Jan 18
WoW Player Housing
Have I ever mentioned how much I like MTV’s games coverage? Stephen Totilo is doing a bangup job over there. Now if only it weren’t trapped in that awful flash thing.
Anyway, Totilo has a sit-down with Jeff Kaplan up on the site right now, and it’s good stuff. The part that made me jump up and down in my seat is, specifically, this:
“Another small but potentially profound concept for ‘WoW’ is player-generated housing. Gamers don’t have a room of their own for their characters to live and decorate right now. This matters to Kaplan, who is a big fan of ‘Animal Crossing,’ the Nintendo franchise centered around cultivating a home and sense of unique, personal space. ‘I think housing can take World of Warcraft to the next level,’ Kaplan said. ‘I want to make sure that when we introduce player housing to World of Warcraft we do it right and give the feature the credit that it deserves, which is a massive amount of production time on the programming, design and art time. It’s something we actually wanted to do for the original shipping game.’ But it’s not coming, he said, until it’s a “Blizzard-quality feature.”
You’ll note he doesn’t say ‘if’, but ‘when we introduce player housing’. I was starting to worry. Thanks Blizz! You have made one guy, at least, really happy with this announcement.
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Nice find, that would be very nice. Housing is one of those things I have always found enjoyable - I hope it happens.
/agree Ethic
Nice find!
I don’t think anyone would be surprised if housing came to WoW. It’s on the short list for broadening the mid- and endgame for any MMO, particularly the linear ones.
As long as they do it in their own instances, it’ll be fine. I know people have fears of houses on Hyjal, but the days of players building wherever they feel like ended with UO’s first expansion :)
Well … not quite ended. SWG? :)
WoW housing is almost certainly going to be instanced. To my knowlege, they have never said what the gated-up blue swirly in Stormwind is for, and I can only assume there are similar hidden troves in the other major cities.
I hope, no I pray that you can choose any aligned faction city. My NEs always make the run to GS to level. I would HATE being stuck in elf land.
[...] Housing - This one, at least, we know for sure is coming at some point in the future. Jeff Kaplan admitted as much: it’s not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ Player Housing makes it into the game. (It’s semi-been there since launch; go look for the gated-off instance portal in Stormwind some time.) The reason it’s not out yet is, again, the extremely high level of quality Blizzard demands from its products. They want housing to be amazing and fun before they’ll release it. Given the release of jewelcutting with the BC expansion, it’s possible we could see a new crafting skill to deal entirely with housing items. At the very least, we’re sure to see the ability to take trophies from momentous kills, and perhaps the chance to show off our impressive loot in our homes. What will be interesting to see is whether WoW can elevate housing from a simple pleasant distraction to something with impact on your game experience. [...]
Very interesting news.
Player housing is definitavely the thing that could make me go back to WoW if nothing better comes in the meantime. Until then I will stick with EVE :)
Wow, this was some new hope for me. I’ve recently been looking into past ideas Blizzard have expressed interest in, and the idea of player housing really hooked me in, particulary as I enjoy playing on RP servers. From what I’ve read so far, it appeared as if they idea had been totally dropped.
But seeing as this is a more recent find, it looks promising!