World of Warcraft has been the biggest of big boy MMOs for most of its lifespan. But one thing always staggered me about it: despite being out for over 20 years, WoW has never taken an honest stab at player housing. Of course, there were garrisons, mind—but while games like FF14 and The Elder Scrolls: Online have had entire communities sprout up around their customisable homesteads, WoW has abstained. Until now.
As revealed at the tail-end of the Warcraft 30th anniversary stream, Ion Hazzikostas casually notes that the team "does have one more thing to share with you". Fade to black. Cue a warrior opening the door like me after a drunken night out and staggering, world-weary, into his chair by a fireplace, only to plonk down a mug that says "home sweet home".
This has been confirmed, in an interview with PC Gamer's Tyler Colp, to be player housing: "It is, in fact, what it appeared to be—player housing is officially coming to World of Warcraft", alas, as the big logo slapped over the end of the trailer says, "in the Midnight expansion."
Midnight is the second of the trio of WoW expansions that were announced in November last year, and The War Within is still in its infancy. Essentially, you can expect to wait 1-2 years before you can decorate your own digs.
It's genuinely a very early announcement, given the timescale, though Hazzikostas states that the long wait is on purpose given how important this feature is to many players: "We want to give players a little sneak preview of some of what the team is cooking. This also gives us a chance, I think, to have more open conversations about it that aren't possible when it's a top secret feature."
Those hoped-for conversations include "hearing what people are excited about, what they expect, [and] what they'd like to see from housing and World of Warcraft", in hopes that it'll "help guide the team's development efforts over the months ahead."
As Hazzikostas puts it: "It's an idea that's been kicked around for a long time—but we knew that to do it, we needed to be able to do it right. It's a tremendously large undertaking. We've also been able to develop enough underlying technology that supports the system that we can now see a clear path to delivering this to players."
This includes "seemingly innocuous" tech, like how Delves seamlessly plonk you in a private instance without a loading screen. These new innovations "bring us extra steps closer to making housing a reality … there's elements of garrisons, elements of island expeditions, there's pieces of that that built up the tech that made delves possible, the tech that will make housing possible."
The real kicker, I think, will be whether or not Blizzard is able to give players the kind of freeform furniture building, placement, and rotation we've seen in other MMOs. As someone who's always been fascinated by the marvels players can put together, that's the kind of stuff that'll make a system like this sing. Regardless, Hazzikostas "can't wait to fully back the curtain" when Midnight approaches.
