For those of us who have been playing World of Warcraft for decades, Azeroth’s cities, mountains, plains, and caverns already feel like home. Soon, though, players will be able to give up the nomadic lifestyle and settle down in a place of their own. Housing is finally coming to WoW next year, giving players a permanent, fully customizable home to rest their heads between adventures.
During a recent visit to Blizzard’s Boston office,I got to go hands-on with WoW’s impressive new decor tools, which you’ll use to create your house’s floor plan, shape each room, and fill them with furniture and decorations. Afterward, I sat down with principal game designer Jesse Kurlancheek and game producer Rachel Bussone to find out more about Blizzard’s visions for neighborhoods and suburban living in World of Warcraft.
Living The Azerothian Dream
When I first heard player housing was coming to World of Warcraft, an image of me and my pets in a quiet little cabin hidden deep in the Un’Goro Crater popped into my mind. If you also have a favorite spot where you’d like to retire to in between apocalyptic events, or if, for some reason, you dream of suburban sprawl extending out from the capital cities like mold spreading across a slice of bread, you’re out of luck. All housing will be contained within two new zones, one for Horde and one for Alliance, which will have a maximum of around 50 houses each.
Housing is not limited in WoW like other MMOs. Everyone will be able to have their own house, but your neighborhood will be restricted to around 50 of your closest friends.
As Kurlancheek explains, WoW is too big to let players live anywhere. “You’ll fracture the player base,” he says. “And it would be pretty isolating.” Building a sense of community and making players feel like they’re living in a real neighborhood is an important goal for the dev team. For Kurlancheek, a big part of the appeal of player housing is the social opportunities it creates. He wants neighbors to be able to walk out their front door and wave to one another, or on the flip side, scoff when the neighbor across the street puts up tacky ornaments in their front lawn.
You will havesomefreedom about where you place your house, though. Both zones will offer a variety of biomes to live in, somewhat based on the native homes of the different races. There’s a coastline that looks similar to the Troll’s Echo Isles, while a mountainous bluff biome will look like home to Tauren players. The zones will have distinct biomes and characteristics that match the Horde and Alliance factions too. The Horde zone has elements of Durotar, Azshara, and the mesas of Mulgore, while the Alliance zone includes biomes based on Elwynn Forest, Duskwood, and Westfall.
If you have friends in other guilds, Kurlancheek says you’ll be able to visit their neighborhoods “fairly seamlessly”. You won’t have to wait for a boat and run for 20 minutes to get to your friends’ house.
Fostering Community In New Ways
What you can do in those neighborhoods hasn’t been entirely nailed down yet. Whether or not you’ll be able to access things like your vault, class trainers, or the auction house in your neighborhood is still something the team is deciding. “We’re still figuring out what’s important to keep in the capitals and what’s important to bring into the neighborhoods,” Kurlancheek explains. “From a neighborhood vibe you want coffee shops and food stands, you don’t necessarily want banks in your neighborhood.”
A lot of what players will do in their neighborhoods will be up to them. “I think we’ll try to provide some sort of activities that players can do,” Bussone says. “But for the most part, I feel like that is something that’s really organic and natural that players will tend to do.” You’re free to invite whoever you want into your house, so if a player wants to turn part of their house into a nightclub and throw a party, they’ll have all the tools they’d need to do that.
The developers anticipate that a lot of things that happen in real-life neighborhoods will seep into the game. Some people will decorate their homes for Christmas or Halloween, or even turn their homes into a walk-through haunted house experience for their neighbors to enjoy. “The ability for a community and neighborhood to self-identify and organize, to be able to throw parties and events that appeal to their populace, was really exciting as a player and a developer,” Kurlancheek says.
This kind of roleplaying is a big part of WoW, but it’s always been a niche relegated to specific roleplay servers. Kurlancheek sees neighborhoods as a framework that gives players a more approachable on-ramp to roleplay in WoW. “I think a lot of players who don’t necessarily identify as roleplayers find it interesting, but don’t necessarily know how to get started,” he says. “This offers a very light entry into it.” Creating opportunities for players to engage in social gameplay outside of the core monster-killing gameplay will expose them to a new side of WoW.
The developers know the social side of housing isn’t going to appeal to everyone, of course. Just like real life, some people aren’t all that interested in interior design or getting to know their neighbors. Kurlancheek says housing is built for players who just want a bed to sleep on and a wall to hang up a few of their favorite trophies too, if that’s all they care about. Supporting the “bachelor pad” player, as he calls it, is just as important as supporting the neighborhood block party. “If you’re a player who just wants to make some space you can feel good about, but not get too mired down fiddling with the nuts and bolts of it all, that’s something that’s definitely important [to us] when you think about the number of different types of players there are in World of Warcraft.”
