We Tried WoW's Player Housing, And The Possibilities Already Feel Endless
Even just a few hours was enough to show the power of WoW's upcoming housing-decoration systems, which Blizzard plans on expanding for years to come
The basics of player housing seem set in stone--the actual mechanics of decorating a home, the philosophy behind all players being homeowners, and the social-driven nature of the entire endeavor--and have already been officially detailed by Blizzard in a series of blog posts dedicated to the subject. Every player who wants a house will be able to get one, and homes will be located in neighborhoods (one for each faction) where players will have persistent neighbors. Home decor will be doled out as quest rewards, from professions, and other areas of the game. Those are the major facts we already knew, but the finer details, as well as the big ideas for what the housing system could be potentially capable of in the future, all still feel a bit ethereal.
Blizzard seems well aware it hasn't thought of everything when it comes to housing. It's both a little concerning but also, in a strange way, refreshing. There is an air of possibility that comes with seeing such a game-changing feature still in its infancy. Blizzard has made clear that the version of housing that will launch as part of the Midnight expansion (or, as has been heavily implied, ahead of it) will just be a starting point. It won't launch with 20 years of assets at the beginning, nor will all the tools and functions players might like to see be there on day one.
Lead game designer Toby Ragaini says the first version of housing Blizzard is shipping will be "an initial step." The team is already planning multiple years ahead for a feature that hasn't even launched yet, he said, and the size and scope of the endeavor is definitely a little intimidating.
"It's a huge responsibility," Ragaini tells GameSpot. "Players have been asking for player housing for decades now. The belief has always been we will release it when we feel like we can do it justice. We were determined not to just simply meet players' expectations; we needed to exceed them…It's something that's going to be with the game for as long as there is WoW. We really couldn't do a half measure."
At least on the housing-decoration front, Blizzard already seems poised to exceed expectations. While much of what we experienced as part of the hands-on housing demo has already been "revealed," actually using the systems for myself, and seeing them used in the hands of a pro like Jay Hwang--a principal artist on WoW and the player housing system's lead decoration designer--completely changed my preconceived opinion on what the housing tools could be capable of.
On its surface, WoW's house-decoration system is simple. Players will have a collection of decor earned from quests, bought from vendors, or gained through other sources, that can be placed within a home. A house is capable of holding thousands and thousands of decor objects. Decor can be placed simply using the game's Basic placement mode, in which decor will attempt to snap to walls, ceilings, or floors without fuss. For finer placement, players can turn on Advanced mode, which disables decor collision and can be used for more granular positioning. Players can additionally rotate and resize decor. As Blizzard has previously revealed, a player's home on the inside can be as big or small as they want, ranging from just one room to a mansion of dozens. There are a variety of different room layouts to choose from, including pre-built staircase rooms that can be used to create a multi-story home. A top-down room layout mode makes it simple to add or delete rooms.
For the demo, Blizzard starts each player with a few pre-decorated rooms made by Hwang to help players to get an idea for what might be possible, and from there it's on each participant to explore their creativity and push the decorating tools to their limit in whatever way they see fit. As someone who is not typically into home building or decorating (both in-game or in real-life), it's a little nerve-wracking trying to be creative and cook up a cool room while curious Blizzard employees look over my shoulder, eager to see how I interact with the systems they've long been working on.
Despite not being a survival-crafting player accustomed to placing walls and adjusting objects, it isn't long before I'm putting together a magical study or a Forsaken-themed dungeon, all with relative ease. I found WoW's housing tools extremely simple to use, albeit with a few minor frustrations.
The basics are easy. Clicking and dragging decor, resizing them, and placing them in the 3D space works like you would expect it to, which is a bigger compliment than it might seem. A hotbar of housing tools at the bottom of the screen lets players easily swap between modes, whether it's decor placement or changing the color of decor with various dyes. Some basic functionality you might expect, like the ability to place an object multiple times or copy and paste it in some way, isn't currently present, resulting in a bit of menu fatigue as you need to open the menu, click an object, place it, and then rinse and repeat every single time. Despite that and my lack of virtual-home-building skills, slapping together a room still felt relatively quick, and I came away happy with the handful of rooms I was able to create in the span of a few hours.
While actually assembling rooms felt straightforward in a positive way, I did fairly quickly begin to find the list of decor I could use lacking. All of the basics are there: various chairs, rugs, lamps, beds, and tables. Many of the decor items are themed around various WoW races like Humans, Blood Elves, Night Elves, Tauren, and others. Hwang says it's a priority for the team to let players decorate their homes according to various race and class fantasies, and so Blizzard focused on providing those kinds of decorating assets first, though there are a few oddball items, like two different guillotines, as well. Overall, the number of decor items on offer is serviceable, but still feels like there are too few objects to satisfy those truly looking to create their Azerothian dream hom54e.
That was, until I started paying more attention to the Advanced mode, thanks in part to a live demo Hwang gives that shows off the decorating tool's full power. Because using Advanced mode eliminates object collision and ignores the standard object-snapping rules, it can be used to essentially make entirely new objects out of existing ones. Suddenly, a bookshelf floating in the middle of a wall can become a kitchen cabinet. A fence angled in mid-air in a particular way can become a stair railing. A container, moved halfway under the floor and combined with a small pillow, can become a cat bed.
It's in the Advanced decoration mode where the true genius of WoW's player-housing system is hidden. Suddenly, the possibilities seem nearly endless, even more so when combined with the ability to resize objects and to use additional walls, pillars, and other objects to transform cookie-cutter room layouts into unique ones or even turn a single room into an entire multi-room home in and of itself.
Once I started to look at objects not exactly as they were, but in terms of their individual pieces and components, it was as if an entire new realm of possibility had been unlocked. There aren't just hundreds of decor items to use--there are thousands, all of which can be used in all manner of creative ways.
Hwang says he is a fan of games where building houses is a key component, like Valheim and Minecraft, and wanted to create a decoration system with both simple and more-complex tools. As he continued to work on the decorating system and bumped into various limitations, he began to ask if it would be possible to incorporate more and more features, like Advanced mode.
"We got to where it is because we are the kind of player we are making the feature for," Hwang says.
By the end of our hands-on demo time, it's difficult not to be impressed by what everyone in attendance has accomplished. One player crafted a 3D-platforming maze. Another made an elaborate wrestling arena. Others combined decor or used the Advanced mode to craft items and rooms that I couldn't even comprehend how'd they'd done it, much less try to replicate it myself. If this is what a handful of people can create in the span of just a few hours, what will the game's playerbase of millions come up with once it's fully in their hands? With the tools Blizzard is providing, it's easy to see players creating dance clubs, taverns, casinos, sprawling apartment complexes, and everything in between. Add in the fact that the decor available at launch will be just a fraction of the total possible decor assets in the game, all of which can be manipulated in all kinds of unforeseen ways, and it's easy to be overwhelmed at the possibilities.
"Those two decades of content for WoW [are] enormously valuable right now," Ragaini says. "Suddenly, all these assets, every piece of furniture you've ever seen in the game, for example, is something that could potentially, and fairly easily, be turned into decor for the player. We're not going to hit every single one--there [are] tens of thousands of items at that scale--but we'll get there eventually. It's just a matter of prioritization."
It's clear that Blizzard has built a powerful tool--one that hands players the keys to the proverbial castle and says, "Go wild." In a game that has become increasingly on rails over the last two decades, and where many expansion-specific systems in the past have often felt restrictive and intended to be engaged with in a very specific way, the feeling of freedom found in the housing-decorating system caught me off guard. That this is the tool in what is essentially its first form, before UI improvements, added features, and thousands upon thousands more decor objects, is even more astounding.
As for when those improvements and additional decor rewards will be coming, Blizzard won't say. After all, it's not even ready to disclose when housing is officially arriving. But like many other more recent WoW features like skyriding, hero talents, or delves, Blizzard is treating housing as an ongoing evergreen feature and not a one-off expansion bullet point for Midnight. Ragaini says Blizzard already has a multi-year content roadmap for housing, but it's leaving ample room for player feedback and suggestions.
"We're going to be listening," Ragaini says. "We're going to be iterating and improving from day one. It would be premature to have this perfectly laid-out plan, because that would assume we know perfectly well how players will respond."
It's easy to imagine players spending dozens upon dozens of hours building fantastical rooms and elaborate homes once housing launches: an entire game within an already massive one. Blizzard's hope is that by giving a home to essentially every player who wants one, it will become a core pillar of the game moving forward, with housing rewards sprinkled throughout the game's various activities serving as a feedback loop for players to return to their home and see what new items they unlocked after completing dungeons or unlocking an achievement.
If, however, a player has no real interest in spending much time in their home, Blizzard says that's fine too. There will be "prefab" rooms designed to already look like specific parts of a house, such as a foyer, that players will be able to place down and quickly decorate for those who don't want to get into the nitty-gritty details of building themselves. Ultimately, Blizzard says that if a player doesn't want to engage with housing at all, they don't have to. There will be no player power associated with housing, and Blizzard seems very keen to not repeat the mistakes of Warlords of Draenor's Garrisons, where players could gather crafting materials and essentially access everything they ever needed without having to leave their own personal base. As one of the core design goals behind housing is for it to be a social experience, Blizzard wants to avoid the pitfall of having homes be a place for things like a mission table or an herb garden that would eliminate reasons to venture out into Azeroth.
If there was one landmine Blizzard seems primed to step on during the demo, it's a prominent "shop" icon located directly in the housing decoration interface. Though it isn't functioning during the hands-on, Blizzard confirms that it will, in theory, take players to WoW's in-game cash shop, where certain housing items will be available for purchase.
That raises a few alarm bells, to say the least, if for no other reason than it would be the first time a button to the in-game shop was displayed so prominently, as it's normally relegated to WoW's main menu or a small button in the right corner of the game's UI. Blizzard emphasizes that it plans to treat player-housing items for sale just as it does mounts and other cosmetics currently, and that the majority of items for housing will be earnable through gameplay. That being said, Blizzard seems open to the idea of removing the shop tab from the decorating interface, though whether or not that will actually happen by launch remains to be seen.
Blizzard, at the end of the day, seems open to a lot of things when it comes to housing, as it hones in on what the feature will look like initially but banks ideas for the future. It's poised to be the biggest evergreen addition to WoW in the game's 21-year life, but it's also one that may not reach its full potential for many years to come: a fact that Blizzard isn't shying away from. There are still plenty of unknowns, like additional details about player neighborhoods, the ability to decorate the outside of homes, and the cadence and scarcity of decor rewards. Those are all things Blizzard isn't ready to talk about just yet, and any one of them, if not done correctly, could potentially derail one of the most important features in WoW history. Even still, this early version of the housing-decoration system, and the creativity it is likely to unleash, feels special. It may have taken over two decades to become a reality, but if Blizzard can stick the landing, WoW's player housing system could be worth the wait.
This story originally appeared on: GameSpot - Author:UK GAG
