Blizzard has promised players of World of Warcraft that player housing, which launches in a limited form today (tomorrow across Europe), is going to be expanded in every patch and in future expansions released for the online game.
“I will reassure you as much as possible that that is the case,” World of Warcraft housing lead Jesse Kurlancheek told IGN. “We have a short-term, medium-term, long-term list of features and content that we want to add. We talk about what are we doing in 12.0 and 12.1 and 12.2 and beyond pretty regularly […] We’re thinking about things as not just a single feature release, [but as ] a very long-running thing.”
Senior UX designer Joanna Giannullis added: “I think we’ve already always started wanting to make sure that we were kind of in it for the long haul. This is a feature that we know is going to live in the game for some time to come, and we’re going to be adding more to it with every, not just every patch, but in future expansions, and we want to keep growing it.”
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The full player-housing release happens alongside new expansion World of Warcraft: Midnight, which launches 2nd March, but people who’ve pre-ordered it can dabble in a slimmer version of housing starting today. Incidentally, if you’re planning to try housing out, there’s a Getting Started explainer on the WoW website you might find handy.
Housing is arguably the largest systemic addition to World of Warcraft ever, and housing has been in development for several years. It’s a system that allows players to not only own and customise houses, but also to organise themselves into neighbourhoods – an aspect Blizzard has talked about before as being a kind of “sociological experiment”.
The main thing to remember about housing’s soft-launch today, according to Kurlancheek and Giannullis, is that it’s a start. There are many more things to come to it, both in the weeks and months to come, leading up to Midnight’s launch, and beyond.
One of the most requested features, the housing duo revealed, is co-ownership of a house – or the ability to temporarily give someone edit access to it. “Yeah, one [that] comes up a lot is, ‘I’m not especially creative or I’m not great with a toolset – can my friend come over and sort of deck out my apartment or deck out my house?’ Yeah, it’s certainly on our radar,” Kurlancheek said. This could even give rise to a whole cottage industry of players who specialise in this work.
“The idea of us building together is super compelling”
This co-operative building could be developed even further into communal building. “The idea of us building together is super compelling, I think,” Kurlancheek added. “As soon as players can build something themselves, we want to build things together. And so, what that ends up being depends on what people are trying to do or what is interesting for them. If it is just us coming together in the town square and hanging up balloons or whatever, because we’re having a birthday party, what does that look like? Versus we want to build a racetrack for our mounts around the outside of a town and what does that look like? Versus we want to do prop hunts and duelling things and all of these different potential pieces of stuff.”
But though there are many ideas, both from inside Blizzard and from the community, there is “a fairly hard line” drawn regarding things that can potentially increase a character’s power. “You should never feel that, ‘I have to go engage in a housing loop because if I don’t, I can’t attune to a raid, or I won’t have a three percent DPS boost or whatever,'” said Kurlancheek. “So that sort of practical stuff is really not on the table.”
Reactions to player housing from the alpha already seem very favourable, although there is some concern about the new Hearthsteel currency Blizzard is introducing to World of Warcraft to buy cosmetics related to it. This is the first real-money currency added to the game in 20 years, and while Blizzard assures us it’ll only be used for housing specifically, and that the majority of house items you won’t be able to buy that way, there’s worry that these standards will gradually erode over time.
