Player housing has just dropped in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, allowing fans to build their gorgeous fantasy homes in the decades-old MMORPG.
However, there’s always a worry that a feature added in World of Warcraft may be left behind as future updates see a change in focus. WoW has frequently dropped features then abandoned them, but the team is adamant that player housing is here to stay.
Following the launch of the new mechanic, housing lead and principal game designer Jesse Kurlancheek explained that the new feature is a key focus for the MMO team with significant plans already in place for its future.
“I will reassure you as much as possible that that is the case,” Kurlancheek promised 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.”
The developer explained that every player could give a different answer regarding what they want out of player housing, but that makes updates more freeing than other features. With this in mind, there will always be something to add, overhaul or fix with the new World of Warcraft feature.
“It’s such a wide, open field that you can’t really say no to a lot of stuff, and because of that, it’s really exciting to add all of these things,” the developer continued. “And you can see a through line as we talk about stuff, we want players to have this area to express themselves, to be creative, to build sort of what they want, their ideal home in Azeroth.”
Kurlancheek explained that Blizzard “have the things that we know players want”, citing more content, decor, cultural items, additional customisation options, and quality of life improvements. However, the team is also keen to improve in ways that players might not ever think about.
“Watching people have conversations about the what ifs with housing is very gratifying,” the developer continued. “Hopefully, that very long-winded answer reassures you that we’re thinking about things as not just a single feature release, that this is a very long-running thing.”
One of the key improvements coming to player housing in the future is the addition of exterior lighting for houses. In the current build, this feature has been disabled due to performance hits, but the team has been working on optimising these lights to bring additional customisation to the game.
“There’s exterior lighting we had to disable during alpha or beta, I can’t remember what, just because of the performance impacts,” Kurlancheek said. “If everybody in your sight line put 100 lights on their lawn, that was going to cause a problem. So, we had to disable those. We’re going to fix it up, get them working post-launch, post Midnight launch. Yeah, I think there’ve been a number of things that sort of people held near and dear to their hearts that we had to just not cut, but just be like, “That’s going to wait a little bit and then we’ll get to it.”
All in all, World of Warcraft player housing is here to stay, and that’s for the best. Customisation options like this are usually foundational experiences for certain types of players, and they offer a lot of value outside of daily grinding and raids.
Additionally, with plans to sell certain furniture items and decorations for real money, it would be quite silly to abandon another source of income for the MMO.
