One of the things I noted in my initial reactions to the World of Warcraft: Dragonflight announcement was that I had not expected to get an announcement of player housing, and of course we didn’t get it. To me, this just seemed like something obvious. Blizzard was not going to do that much of a philosophical change that quickly. This did not disappoint me in the specific because I had not actually expected it, even though the fact of the matter is that this is a feature the game should have had ages ago.
In and of itself, this would not prompt a column because… well, the non-announcement that we’re not getting something I didn’t expect to get in the first place is not particularly noteworthy. But it seems that Ion Hazzikostas decided to open up about adding player housing, in the process giving us a truly terrible glimpse of the team’s process in a quote, and now we’re going to have to talk about it. So, y’know, way to draw more scrutiny to failings! That’s some real good thinking there.
All right. So here’s that quote:
Player housing is topic that comes up a ton around the team. Tons of support for it across the community and within the team, it’s something many of us would love ourselves. Putting together any of the package of features for an expansion, it’s a mix of what thematically suits the expansion, what’s going to appeal to different types of players, but also what would be required to deliver that feature at the level that players expect and deserve, and what would we have to give up to make that happen… and player housing is a big one. It’s a big project, a big undertaking, and I would argue that if we were to do it, it would probably have to span multiple expansions – it’s a large enough feature just from the art.
Now, I have a pretty universal approach to quotes from director Hazzikostas, and that’s a simple and understandable one: I take the man at his word. While I frequently disagree with his decisions for many, many clearly illustrated reasons and don’t think he’s someone who should be directing the game, I also do not think he is someone who speaks impulsively or imprecisely. His track record does not mark him as a liar or someone prone to ambiguous or vague statements. When he says something about the game, it is what he means to say, no more and no less.
So while I do understand why some people might think that he’s being disingenuous, I am choosing specifically to believe what he says. I will happily take him at his word that housing is a big feature that would have to span multiple expansions and would take a lot of design resources and work from the art team.
Here’s the thing, though: That’s why you start now, my dude.
Like, seriously, this is not a defense for not including housing in Dragonflight; this is an admission of failure in planning. I don’t believe that there are any false statements included in this statement, but if you’re holding that up as “here’s why we didn’t include it” what you’re actually doing is admitting that your forward planning is shit.
Housing will take a lot of time, yes. It will take work and effort to realize the art assets that people want, for starters. It’s quite possible that housing will require multiple expansions to get all the various racial structures players would expect in place, not to mention all of the possible furnishings and such. All of that is totally understandable.
But then why wouldn’t you start now? Seriously, are you expecting to have fewer races that need specific housing styles after the next expansion? Are we getting less stuff? Will the next expansion remove some zones? If you don’t start on this project now, what exactly is starting on the next expansion going to make any easier or more conducive to this particular feature? Even taken 100% at face value, this comment is actually arguing for the exact opposite of what it seems to be defending.
For that matter, even if you buy the explanation, housing is never done. People will always want new furnishings, new options, new decorations, and so forth. It’s like any other element of the game. What, do you expect to announce that gear modeling is done for good after this expansion and players neither need nor want another set of appearances? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure that’s not going to be the case.
I would be willing to bet real money that if the team announced “housing is coming to WoW, but to start with you only get a couple of racial house style options,” basically no one would be all that miffed about the restrictions. So long as you believed that it would eventually encompass more styles, no one is going to be all that sad if at the start your Draenei can choose only between Human, Kul Tiran, or Dwarven architecture. Has to start somewhere, right? This is a logical starting point with more coming, and it’s how housing in most MMOs has traditionally happened.
Whether or not people actually believe that customization options will continue being expanded and improved is an entirely different discussion.
A lot of people, of course, take this statement as a weak deflection from the real reason that housing is not included, which comes down to a belief that Hazzikostas does not see the value in housing as a feature and does not wish to implement it in the game. My point here is not to say that this reading is wrong or even being made in bad faith; it’s that even if you take the statement entirely at face value, it still isn’t a defense of the decision. It’s an admission of poor strategy and long-term planning.
You can, in many ways, argue that there are very real pressures on the WoW development team when it comes to housing. Any housing system is going to have to deal with a lot of backlog in terms of decoration and expected art styles, as noted; it’s also going to have to find a way to make up, in whole or in part, for not being in the game for so long. I do not hold these statements as being untrue or deceptive. It is totally valid to say, for example, that the team doesn’t know how to do justice to housing after years of demand.
But that’s the thing. You know what design is never going to do justice to housing? Not even bothering to try. No matter how much pressure there is on the team to deliver, you have a 0% chance of success if you never even start allocating the time and resources to make this a thing.
Put it another way: The more explanations like this are trotted out, the more bad-faith they look. When you can easily point to the defenses and poke holes in them, it makes it much clearer that the actual answer is the one alluded to before. The developers just don’t want to do it. It’s not really a question of what needs to be sacrificed or what the technical or cultural challenges might be; the people signing off on decisions don’t see the value and thus have no interest in bothering to try. If they wanted to do it, they’d already have started.
I’m writing this column right after we’ve gotten an absolutely savage report about the financial state of Blizzard in general, showing that the company’s general policies and decisions have resulted in another year-over-year decrease of 5,000,000 monthly active users across its games, including WoW. And I’m looking at this quote, at something that claims that doing this long-requested and much-desired feature would take a lot of time and effort. And I just find myself thinking, not even for the first time… why?
Your current approach is not working. Your current plans for content and your current understanding of what players want does not seem to match reality. It feels to me, at least, like you would say “let’s do this feature our players say they want, even if it’s going to be incomplete at the start, because our current way of doing things isn’t working out.”
Of course it’s going to take a while. That’s why you start now.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with a decade of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre each week for a new installment of WoW Factor as he examines the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
