A Homeowner Is You

Some games offer you the option to buy a house. That is, if they don't force you to buy one outright, although, in those cases, they're usually "kind" enough to let you choose where and how your house should be.

This may act as a free Inn, give you a place to store stuff, or just be a Bragging Rights Reward. It rarely has a major impact on the gameplay (but may be a big pull for certain types of players, depending on the level of An Interior Designer Is You).

Compare Hub Level and Renovating the Player Headquarters. Sister Trope of Home and Garden, which is about feel-good shows giving houses/gardens a makeover.

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Examples:

Action-Adventure

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a run-down house you can buy and then shell out tons more cash to upgrade. There's not much to do there besides sleep and display/store a handful of weapons and shields as trophies; however, it's probably the player's first glimpse of how the game averts the series' usual Money for Nothing. Buying the house and all the upgrades also unlocks the "From the Ground Up" side quest line where you help one of the workers, Hudson, build Tarrey Town in the Akkala region by bringing him wood and merchants whose names end in the suffix "son". Completing Tarrey Town also unlocks another resident merchant, Grante, who sells rare armor pieces you may have missed as well as the Hylian Shield.
  • In the sequel, Link's original house has been co-opted by Zelda, so he instead gets the opportunity to buy a new house in Tarrey Town proper from Hudson. This time around, Hudson sells Link house pieces that he can manipulate with Ultrahand to construct the house himself to his own design.

Action RPG

• In Kult: Heretic Kingdoms, Alita can buy houses, which may be more convenient for resting (a game mechanic) than the alternatives. They also provide storage, although less than Alita herself can carry if you equip her with lots of bags.

Eastern RPG

• The Aveyond series gives you the option to buy a house/manor half-way through the quest. This gives the player a free Trauma Inn, and also allows the party members to interact with each other.
• In Fantasy Life, the player starts out living in a small attic and can eventually move to bigger houses inside First Town and get a vacation home in each of the two other towns. The beds that can be put in them work as both a free inn and an extra save point. In addition, the houses are part of the places to which the player can teleport freely and furniture can be both made and purchased.
• Once the party moves to their base in Lunarosse, several party members get their own houses. It's also the only save point in the game where Channing can check on the Relationship Values.
• The party in Rakenzarn Tales gets a place near the start of the game. Besides the standard use of free healing, you can also converse with all the party members who begin taking up residence once you recruit them, as well as access the monster encyclopedia and in-game biographies.
• Terranigma allows you to buy an apartment if you max out Loire's development. You can even buy furnishings, a bed for resting and a Save Point to put in it!
• The Untold Tales Of The Vocaloids has vacant houses at several towns visited in the story. You can purchase them and then hire a maid and adds several decorations. They serve as a free Inn and when fully decorated, they spawn a chest containing a picture and one of the items required for a character's ultimate weapon.

Japanese RPG

• Dragon Quest X lets you build a house which can then be customized.
• In EarthBound (1994) you can eventually afford to buy a small house just west of your hometown. The guy you buy it from neglects to mention that it's missing a wall, but it contains a photo location and a silly magazine excerpt so it's totally worth it.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII has one which serves as a free inn, but as there's already one of those aboard the Highwind, it's really just for the bragging rights.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, players can purchase plots of land in housing districts upon which to build homes, either for themselves or their Free Company. There are a limited number of housing plots available on each server, but players also have the option of buying a private chamber in their Free Company house or an apartment.
• In Pokémon Platinum, a random person gives you a Villa in the Resort Area for free. Other powerful trainers will visit you there, but it's really just something to spend your cash on.
• Phantasy Star:
  • In Phantasy Star II, your home is where new party members come to call and where you can swap them out.
  • In Phantasy Star IV, you can stay at your home in Aiedo for free instead of staying at an inn. You can display the ridiculous souvenir crap you can buy at a tourist trap in the first half of the game.
  • Phantasy Star Online 2 gives players the option to rent and furnish an apartment of their own.
  • Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis has Creative Space, which expands the "homeowner" part to "private island owner". You could build your own custom house from scratch... or you could build anything else, from giant robots to underground mazes to sky islands to cities. All players get one free Creative Space with additional Spaces being paid rental. You can even give your friends building permissions on your Creative Space so you can collaborate on a project.

Metroidvania

• In An Untitled Story, you can buy a home in SkyTown that can be decorated with numerous items bought from its landlord, including three arcade cabinets which reward heart containers when you beat the top-score in each of them.

MMORPG

• RuneScape has a Construction skill that allows you to build and customise a house, starting from a little one-room shack and potentially becoming a huge castle with a dungeon other players can explore.
• In Ultima Online, one of the first commercially successful MMORPGs, a player with enough gold could buy a deed to a house and then place it almost anywhere in the game world. This led to the online equivalent of a housing bubble as available land was quickly claimed, and newer players could only buy an existing house or hope for a negligent player to allow their home to fall into collapse (thus freeing up some of the limited landscape). In the late Nineties UO properties could be found on eBay for hundreds of US dollars. The advantages of housing in UO included item storage, easy access to item crafting (forges, looms, etc.), a safe place to practice skills (given the early PVP everywhere environment), and prestige. Given this was one of the first online examples of home ownership and the developers did not fully anticipate human nature, the disadvantages included burglary, home invasion, stalking, etc. But those were the good old days.
• Wurm Online as well, which is superficially similar to Minecraft but a few orders of magnitude more complicated. The end results, be it a 2x2 hut with a vegetable patch or a magnificent villa, is still immensely satisfying once you've nailed the last plank into place.

Real-Time Strategy

• In Spellforce 2 you're awarded (by plot) with control over a fiefdom for your heroic efforts in warning the human kingdom of the impending Shadow Pact invasion. It turns out to be one of the most embattled, troubled provinces in the kingdom that has killed multiple ruling families, and it's up to you to clean it up or die trying. Except you eventually do so well, along with other plot developments, that the king gets suspicious and sends a "pacifying" force in under the pretext of crushing a rebellion you never even considered. It also ends up becoming something of a secondary Hub Level complete with merchants and quest-givers since you're dealing with a whole RTS-style map, after all.

Roguelike

• You start out in a modest cave in Elona and eventually have the option of buying bigger and better real estate.

Role-Playing Game

• Baldur's Gate II had "stronghold quests" for each PC class, with rewards ranging from a castle for Fighters and the Planar Sphere for Mages to a bunk in The Order of the Radiant Heart HQ for paladins.
• Bug Fables has a locked red house in the Ant Kingdom, and, when Chapter 3 is completed, Team Snakemouth can buy a key for it from Beette in the Bee Kingdom balcony. The house allows you to sleep in it for free and let you access its and the nearly inn's roofs, in latter of which there is a Charge Up medal to be collected. There is also a pet bed, in which you can leave Chompy in or take/give her ribbons without going all the way back to the Bee Kingdom hive.
• Dragon Age:
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, if you cleaned the DLC-only location Soldier's Peak of Darkspawn infestation, it would serve as your nominal home. You couldn't actually live there, but it had two local merchants and, more importantly, the only container usable for storing your own items in the entire game.
  • In Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening expansion, you get Vigil's Keep as your home: it lets you swap party members in and out like the Party Camp did in Origins and has a storage container like Soldier's Peak.
  • In Dragon Age II, you get two houses: In Act I, you and your family are living with your uncle in his small home in Lowtown. There is a storage chest there, and you can always find your mother, uncle, brother/ sister, and possibly dog there to converse with them, and can read letters sent to you, mostly to start sidequests. By Act II, you've moved up in the world, and purchased the old family manor in Hightown. It has all the same features as Gamlen's shack, except its bigger, Gamlen doesn't live there, you can potentially ask your Love Interest to move in with you, and your sibling can no longer be found there.
• Each game in The Elder Scrolls series (starting with Daggerfall) gives you the option to buy and/or build a home. Specific details:
  • In Daggerfall, you can buy a house. A house affords you a safe space to rest without drawing the ire of the aggressive City Guards, stockpile loot, and otherwise serve as a status symbol. Houses are purchased from banks, or obtained as a gift upon achieving the highest rank in a knightly order.
  • Morrowind allows you to build your own stronghold as part of the Great House questlines. In each case, it requires a sum of money to fund the construction, a land deed from the Duke, and you'll need to complete a series of quests (differing depending on the Great House you joined) in order to make the stronghold viable, attract settlers, and remove threats/obstacles to it. Given that it is the first game in the series following the 3D Jump, it allows plenty of opportunity to become an Interior Designer, displaying all of your questing treasures and turning it into your own Superhero Trophy Shelf. (Game Mods exist which make this process even easier, as well as many which add additional residences for you to acquire.)
  • Oblivion allows you to buy a home in each of the major cities, ranging from a ramshackle shack to modest houses to a full blown (albeit haunted) mansion. The physics engine unfortunately makes displaying your treasures far more difficult than it was in Morrowind, as attempting to place items next to other items has a tendency to knock them around, if not send them flying across the room. (Once again, Game Mods exist which make this process far easier. In fact, some of the modders were hired by Bethesda to improve the system for Skyrim.)
  • Skyrim:
    • In the vanilla game, you can purchase a house in each of the major holds of Skyrim once you've built up enough of a reputation in those holds. In addition to the money required to buy the house, furnishings (including useful things like extra storage, Alchemy stations, Cooking stations, Enchanting stations, etc.) are separate and cost even more money.
    • The Hearthfire DLC allows you to purchase land and build your own house from the ground up. Once again, it is quite costly, but you can at least find many of the building materials yourself to save money. You can build anything from a simple one-room cabin-like house to full blown mansions with dedicated trophy rooms, Mage Towers, libraries, shrines to the gods of your choosing, and much more.
• In the Fable series, the primary means of earning money is house-flipping or renting out properties. Buying better furniture for your properties increases the homes' values and the occupants' standard of living, subsequently increasing the amount they pay you in rent.
• Fallout:
  • In Fallout 3 the Lone Wanderer can get one of two homes depending on the outcome of the "Power of the Atom" quest. The player can buy several preset decoration schemes for either dwelling and store other useful, valuable, or decorative items there. Both contain beds and can be stocked with additional useful furniture.
  • Fallout: New Vegas has several house options for the PC, but the most developed of these is the Presidential Suite from the Lucky 38 casino, which you get for merely advancing the main quest. This is where you companions hang out when they're not with you (if you don't send them back to where you met them), and you can pay caps to get some useful furniture items, like a crafting bench. Other examples of nominal player housing are the suites you can get at each of the Casinos for making enough money there, the safehouses you can get for aiding major factions, and the Hotel room in Novac you can buy.
  • In Fallout 4, you can buy a home in Diamond City for a nominal fee. You can also build your own home in any of the settlements in the game. The main advantage to the Diamond City home over homes built in settlements is the fact that items you store in your Diamond City home cannot be taken by errant NPCs, making it the safest place to keep unused items.
  • Fallout 76 allows players to build their own home anywhere in the game world.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect, you get your own house as a reward for 100% Completion of the "Pinnacle Station" DLC. It contains a limitless stock of grenades and medi-gel, as well as a computer terminal to procure rare equipment for fairly low prices. It is never mentioned again though. With the DLC's source code lost and the backups unusably corrupted, it is not accessible in the PlayStation 3 port or Legendary Edition (though modders were able to restore it for the PC version of Legendary Edition).
  • In the Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3, Admiral Anderson gives Shepard his apartment on the Citadel so Shepard has a place to clear their head. It has some limited customization options and hosts an optional party for Shepard and the surviving squadmates.

Simulation Game

• You're required to buy a house in Animal Crossing... and you spend most of the game expanding it and paying off your debt.
• Some Harvest Moon games feature this. Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town had one that would pretty much take all of your money and lumber. The other houses had special requirements to unlock them. Harvest Moon: Animal Parade has some around town.
• House Flipper, naturally. In addition to fixing and selling houses, you can also select one of them to be your home office, where you live and operate your business.
• No Umbrellas Allowed: Starting on Week 3, Darcy reminds you that you should move to a new house by the start of Week 5, or else his granddaughter Nari will force you to pay the rent for her room. While you can pay to live two floors above Nari's room with no strings attached, moving to Simuruk Lofts or Badapolis requires you to be more stylish by buying at least two each of new clothing and hairstyles for the former and four for the latter. Each new house places you closer to Darcy's, thus reducing the travel time to work by foot.
• In Roots of Pacha, you spend the first few days living in your adoptive grandparents' house and working on your farm. Then, they encourage you to move out and buy your own house, which you can place anywhere in the village. You can also upgrade it twice so that you can get married and have kids.
• The Sims, of course, but you're pretty much required to build a house if you want one. In The Sims 4, you can take the easy route and use the online content-sharing feature to plop down an entire house instantly.

Other

• Neopets: You can purchase a NeoHome in, and decorate it to your heart's content.
• Shadows of Doubt is set in a noir dystopia so having a place to live is not a guarantee—in fact, in the starting campaign "The Dead of Night" you are actually evicted from the apartment you shared with your ex, and have to beg the retired policeman's union to help you find a replacement. Outside of the campaign, it is possible for your detective to start with a decent apartment, a crappy roach-infested flophouse, or no home at all, forcing you to make-do on the streets until you can collect together enough money to rent a place. Some degree of desperation is inevitable—the amount of money you make early will only allow you to rent some truly abominable quarters, many of which are literally one step above being flooded with sewage. And yes, you can decorate your apartment and put some useful facilities in there, such as a shower to remove the 'smelly' debuff or a nice warm towel to remove the 'wet' and 'cold' debuffs.
• Test Drive Unlimited, in both the first and second games, they allow you to buy houses that, the more luxurious they are, the more cars you can hold in its garage. This goes from a crappy caravan with a two car garage shack to a house on the side of a hill with waterfalls and an eight car garage. Then there are the yachts that go for five to seven million on Ibiza or Hawaii, respectively.

Wide Open Sandbox

• The later Grand Theft Auto games have houses that can be used as save points. Notably, in GTA: San Andreas, these also can be used to access your wardrobe. Changing just one part of your outfit erases your wanted level. Think about it.
  • Also, buy a piece of clothing once and you can access it from every safehouse in the state.
• In Minecraft, you punch trees, make sticks, make picks, mine stone and build the greatest house you can imagine.
• In Radiation Island the safe houses provide a place to heal up, restock, and sleep in relative safety. You'll need to settle in one and turn it into a Player Headquarters to survive. You can craft extra chests to store things. A recent update gave players the ability to build their own houses, complete with multiple floors, stairs, and functional doors. The doors open only for the player who installed them, turning any building into a secure hiding place or storage area. Craft enough furniture like tables, desks, chairs and beds, and An Interior Decorator Is You as a bonus.
• Much like Grand Theft Auto's safehouses the Saints Row series provides the player with "cribs" where they can access their weapon stash, money vault, and wardrobe as well as customize their gang, rewatch cutscenes or buy furniture upgrades.
• Starbound, like Terraria, is a 2D game, that allows players to build their own homes on the surfaces of planets they travel to. They can also customize their starship interiors.
• Terraria may be 2D, but it's pretty similar to Minecraft. You have so many items to pick from when customizing your home, and, like Minecraft, you build it from scratch, so it truly is your home.
• In the Blood and Wine DLC of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Geralt receives the deed to a vineyard early on in the story that can be upgraded to include various furnishings and decorations, some of which will grant you buffs by using them.

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