When we covered Shroud of the Avatar’s newsletter yesterday, one of the tidbits we mentioned was the plan for craftable housing. In response to a question from a player, Starr Long essentially announced that in the launch patch next week, Portalarium is planning to tweak that system, which has long provoked claims of pay-to-win.
“Yes we are going to be expanding the number of craftable houses soon. In R52 in fact we are adding a craftable inn.”
So what exactly does housing entail? A helpful Redditor linked to a helpful thread on the official site just a few weeks ago breaking down how exactly you can buy property without handing over your credit card because you definitely can – that’s the good news. If you’re not a crafter yourself, you just need a specific currency, Crowns of the Obsidians, which you can buy with gold.
The bad news is that you need a lot of gold. The player did a test run hunting bandits for cash and found that he was able to make around 4000 gold per hour, meaning that by conservative estimate it’d take him about 78 hours to earn enough to buy a small housing plot. But that number assumes all other things being equal, and they’re not. You’d be leveling up, getting lucky drops, improving your merchanting, and most likely eventually figuring out that there are better ways to make bank, like hunting resources. It also assumes a stable price for Crowns (apparently the market is fluctuating wildly right now ahead of launch).
If you’re accustomed to getting an MMO house for nothing, that’s going to seem like a lot, to be sure, but old-school Ultima Online players probably aren’t even going to flinch at that kind of grind.
