Decorating Sandbox

On Friday, Stargrace made a great post about decorating in EQ2.  In her post, she says, “Out of all the games I’ve played, EQ2 handled housing the best. Though EQ1 has guild halls (you can’t decorate them) and Vanguard has ACTUAL houses that you physically build – EQ2 by far has the best array of items and goods that can be placed in your home, both crafted and quested.”

On the one hand, I agree.  On the other, I don’t.  To the best of my knowledge, Stargrace never played SWG, but that game had by far the best housing and decorating system of any game.  If you could put it in your inventory, you could drop it in your house.  Most advanced crafting require some sub-combines and even sub-combines can be used for decorating if you can find a use for it.

I glanced through some of my old SWG screenshots and found some that I like.

Here is a shot of a custom fireplace.  The gray base of the fireplace is made of multiple subcombines for building a house.  The brown sections are armoires turned around backwards and dining tables.  The flames are created by torches.

You not only got to place your own house in SWG, you could pick it up and move it.  There are multiple housing types available.  Some can only be placed on certain planets.  Guilds can create their own cities.

Here is a city that I helped to design and create in the middle of the desert on a planet called Lok.

SWG also has player run in-game events where you can buy temporary decorations to place on the landscape.  Here is an event in the planning stages in the city of my current SWG guild.  The city is called New Dawn and is on the planet of Naboo.

Here’s another fireplace I designed.  This time, it is made up entirely of the house sub-combine and torches.

If you turn around on the stairs that I’m standing on in the above picture and look up, you will see a chandelier I build.  The chandelier is actually a dozen or so bird cages, several candles, and a fighting staff.

This next shot is of my chessboard.  The brown border of the board is made up of end tables.  The white squares are a different end table.  The black squares are ottomons.

Here’s my aquarium.  Again, I used house components for the frame of the tank.  A fighting staff in the corner gives the illusion of glass.  The fish were just gathered by fishing.  If the shot were closer, you would see game dice scattered about to give the illusion of air bubbles.

A friend asked me to design a kitchen layout in his cantina.  This is the result.  Most of the items are actually ship components.  The grill is a capacitor with torches providing the flames.  The corner control monitor is actually a shield generator with a ship laser gun on top and a data terminal stuck through the middle.  The flat surface is a ship reactor with a dining table on top.

I had a friend in SWG who was a master of decorating.  I wish I had some screenshots of some of the things she has done.  Among the custom jobs she performed, she created a full-sized ATAT using mostly ship parts and armor components.

For all the negatives that are associated with SWG, the housing system is definately not one of them.  The only limits to decorating are the limits of the player’s imagination.