When I was playing EQ2 regularly, one of the elements that really motivated me was collecting housing items from quest rewards. I was amazed at how flexible and accessible the housing system is compared to my only other experiences with LoTRO and Runes of Magic. It’s really a gem of a system which gives you a very low bar but lots of harder to reach optional goals if you want something bigger or fancier.

In EQ2 I have a basic house on two of my characters and was tempted to have one on a third. Now I’m playing Vanguard which, so I’ve read, has a great housing system as well; however housing in Vanguard is a very different prospect. It’ll require a much higher initial outlay financially, plus I’ll need someone to build it for me as I probably won’t be able to level up all the required crafting skills myself. This could be the basis for a great, self-imposed, long term goal for my gameplay. That would help me pick from the array of crafting professions and give guidance to what materials I gather while questing.

In a sense I find it hard to state categorically that I prefer one model over the other, I’ll have to come back to this after a few months of Vanguard to see if I’ve made that decision. I do like the idea of having optional long term goals in-game though that do not centre of power progression or endless combat.

I suspect that my choice over whether to play EQ2 or Vanguard in the longer term will depend much more on the extras like housing and crafting than combat systems or endgame content.