Editor’s note: This column was originally published in August 2024, a full three months before we knew WoW is actually getting housing with the Midnight expansion. Enjoy!
Since the launch of World of Warcraft, players have been waiting for and longing to have housing. It still has not happened. The reasons given range from being adjacent to plausible to just feeling outright silly, but the details don’t particularly matter in context; what matters is that we’re still sitting here without housing in the game, and some of the people who have long labored deep within the fanboy mines get deeply offended at the idea that maybe, just maybe, this game produced by an enormous company can afford the resources to add in a feature that exists in so many other MMORPGs.
Now, to be clear, there is not some secret formula that must be followed in order to make housing work within the game. You can literally just add housing and it’ll be good. But I do think that when dealing with an intractable leadership and fans that are all too willing to apologize away the lack of movement that you have to do something to demonstrate that this isn’t just a nice thing but something that actually improves the game as a whole. So let’s lay out a plan in this edition of Design Mockument.
The first thing that I think is important to note is that my goal here is perhaps a subtle one: Do not try to change the base game in an appreciable fashion. In other words, WoW is not a crafting game or even a heavy open-world game; it’s a game of specific zone events in patches along with dungeons and raids and instanced PvP. That is what the game is about, and I am not going to try to change that with, say, a big new crafting profession or anything of the sort.
So let’s start with a basic premise. Housing in WoW is built as a way to show off your achievements and display the things that you have unlocked and accomplished. The primary mechanism for doing this is via achievements. In order to unlock housing, you have to start by reaching max level and becoming Exalted with all of your faction’s “base” reputations. In other words, it won’t be hard to accomplish for veteran players, but new characters will take some doing.
Rather than having a specific housing district, players can unlock the aesthetics of a given zone by clearing the story quests in that zone. If you have that achievement, you can make your personal housing island look like that region. However, that doesn’t allow you to necessarily give you the ability to unlock any buildings; at first you can only place a small house akin to the generic human or orc style on your plot.
In order to gain decorations, there are two options. The first is by raid or dungeon achievements. Clear a couple of dungeons and you can place basic chairs and dressers and the like; clear some Pandaren areas and you might be able to place appropriate decor for those maps, and so forth. The doodads and such for housing already exist as parts of the game code, so no new assets need to be created. These allow for the most basic appearance items, structures, and the like.
However, these can also be achieved as drops from specific dungeons. The drops in question are particularly zone-themed, so if you’re doing dungeons in The Burning Crusade areas, you’ll get decor items from that expansion. And while these items can drop at any time, they’re more common by at least an order of magnitude when done during Timewalking events. They’re still random drops, however, encouraging you to run these events more often.
You can also unlock larger buildings and dwellings through achievements earned by filling out the Great Vault. If you want a really big house, you’ll need to routinely get a full line unlocked; the more often you do so, the faster you unlock bigger houses. You can also earn terrain modifications through a similar means, as well as via PvP achievements.
Placement is handled in an open space and most items can be placed anywhere there’s floor, although not all items can be stacked on top of one another. In addition, you can unlock mannequins or NPCs that you can dress up with the appearances your Warband has unlocked, just like transmogs of your own items.
So far all of this is fairly robust, but it doesn’t actually provide any sort of reward. It’s a good foundation for making functional housing, but it is also a pure vanity thing. And the important element to be mindful of here is that the functionality of Garrisons wasn’t actually a good thing; letting players have an herb garden, for example, just made Herbalism less worthwhile for everyone. But you still need a reason for players to engage… and that’s where the other facilities you can build on your housing island come into play.
Each island can have three non-house facilities on it. These facilities offer you a buff, and they can be improved and refined over time through a combination of currency and achievements. However, the currency to upgrade them comes from dungeons, raids, or PvP primarily, and they do decay over time; you’re thus encouraged to keep running this content and accumulating more. If you regularly do these things, you shouldn’t run out, but if you avoid them, then your island is likely to decay.
These buffs do not offer direct strength buffs, but they do offer you benefits for your gameplay. For example, you could have a farm that does not directly produce herbs over time, but as you gather herbs, it does produce extra herbs to encourage you to stop back in. Another facility might slow the durability you lose on your gear over time, another passively improves your reputation gains. All of these buffs require you to do the thing you otherwise were working on; you can’t gain more reputation by just having the facility, but reputation will increase if you’re working on it otherwise.
You can also periodically get visitors to your island in the form of NPCs as well as other PCs, and visiting the houses of others generates some rewards at your house and rewards for the house you visit. The rewards are diminished if you keep visiting the same house repeatedly, though, so you’re given reason to check out new houses and see new people.
None of this is a perfect system, of course; there are plenty of dials and numbers that would need to be tweaked. The idea should always be that there is reason to visit new houses and say hello to your neighbors, as it were, but it’s also possible to gamify it too far. And a fine hand would need to be taken to make sure that the housing both feels optional but still like rewarding content. This is a first draft, not a final one.
Rather, the point is that this sort of system simultaneously gives housing gameplay benefits and reasons to exist and also provides the sort of freedom players have long wanted… and it does all that without fundamentally changing the style of game that is already in place. It may still be a first draft, but as a proof of concept, it sounds fun to me. And that was always really the goal, yes?
Designing an MMO is hard. But writing about some top level ideas for designing one? That’s… also remarkably hard. But sometimes it’s fun to do just the same. Join Eliot Lefebvre in Design Mockumentas he brainstorms elevator pitches for MMO sequels, spinoffs, and the like for games that haven’t yet happened and most likely never will!
