World of Warcraft’s latest patch didn’t land great—I’ve not had a chance to check it out myself, but to hear our contributor and WoW expert Heather Newman explain it, it seems as though it’s riddled with bugs and suffering from time-gated content and a weird release schedule. I suppose it was only a matter of time before Blizzard swung and completely missed.
However, I am beyond excited about its player housing feature, which is slated to come sometime before the next expansion, Midnight. Reports from prominent YouTubers such as Preach Gaming and Taliesin & Evitel, as well as an interview from Breakflip (translated here via WoWHead), seems to have everything pointed in the right direction.
Watch On
I’m just going to share a recollection from Taliesin, here, that already has me sold on the entire concept:
“Jay was showing us—he did like a live room build … he made a whole oven, and what he did was he used [a] kitchen cabinet sort of thing. And then he got a crate with an iron top on it, and he clipped that through the table so only the top of the crate was showing in the table, which made the stovetop. And then he took a bunch of barrels that had round tops, shrunk them down, and clipped them through the top of the stove top like hobs.”
My inner MMO sicko is bellowing ‘yes!’ I rarely get into housing, but I have put together bases in City of Heroes: Homecoming, a game which has had its base-building systems jailbroken and improved by a bunch of volunteer devs. What Taliesin describes here is something I have literally done myself in that game, except with wastebins and kitchen cabinets—and that was without the power of scaling.
This kind of player housing is exactly what creates bustling, avid communities in MMOs like The Elder Scrolls Online, and Blizzard has landed on exactly the right stance by letting players scale, rotate, and clip objects into each other in a way that’s supremely freeform.
There are, of course, other elements outside the basic control scheme that are important to nail, and so far, Blizzard is saying all the right words. While Blizzard’s already bragged about a lack of rental fees, auto-demolishments, or housing lotteries before, some other elements from the Breakflip interview seem very promising.
First up, Blizzard’s learned from Garrisons, and won’t be tying Player Housing into direct power boosts in any way—it’s a purely cosmetic system that’ll let you make jumping puzzles, guild bases, taverns, whatever you want. No pay-to-win or power scaling benefits like in-housing Auction Houses—only anvils for professions and the like without any direct boosts.
Moreover, while there’ll be special furnishings you can get through achievements, they’ll be rare—and Breakflip reports that anything that goes on the store will have a free equivalent available in-game. Neighbourhoods will be a thing, and “are being designed as real living spaces, complete with Azeroth NPCs, seasonal events, dynamic interactions, etc”.
Watch On
All in all, glowing words from anyone who’s taken it for a spin. There might be bugs or glitches or problems down the line, but Blizzard has enjoyed the benefit of years of hindsight from other games and put those lessons to use. And having seen just a glimpse of the broader MMO player housing community’s creativity, I cannot wait to see what WoW’s players cook.
Read the full article here
