When Blizzard last talked about World of Warcraft’s housing, it was a vague overview of the studio’s philosophies that left a lot of players with more questions than answers. As of today, we’re finally getting a more detailed look at the plan for your home in Azeroth, specifically for how interior decorating will work. Blizzard does note that everything in today’s blog post is a work-in-progress and asks players to “focus more on the functionality” for now.
It sounds as if the system will have two decorating modes:
- There’s a basic mode, which makes plopping items down and then rotating them fairly easily in simple 15-degree increments. Objects in this mode will align logically and snap to a grid (or to each other) without being lost in the walls and so forth.
- And then there’s an advanced mode, which effectively turns off the snap-to-grid limitation. There’s no collision, so you can move objects to intersect each other at weird angles and then play with rotation as well as pitch and roll (yes, all three axes). You can rescale objects to be smaller and larger too. If you have checked out Guild Wars 2’s housing system, you know it’s pretty much this.
“Internally using [the scaling tools], employees have taken bushes and made them into garland for their fireplaces, constructed a boat’s prow from a bed, or made paint buckets into small spice racks for their kitchens,” Blizzard says.
Additionally, players will be able to dye new housing assets (but not legacy assets) and customize the wallpaper, ceiling, and flooring, a la Lord of the Rings Online. And get your “it’s bigger on the inside” jokes ready because the team assures us that you can build a mansion of rooms inside what appears to be a shack on the outside.
Before you ask, no, the team doesn’t talk about exteriors beyond that, nor does it address collections in housing, how professions fit into the housing systems, or how neighborhoods work, though Blizzard mentioning all those things as “next time” topics will certainly get people chatting for the next month.
Sure, it’s all pretty basic stuff in the 27-year-old MMO world, but it’s certainly going to be new to World of Warcraft.
