It was a tiny, incidental line in Final Fantasy XIV‘s live letter. The sort of thing that you could easily miss, especially since it’s not even coming with the game’s next patch. But Naoki Yoshida mentioned that one of the projects the team is working on, separate but connected to allowing you to change design aspects of your house interior regardless of district, is to change the size of the house people walk into. And that is, in fact, a huge deal.
This might sound like it’s not that big of a deal if you’re not someone who really has much interest in the game’s housing for whatever reason, but I would postulate that even if you have long since given up on the idea of owning a house, it is a big deal. And the reason for that comes down to the way that housing in the game is structured and why a lot of people have given up on owning houses. Decoupling interior size is a big step toward making housing just generally more accessible.
Housing, for the game’s entire history, has been the one problem that FFXIV has consistently been unable to fix. It’s not that FFXIV has had no missteps, but rather that the team hears feedback about them and then addresses them consistently. An instanced fight gates progress early in the MSQ for Stormblood? No such gates in Shadowbringers and the issue is fixed within a couple days. Horrible queue times with the Endwalker launch? We didn’t have those for Dawntrail. Most of the issues that we run into, as players, get fixed pronto.
But housing just keeps being a series of half-fixes. First it’s only FC housing with exorbitant prices at the time. More means of earning gil get added, then private housing is the same. More wards never solve the issue. Housing lottery doesn’t really solve the issue. It’s a constant string of half-measures meant to fix things that keep not really fixing things, an attempt to get around the fundamental problem of having limited housing in a game that has a much larger number of players who want housing.
I suspect – very strongly – that this comes down to something that is very deeply wedged within the code of the game and cannot easily be modified out. But that doesn’t really matter, does it?
The thing is that the housing limitations are actually a bipartite issue. The first issue is that there are just a limited number of homes available and a large number of players who want them. That’s a noteworthy problem, it’s something that is going to keep coming up so long as housing remains limited. But the concurrent problem is that that limited housing is further tiered between three different house sizes, and from an objective standpoint the Large plots are most desirable. They have the most yard space, the most interior space, and so forth. If you want a house, you want a Large.
Decoupling the interior from the exterior does not, in and of itself, solve the former problem. But it does at least start to solve the latter problem. It means that instead of having to compete over getting any house and then also compete over getting a good house, you can at least focus solely on the former. And that in and of itself changes a lot.
Hypothetically, yes, a Large plot still has more outdoor space than a Small one. But if the interior is large enough, the fact is that it’s not going to matter much. Most of the outdoor activities of note kind of require a free company’s worth of players to make it truly work (or one very dedicated player who is fixated on doing things that don’t have a huge impact), so it’s honestly not even a real loss to skip out on the big outdoor stuff.
And that might sound like it’s just a nice thing for the players who manage to get houses, but I think it’s going to have bigger impacts than that because if you can decouple exteriors from interiors out in the wards, that might be possible with rooms and apartments, too.
Now, I do not know what sort of code is tied into making the housing work right now, but certainly it is only semi-instanced. That is, a Small exterior points to a specific Small interior, which is why you can go to a house while the owner is offline and still walk around inside of it. (Something you cannot do with island sanctuaries, for the record). My guess – again, based only on what we’ve been told so far – is that the developers are trying to untangle this so that the interior can be resized, which I imagine means a similar trick can be done elsewhere. That will massively increase the number of spaces available for players to build a large house in, to the point that it might genuinely start turning the tide for housing.
To be clear, I am not saying any of this is necessarily in the works. It’s even possible that the coding used for apartments and free company rooms absolutely cannot work with this even if you can resize interiors. But it’s the first serious long-term step toward fixing some of the major problems that housing has long had.
And if people are no longer zealously chasing Larges just for interior decorating space, that takes some of the pressure off of housing to begin with. Oh, sure, a Large exterior still has advantages in terms of looking big, but that’s a lesser issue. Even if the cost of buying a Large interior is the same as buying a Large house, period, it feels much more like an achievable goal if you just have to have some house, any house. It makes smaller plots more desirable and lessens the feeling of compromising with a sub-par house simply because you couldn’t get anything better.
Most importantly, it’s another step in doing something that I just finished saying the game still has yet to successfully do: fix the housing problem. Not slap a bandage on it, not try to work around it, but actually fix the consistent troubles that the game has had since housing first launched that have never been fully addressed. There are still other issues, to be sure, and other things that have to be done. But if we can actually see steps taken to making housing less of a desired but widely unobtainable feature? I’m all for it.
And if it doesn’t ultimately work out, then I’ll be disappointed. But there’s a long history of that when it comes to the game’s housing, sadly.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to talk about current job balance in broad strokes, from the jobs that are doing perhaps a bit too well to the ones that are underperforming a bit and how complicated the balance game remains.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
