed. In the end, however, player housing managed to edge out a nail-bitingly narrow victory with 47% of the total vote against PvE’s 44%. And so, with that decision being made, I spent a great deal of my weekend — and a not insignificant amount of Bonongo’s gold reserves — exploring the intricacies of WildStar‘s player housing. The end result? A rather comfortable, albeit humble, abode where Bonongo can retire after a long day of Spellslinging.
So, as is customary around these parts, let’s take a moment before we dive into the nuts and bolts and make sure we have a solid idea of how things work ’round WildStar player housing’s parts. When you first spawn into your housing plot — which is a floating island in the clouds, in case you weren’t aware — you’ll see nothing but a bunch of vacant, overgrown land with a sorry-lookin’ lean-to in the center of it. In my excitement to build my house, I forgot to take a “before” screenshot to illustrate this, but trust me, you’re not missing much.
When you open the landscape enhancement window, which is the window from which you’ll make most of the major modifications to your housing plot, you’ll see a plot layout like the one in the screenshot below. Each of those square plots, or “sockets,” represents an area of land on which you can build a variety of major landscape features, each of which is modular and commonly referred to as a “plug.” As you may have already put together, plugs go into sockets.
That center socket, the big square one initially occupied by the aforementioned sorry-lookin’ lean-to, is your primary housing plot, where your actual house will go. The smaller sockets on either side of the primary housing plot can be filled with “small,” features, but as I’ll discuss momentarily, “small” does not mean “useless.” Finally, at the top of the layout, there are a pair of long, rectangular sockets. The feature plugs for these plots vary wildly in terms of usefulness, awesomeness, and outright absurdity.
In order to construct a plug, you have to pay a price, though what exactly that price is depends on the plug in question. Many of the lower-tier, “starter” plots require nothing more than solid coin, while others require special construction items called fabkits, which can be acquired in a number of different ways — crafted by Architects, purchased from reputation vendors, awarded by challenges, and so on. On top of that, many of the fancier plugs have level requirements as well.
While plugs are used to add larger, more unique features to your housing plots, for the smaller details, WildStar provides a huge number of housing decorations ranging from plants, trees, and rocks to tables, chairs, and beds, plus just about everything in between. The system for placing and arranging decor comes in two flavors: First, there’s the plain-and-simple drag-and-drop method, which is exactly what it sounds like. Drag the object around until it’s where you want it, rotate it or rescale it if need be, and voila, you’re done. This system also makes it easy to attach certain decorations to others — like mugs to tables, for instance — by simply right-clicking the decoration onto which you wanna attach the new one.
However, the basic drag-and-drop method can be a bit fidgety, so for those who prefer a finer degree of control, there’s also an “advanced” decoration-placement toolkit, which allows you to move and rotate any item by its X, Y, and Z axes. It’s usually not necessary for the “broad strokes,” like placing a bed, but it’s perfect for when you need to — oh, I dunno, let’s just say — situate a tableau of plushies on the bed so that each one is right where you want it. Besides the socket-and-plug and decoration systems, there are other ways to customize your housing plot, but I’ll get to those in a bit. Right now, let’s get down to the proverbial brass tacks.
I’m going to go ahead and say that, all-in-all, WildStar‘s housing system is pretty robust, but it stops just short of “perfect.” I do, for starters, love the socket-and-plug system. Like I alluded to earlier, it’s the “small” sockets which seem to hold the plugs with the greatest utility. Right now, I’ve got myself a garden where I can grow plants from any seeds I come across in my adventures; a perpetually replenishing Survivalist’s thicket that provides me with a steady supply of lumber, meat, and leather; and my own, personal crafting station so that I can undertake my architectural endeavors in solitude. I also have a barbecue, which is useless, but hey, sometimes a Chua just wants to wind down with a nice rack of ribs.
Anyway, even though I’m not the kind of person who really requires that housing have any kind of effect on my gameplay as a whole — I’m more than happy to decorate for the sheer joy of decorating — I have to admit that it’s a pretty nice touch that my housing features provide me with some kind of utilitarian benefit, like the aforementioned everlasting supply of crafting materials.
That general trend carries over to the two larger plots, as well, albeit perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent — at least at my current level of progression in the game. One type of plug unique to these larger sockets is the “biome” plug, which transforms the socket’s corresponding plot of land into a miniature version of another zone’s biome. Each biome plug requires a fabkit to build, and I picked one up from the reputation vendor in Ellevar, so now I can enjoy Ellevar’s phosphorescent fungi and weirdly crooked trees from the comfort of my own housing plot. As a bonus, it includes a portal that’ll whisk me straight to Ellevar in an instant, so that’s pretty nice, too.
There are also quite a few other plugs with interesting gameplay effects, albeit less utilitarian effects than the that of the harvesting thicket I mentioned earlier. Instead, these particular plugs allow players to attempt unique challenges. One such plug I installed on my housing plot was called the “Prospector Plot,” and activating it allowed me to take part in a challenge that had me dashing between a barrage of TNT explosions in order to pick up a certain number of gold nuggets within the alloted time. Sure, it’s not exactly useful in the purest sense of the word, but it does add a dash of flavor to the proceedings, and it seems to me that it would also encourage players to swap out their plots regularly to experience the different challenges, thereby keeping players from feeling like they’re required to keep a certain arrangement of plots for the pure gameplay benefit of it.
Oh, and also, there are housing plugs that grant players access to unique “housing expeditions” — which is just another way of saying “dungeons” — which, according to the descriptions, are scalable for one to five players of any level. I’m not high enough level yet to build any of them (and even if I weren’t, I lack the fabkits to do so), so I have nothing else to say on the matter, but I thought that was so neat that it deserved its own mini-paragraph.
Of course, there are also plenty of plugs that do absolutely nothing but provide atmosphere, and I have to say, some of them are pretty damn neat. There’s a dueling arena, an elaborate science laboratory, a frickin’ tiki lounge, a zen garden, and — my new personal goal — a giant floor piano like the one at FAO Schwarz. Yes, the one from Big. Anyway, whether you’re more motivated by pragmatism or fashion, WildStar has plenty of plugs to appeal to all tastes. Which… sounds way dirtier than I thought it would. Moving on.
The fun doesn’t stop at plugs (ugh, still though). Like I said, you’re also able to further customize your housing plot via the placement of various decorative items like furniture and landscape features such as plants and trees. As you would expect, a huge variety of such decorations is available, and, like the previously mentioned fabkits, they can be acquired from a multitude of different sources.
A pretty solid selection is available to be purchased with your hard-earned gold directly from the merchant window of the housing interface, but many more can be crafted by Architects, purchased from vendors, dropped by mobs, and awarded as challenge and quest rewards. Like many of the plugs, a great deal of the decor items provide a utilitarian benefit in the form of a buff to the rate at which rested XP is accumulated when a character logs out on his housing plot, which is a nice little incentive to play interior decorator (or to just pile crap in your house, if you’re some kind of phillistine).
Since Bonongo is pretty much broke because I have poor impulse control, the vast majority of my current housing decorations were crafted by yours truly. It’s still a pretty spartan affair, but my interior is furnished with a bed, a table, a couch, a rug, a variety of dangling (and probably dangerous) cables and nets — as befits the residence of a true Chua, It’s all tied together by the corpse of a gar (a kind of alligator-ish creature) that I’ve mounted on my wall as a trophy. Home, sweet home. Outside, as you can see from the screenshot below, I’ve set up a couple of canopies that serve to shade the hover-hammocks below. A picnic table topped with (presumably) ice-cold drinks rounds out my little outdoor lounge.
But unfortunately, that brings me around to one of my chief — and frankly, only — complaints about WildStar‘s player housing: None of the furniture is interactable! I know, I know, it’s a pathetically minor squabble, but I’d be lying if I said I weren’t at least a little bit dismayed when, satisfied with my landscaping endeavors, I tried to hop into one of the hover-hammocks for a bit of well-deserved R&R only to discover that my Chua, wittle though he is, couldn’t fit inside the hammock, his entry blocked by the bizarre forcefield dome that covers the hammock, presumably to block out any dangerous UV rays.
This can be worked around by scaling the item up until my character fits, but at that point, it looks less like a hammock for a Chua and more like a hammock for a remarkably hefty giant, so I just resigned myself to having purely decorative hammocks. Again, yes, this is a stupidly inconsequential quibble, and with most of the more traditional furniture pieces, like chairs and couches, it’s easy enough to make it look like my character’s sitting in them by way of careful positioning and the /sit emote, but I have to complain about something, and honestly, this is all I’ve got.
Because really, WildStar‘s housing is about as good as any I’ve seen in an MMO. I understand that some might bristle at seemingly cookie-cutter conformity of the modular socket-and-plug system, but the sheer variety of plugs available, in conjunction with the massive array of decor items to collect, provides plenty of ways to make sure that your housing plot is uniquely yours.
That reminds me that I forgot to mention that you can also go so far as to change the housing plot’s environment, music, and even camera effects, so if you want to live on an island of icy tundra that is perpetually hurtling into a massive, looming green sun, all viewed through an olde tyme film-grain effect while the overly upbeat theme music of the Protostar Corporation plays in the background, then you’re a goddamn lunatic. But also, you can totally do that.
And unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — that brings us to the end of this last installment of the WildStar edition of Choose My Adventure. A big, affectionate thank-you, as always, for those of you who joined (and directed) me on my journeys, and I certainly hope you’ll join me next week, when I’ll be starting a new adventure in a certain game’s recently released first expansion. I bet you’ll never guess which one.
Thanks again, friends, and I’ll see you all next week. Until then!
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Matt each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures — and you get to decide his fate. Be gentle (or not)!
