Freehold Placement / Pathing

@Craiken , While I don't particularly doubt the possibility that freehold location 'slots' will be predefined, in some way, it's not necessarily required to be inflexible. BDO has a system for the placement of player farms, where you can place them on basically any reasonably level terrain that doesn't have any major obstructions. You go to an area, and activate the farm 'item' in your inventory, and it brings up an aerial view of the area. Areas which are not suitable terrain-wise, or are obstructed are marked with a red grid, areas where your farm can be placed are marked with a blue grid. The important part however, is that they exclude areas near towns from placement using this same system. If some terrain is within a town's "borders", it's just not a legal farm placement.

You can get a reasonably flexible system while still having basic restrictions on terrain quality, obstacles (maybe for freeholds it ignores trees and the like if they prefer that), and "excluded regions" such as a node's central growth boundaries. They could easily enough permit "anything within some large radius of the node, which isn't obstructed or extremely close to the core node buildup".

Intrepid decides, obviously, what's considered an obstacle for freehold placement. I'd figure they'd let you "cut down trees" or move all but the largest rocks, simply so you even can have a freehold in a forested area. Having pre-defined placement options isn't the worst thing in the world, but it can be a bit limiting. In BDO, there are several house options that I can't use just because I'd want them to face a different direction, or be positioned a little different, for a different sort of view.

I mean, it might be weird to have a tavern out there in the wilderness, but it could also be really cool to have your secret out of the way tavern where you have to know a guy or get lucky exploring. After all, players could put their tavern near a road themselves, with any meaningful freedom of choice. They weren't everywhere , but Alpha 1 had enough roads that this wouldn't be a problem.

(Yes, that's what I meant about BDO Houses)