To the surprise of basically no one who is at least passingly familiar with me over the past several years, I am indeed still on my World of Warcraft housing kick. This despite the fact that we all know full well that it’s going to not be until the next expansion that we’ll get it, and this expansion alone only just released. But it’s still on my mind because of course it is, and that also means I have certain hopes because of course I do. There are things I do, in fact, want from this system.
Now, I hasten to stress that none of these constitute predictions at this time because how could they? We still know virtually nothing about the system beyond the twin facts that it’s going to exist (nice) and that it’s not going to be Garrisons all over again (also nice but also rather implied). So at this point I’m still largely just making a series of educated wishes. Which is kind of all I do these days anyway. Onward!
Outdoor decor
The easiest way to set up housing is to just have a building with an entrance portal and you go inside and whee, you’re in a personal instance you can decorate to your heart’s content. (This is “easiest” from a “what disrupts the world layout the least” standpoint; I am not sure if that would be easier or harder from a coding standpoint.) That would be acceptable, but it’s also not something I’d like to see. I would hope that at a bare minimum we get some outside space to decorate with plants, furniture, and the like.
Now, to be clear, this housing is going to be instanced or phased in some way rather than being purely open-world; we haven’t been told this yet, but I feel very confident asserting this because I have more than passing familiarity with how Blizzard operates and has operated over the past two decades. That’s fine. I don’t expect people to walk down the Stormwind Housing District and coo at the various houses set up. Rather, my point here is that housing as a mechanism for player expression extends to the exterior as well as the interior. I hope this delivers on that.
And if it is set up with phasing and you can see your friends’ houses if you don’t have a house in that location, that’d be neat too. But I’m not making that a dealbreaker.
Choices about where to set up
Let’s be clear here: If you have a “choice” insofar as Horde players get houses in Durotar and Alliance players get houses in Elwynn, this hope has officially not been realized. That’s not enough. We’re talking about being able to pick between different zones and being able to choose where you want your house to be located.
That does not mean that every single zone should be a viable spot for housing. While that would be nice for various characters, I do not exactly see it as a failure of design if, say, Silithus is not a place where you can build your personal house. Or Bastion. Or… you get the idea. There are zones that make sense as “no housing” locations. But every single faction has a few zones with capital cities, for starters, even if you exclude the Undercity and Teldrassil at the moment. There are more places that should be eligible.
It would also make sense and be wholly acceptable if there are only a couple zones to choose between at launch and several more locations that are meant to be patched in later. So long as we have some mechanism of moving houses to there? All good.
Not tied to existing crafting
WoW’s crafting system is a weird legacy mess that the designers keep trying to fix and then wind up making worse over and over, but that’s actually not why I hope that the system is not tied to existing crafting. No, in this case it’s simply because trying to balance things to make every craft useful in different ways also results in an unpleasant situation wherein most people do not have their crafting professions because of character decisions; it’s because this is the craft that is either most advantageous to them or just the one that their regular group needs.
Your Warlock is probably not a Blacksmith even if that would make logical sense for him, in other words. And trying to retrofit furniture into that choice? Oh, that’s going to just get messy.
That’s not to say that we must not allow any kind of crafting influence whatsoever, but it shouldn’t be the main focus on how you get furniture. If Inscription is The Furniture Crafter, then people (including me) are not going to be happy about that – and bear in mind I actually have a main who focuses on Inscription for some benighted reason.
If we do get a wholly new crafting profession for furniture akin to how Archaeology was conceived of, that’d be peachy. I’d have little problem with that. But it shouldn’t force people to choose between what they need for their characters and what allows them to decorate.
Not just a gold sink
Gold sinks in WoW are hardly uncommon at this point, but that’s not why I don’t want furnishing your house or even just acquiring it to be a gold sink. No, it’s because gold sinks in WoW feel gross now and have done since the introduction of the WoW Token. I don’t exactly have a deep-seated aversion to the existence of the token itself, though I understand why people do, but I definitely think that introducing a new thing that costs a lot of gold requires filtering through the lens of allowing players to just bypass that cost by paying money.
In and of itself, this is hardly fatal. Paying gold up-front is the obvious way to start in on having your house, after all. But there’s a difference between a gold cost and a gold sink, and making housing into a way to extract excess gold from the economy is… yeah, it’s not great as a concept. Especially when it’s been clear recently that Blizzard is uncomfortably eager to throw things like that into the game. If you need to buy your way into having actual decor options, it’s sub-par.
The obvious question is that if furnishing isn’t primarily gated by crafting or by outlandish gold costs, how will it be gated at all? To which my response would first be, “Well, Blizzard, you’re the studio that designed your game to shut both of those avenues off without being uncomfortable; that’s your own stupid fault.” My second response, though, would be to point out that allowing players to buy or earn unlocks for furniture packs that could then be endlessly used would give players a new goal to work toward, new rewards to farm, and perhaps most crucially wouldn’t require a raw gold output to be useful. Isn’t it fun when that works out?
Of course, just having reasonable minor-but-cumulative gold costs would also work just fine for normal stuff. We’ll have to see how the design shakes out.
War never changes, but World of Warcraft does, with almost two decades of history and a huge footprint in the MMORPG industry. Join Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti for new installments of WoW Factor as they examine the enormous MMO, how it interacts with the larger world of online gaming, and what’s new in the worlds of Azeroth and Draenor.
