player housing will finally make its way into World of Warcraft.
Following the footsteps of other MMOs such as Final Fantasy XIV, Wildstar, Lost Ark, and The Elder Scrolls Online, player housing will finally be carving its own place in the nearly 20-year-old mainstay MMO. While the trailer itself was quite short, speculation on WoW's implementation of housing is already underway. While Blizzard's tease of the feature didn't provide much information, player housing, regardless of how it finds its way into WoW, will certainly change the game forever.
Player Housing Fixes A Long-Standing World Of Warcraft Issue
Characters Will Finally Have A Permanent Place To Call Home
WoW characters, since its original release, have been house-less. In classic WoW, when our characters were humble adventurers, and travel was a more arduous process, the inns dotted across the map made sense. Rest itself was an incentive to log off in taverns, giving players bonus experience gains while outside the game, and creating logical places for gathering and interaction. Players even receive hearthstones, items to return to an inn of their choosing. There's a reason Goldshire is still perhaps the most popular locale in World of Warcraft.
Our characters have come a long way since then. No longer simple adventurers, they exist at the forefront of each world-altering threat. Yet, even while moving across continents every expansion, and constantly conversing with faction leaders, our characters are still logging off at inns. Housing, as the name implies, would finally grace our characters with a piece of land they can call their own, that, regardless of which continent the next threat appears on, we can return to.
How Player Housing Has Worked In Other MMOs
MMOs Have Experimented With A Diverse Range Of Housing Systems
Other MMOs quickly saw the logic in giving players, in a "massive" world, the ability to own and customize a home, but the exact use of these homes differs from game to game. Lost Ark's Strongholds, for instance, offer lucrative gameplay incentives. ESO allows players to travel to their pre-positioned homes, which can be used as a convenient time-saver. Others, like Wildstar's much lauded system, offered endless customization which could spur awe-inspiring creativity.
FFXIV: How Ishgard Empyreum Housing District & The Lottery System Work
Along with the rollout of the lottery and Ishgard Empyreum housing district, a couple more alterations will be made to the housing system in FFXIV.
FFXIV, an MMO steadily staying at the forefront of its genre, has quite a unique system as well. There, players can purchase vacant plots in hand-crafted neighborhoods. These spaces offer areas purely for social interaction, and the houses themselves can be turned into social spaces of their own, such as player run cafés or casinos. Free Companies, FFXIV's version of guilds, could even obtain houses, allowing its to purchase instanced apartments accessible via the main house. These features encourage dynamic social interaction, and are a focal point of the broader RP community.
What Future Player Housing In WoW Could Look Like
Based on the diversity of housing systems in other MMOs, there are quite a few options here. Based on WoW's current trend of making content more optional, I imagine that player housing will not come with any obvious gameplay bonuses. Forcing players to engage with such a system would be sure to generate disdain at its inclusion as a whole, such as with Shadowland's infamous Torghast.
Another recent trend in WoW, as seen in the 11.2 announcement, is the ability to customize mounts. Many of these customizations could be dropped via end-game content, such as raid bosses, and could feasibly be re-tooled as a means to acquire furniture or trophies as a fun reward to showcase player achievements. With The War Within's Warband system, too, it's easy to see our characters potentially sharing houses, or at the very least making customization options wide.
What WoW Can Learn From Their Previous Attempt at Housing
Garrisons Were Poorly Implemented
Notoriously, WoW has already grappled with a housing system of sorts, the garrison from Warlords of Draenor. Garrisons functioned as the players' main hub for most of the expansion, with progression and customization available within. Among the many issues with garrisons, one feels most relevant: they made the world, the massively multiplayer component, feel smaller. Players stayed within their garrisons, leaving the new zones, and the world in general, feeling emptier. Ashran, the expansion's featured city, was often a ghost town.
During their initial announcement, garrisons were said to be able to be placed anywhere on the map. This was later changed to two faction-specific locations, but shows that the idea of utilizing the world was a fantasy Blizzard wanted to fulfill. WoW expansions, typically being on a newfound continent, reduce the grand sandbox of Azeroth. With Midnight and The Last Titan both promising returns to familiar locations, it would be a perfect opportunity for players to have freedom of choice in their house's location and to re-utilize the zones that have been left forgotten.
Player Housing Needs To Be Implemented With Care
Player Interaction Is Already Declining
Player housing, in its ideal form, should be a way for players to both express their creativity, and be a new avenue of player interaction. With each expansion, WoW's player interaction, for better or worse, has continuously decreased. Party finder has reduced the need for communication, flying mounts have left the roads barren, and the internet can answer any question a player may have. Mankrik's wife can be found with a quick search. Preserving the interactions still present is essential, but housing also presents the opportunity to revive this lost identity.
Like garrisons, player housing can further restrict the world with yet another layer of instancing and distance. World of Warcraft needs to avoid this at all costs. If not, the long-term outcome of the system may turn into something talked about as another peg in the long list of systems that detract from the world. Houses should not restrict the world, they need to expand it, to add life to it. Players should be given the opportunity to mark the world in which so many have sunk hundreds of hours into, to have a piece of it that they can call their own.
Source: World of Warcraft/YouTube
World of Warcraft
- Released
- November 23, 2004
- ESRB
- T for Teen: Blood and Gore, Crude Humor, Mild Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol, Violence (online interactions not rated)
- Developer(s)
- Blizzard
- Publisher(s)
- Blizzard
- Engine
- Unreal Engine
- Multiplayer
- Online Multiplayer
- Cross-Platform Play
- pc, ps
- Cross Save
- yes
Created and published by Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft is a long-running massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) that features the lush and expanding lands of Azeroth. Released in 2004, the game has seen a multitude of DLC updates and still sees tons of players logging in each day.
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