WoW Factor: Home is where the heart is, even in World of Warcraft

It has been a curious sensation these last few months, looking at World of Warcraft: The War Within and not wanting to play. That might not sound weird, but… it really was.

Part of me had considered writing a column about it, but honestly, what was there to say? Twenty years is a long time to play anything. A game that I loved was finally taking half-steps in a direction I found appealing, sure, but it was also a game that had the memories of lost friendships, a demolished marriage, and so much pain in the margins. I looked and I just… didn’t want to come back. It wasn’t really Blizzard’s fault entirely, but between the failings the design team has embraced and personal things, I was looking at the expansion and just finding myself feeling done. And that killed me a bit, but… sometimes you’re done.

And then this week, a 45-second trailer dropped confirming housing for WoW, and I sent MOP’s Bree a series of texts specifically blaming her for making that happen just to manipulate me even though that didn’t even pretend to make logical sense so we could share a laugh over it. It’s like being Michael Corleone over here.

So let’s talk about housing in WoW because I have my own thoughts about it. Starting with the obvious question… why now? Why is this finally happening? I know: The obvious thing to note is that the best time to add housing would have been at launch and the second best time is right now. But let’s not be snarky. Why is this finally happening?

The joke here is that it’s because Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV demonstrably live rent-free in the heads of the WoW design team at this point, and now both of those games have housing, and there’s some deep-seated need in Blizzard to not let either of those games somehow lap WoW. This is definitely somewhat true – and also deeply funny, let’s not mince words. It is very funny to think of this like the WoW team dropping “The Heart Part 6” after “Not Like Us” came out.

But I think there’s another more important factor to consider that has a far bigger impact because housing is the clearest manifestation of something that has been an undercurrent for a while but is now undeniable: WoW is trying to market to the people who didn’t leave because they were done.

While MMORPGs are living games much of the time, every single one of them will eventually get to the point that it has players who are, well… done. There’s just not much more for you to do any more. You get to a level where you have cleared all of the content that interests you, acquired all the gear you care to, earned all the reputation that matters to you, and so forth. (Or you reach the point when acquiring more isn’t worth the stress, same difference.) And that’s pretty normal.

This is the point when you stop playing much. Oh, sure, you can make alts and probably stretch it out a bit if you want to, but the point is that you are done, and the developers know it. And this isn’t even a problem state for many MMOs. You’re done with WoW right now? That’s honestly fine; we’ll be releasing an expansion in a few months, and you’ll come back for that. Simple as.

But as we discussed with the Mystery Line and the whole player feedback thing, Blizzard definitely hit a point when that wasn’t the case. People were leaving and not coming back.

There was a long-running shell game that Blizzard played for years where subscriber numbers weren’t really rising but revenues were fine, so the studio just stopped sharing numbers beyond aggregated “monthly active users.” That gave the impression that WoW was fine for years, but eventually that shell game collapsed too. The boat was listing to one side. Blizzard couldn’t hide that forever. Shadowlands was a wake-up call that the game had, in fact, hit a critical mass when it could not just get the people back by adding new content. Fundamental things needed to change.

Housing is really the last, biggest trigger to pull here. It’s something that the developers have long avoided doing because… well, they didn’t want to. They’ve said it over and over. It’s not and has never been impossible to add, nor were Garrisons “proof” that it wouldn’t work in the game any more than someone declining to eat a raw hot dog you left on the sidewalk “proof” that the person in question isn’t really hungry. But if you want to court players who are leaving, this is the most obvious big feature to pull out.

Which is why I specifically opened by saying that I thought I was done until I saw this and… well, maybe I’m not. I mean, it didn’t make me rush into the game post-haste; after all, housing is a next-expansion feature, so it’s not releasing in three months or something, but it is finally actually happening. That’s a big deal! It’s the kind of big deal that gets people talking about your game and leads to plenty of speculation, even though in and of itself the teaser says nothing beyond “housing is happening.”

So what will the mechanics of housing look like? It is way too early for that, and yes, I say that having done a speculative exercise on how the game could do housing while keeping its current design philosophy. For the record, I don’t think that’s how housing will look; the point was “develop housing that works within the game’s current philosophy” more than anything. I have a feeling that what the team is actually going for will be at least marginally better than that.

But even though it’s far too early, I am going to speculate a little. For one thing, I fully expect housing to be instanced, and I expect there will be multiple locations you can pick for your house; between the promised locations for Midnight as an expansion and prior experience, I don’t think the developers are keen to re-make old mistakes. Indeed, having a home as an anchor of stability would make a certain degree of sense for the next expansion, a greater focus in Azeroth.

I also don’t think that player housing is going to replace the major cities, but I think there will be a quick means of travel between the two; that may mean that housing is limited to capitals of each faction, but I tend to think it means that you’ll be limited to placing your home in territories controlled by the Alliance or the Horde. I also suspect that having both factional welcome mats imply more blurring of factional lines to come along with housing, that perhaps this can be a step toward greater integration.

And I do think that this is going to be the major “new” feature of Midnight but that other features from The War Within will carry forward. That just seems clear to me.

Either way, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover between now and then. But I am curious to see where we go from here and how the developers manage expectations over the next couple of years – during which I would expect to see more trickle out steadily about housing. This is a major change for the game, but it’s a positive one, and it’s perhaps the clearest sign that the team is learning some lessons about the state of the game. Sure, the best time to include this would have been at launch… but the second best time is now. Or in a year or two, that works too.