World of Warcraft’s player housing has worked a treat, so far—Blizzard appears to’ve largely learnt all the correct lessons from over 20 years of other MMOs figuring out what a good player housing system looks like. You can kitbash things together, clip them, rotate them, scale them, and build basically whatever you want.
Despite hitting the ground running with the feature, though, Blizzard’s keen to keep making improvements. That’s per the dev’s “State of Azeroth” video released today, which you can view below:
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In it, Blizzard revealed a few key improvements they’re working on for player housing—for example, letting your pets run amok indoors, or hitching “a couple of your favourite mounts up in your yard outdoors”.
But the real juice is in expanding the current tools to be even more powerful than they currently are, as director Ion Hazzikostas explains: “We’ve also seen and heard that as you’re expressing that boundless creativity, and maybe making something like, say, a grand piano that you’ve cobbled together from a dozen different decor pieces, it can be frustrating when you realise that you have your grand creation, but it’s not quite in the spot you want it to be in.”
In the current state of the system, you can’t batch-select pieces of decor, requiring some re-assembly for this sort of thing. Blizzard’s working on a mass-select feature, but it’ll also be working to add a copy/paste function for those mass selections. Lastly, Blizzard is working on a way to import and export said designs. Grand pianos all the way down.
“Along the way, to give you even more freedom in what you can do, you’re going to see decor budgets for both interior and exterior placement continue to increase,” Hazzikostas adds, which is great news for cobblers currently arm-deep in replicating the follicles on Garrosh’s face (I kid, but I’m not kidding by a huge amount).
Hazzikostas says that this is due to technical limitations being sussed out, but also because the team just wants to give you more progression in levelling your home, sweet home.
“All of this is just the ground floor for housing in World of Warcraft. This is the foundation of a feature that we want to be a reflection of your life and times in Azeroth, and we’re serious about expanding it and improving it alongside you. In the years to come.”
Honestly, this all sounds great. I’ve already been mightily impressed by WoW’s housing system so far, so any additional functionality is only bound to make this already solid start even better. I can’t wait to see the kind of nonsense players pull off.
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