Housing Comes to WoW: Some Educated Guesses

I've been meaning to write more about the prospect of housing coming to WoW. We've had a few dev interviews that cleared up a couple of questions since the Warcraft Direct stream, but overall, we still don't know a lot, and I'm probably not the only one who's wondering about both the possibilities and potential problems. Overall I'm still excited about the prospect of housing, but I can definitely see some issues with it too.

First off, I'd like to quickly address a few things that I've seen people bring up and that I actually don't think will be problems.

Will housing be a one-expansion feature?

I can't blame anyone for being cynical about Blizzard's intentions, but the people whom I've seen express this fear usually haven't played retail in at least a couple of years and are a bit behind the times so to speak. The devs have since acknowledged that players didn't like the pattern of them constantly adding new features just to discard them two years later, they've vowed to do better, and we've seen them live up to that promise in Dragonflight and War Within so far. Everyone can have their own standards for how much it would take them to be convinced, but I've seen enough to believe them on this.

Plus, by all indications this housing thing has been in the works for at least three years, which to me indicates that this isn't something that Blizzard is taking lightly. In fact, the addition of Warbands retroactively makes additional sense now, as purely character-bound houses would've been a logistical nightmare at this point and they clearly needed to sort out how to make more things account-wide before giving us housing.

They're just going to put all the housing stuff in the cash shop!

Again, I can't blame people for being cynical, but I just don't think this assertion fits Blizzard's current MO. Housing is likely to introduce a huge number of new items into the game (or at least repurpose a lot of existing items so they can also be placed inside your house too), and considering that the WoW cash shop is relatively light on direct sale items (at least when compared to other MMO cash shops I've seen), suddenly stuffing it with microtransactions for every possible piece of furniture would seem rather out of character.

I'm not claiming that the Blizzard devs are too "good" for this either, but they simply don't need to do it that way to make money off housing. They'll just need to make it a gold sink, and since the WoW Token exists, people buying tokens to finance their new furniture addiction will generate extra income for them automatically. I mean, I could see them putting one special house in the shop for launch or something, but I think in general they'll be happy to let the extra cash roll in through WoW Token sales.

Isn't this likely to just be Garrisons 2.0?

So I think this isn't likely to happen either, mainly because Ion has outright said that they've learned their lessons from Garrisons and won't repeat the same mistakes. He's categorically stated that there'll be no player power tied to housing, and that Garrisons were never really meant to be housing anyway, just a riff on classic Warcraft base-building. The latter made me raise my eyebrows a little but I can't be bothered to go back and try to research whether it was the devs or fans who first referred to Garrisons as WoW's version of housing.

Anyway, I believe Ion when he says that housing won't be tied to player power, and just based on the short teaser trailer, I think the devs also understand that proper housing needs to allow for far more customisation than Garrisons did. However, there were other things wrong with Garrisons, and I'll concede that we'll need to wait and see whether the dev team has really learned all the lessons from Garrisons' mistakes. After all, they are very prone to over-incentivising new features in some way to make sure everyone engages with them (*cough*delves*cough*) and there are ways other than player power that could make housing feel mandatory as something to have and spend time on, for example if there's too much convenience tied to your house that you can't get elsewhere. I'm not yet convinced that the WoW devs are truly brave enough to just add housing and let it be like transmog, something that people just engage with for fun and because they enjoy looking at pretty things on their screen.

Is WoW housing going to be instanced or not?

I've been surprised to see people even ask that question. Wasn't WoW one of the pioneers of making instancing for dungeons and raid bosses commonplace? A lot of MMOs have housing, but the number of them that have non-instanced housing is comparatively small, and it pretty much always seems to cause issues. I have no doubt that WoW housing will be instanced, though how these instances will be set up exactly (e.g. whether there'll be something like neighbourhoods) remains to be seen.

How could they possibly satisfy everyone?

I think the biggest challenge that Blizzard is going to face with implementing housing at this point in WoW's life is that they've never been quite so behind the times with adding a desired new feature, which means that players have literally had several decades of building houses in other MMOs and developing expectations based on that. Not to mention that WoW itself has had decades of its own content that should all be integrated into the system somehow when it launches.

No matter how much effort the devs put into housing's launch, I think it's pretty much destined to feel lacking in some way at first, because people will want different houses and furniture in the style of every playable race, they'll want to be able to collect trophies from every dungeon and raid in the game, they'll want to display each and every one of their hundreds of mounts and pets, they'll want new professions that gather wood and craft furniture... you get the idea.

Free-form or hook-style?

One thing opinions are already split on is how placement of furniture should work. Many people will want to be able to place things completely at their own leisure to fully unleash their creativity... but to be honest I think there'll be some limitations on that. I can see the devs opting for something like the flexible hook system used by SWTOR's strongholds, mainly because like Star Wars, Warcraft is a pretty strong IP with a unique visual identity, and I don't think they'll want people posting pictures of their WoW house containing a giant dick built out of chairs, or having to deal with reports of oh so funny players painting swastikas on the floor via strategic placement of candles (and you just know that WoW players would absolutely do both of those things if left entirely to their own devices).

What else can go wrong?

Finally, and this is a point that I have to admit hadn't occurred to me until I saw someone else mention it: there are practical risks to trying to retro-fit such a giant new system into an old game on a tight schedule. I think I mentioned in a previous post that Blizzard seemingly decided recently that it's better to release content on a quick cadence and let a bunch of bugs slip through, rather than to stick to polishing things until they're as bug-free as possible and make people wait for next patch. To be clear, they'd already lost their reputation for "Blizzard polish" some time ago, but it's definitely gotten worse with The War Within.

And I've got to admit that so far, that trade-off has felt worthwhile to me personally at least, as I haven't run into any major issues myself. When I see stuff like a shaman's totems floating off into the distance during the Dawnbreaker dungeon, it just makes me laugh, but not everyone's been this lucky. The introduction of Warband banks led to some people losing the contents of their guild bank for example, to which Blizzard's ultimate response was basically "too bad, so sad". That's something that may technically be covered under their terms of service, but it's also led to some pretty unhappy customers, and I can't blame anyone for worrying what's going to come next, now that they've established a precedent for accidental data loss on a large scale being something that players just have to put up with.

All in all, I remain optimistic and interested in seeing WoW's implementation of housing, but let's just say there's a lot of room for things to go wrong and it remains to be seen whether the launch will be an unequivocal success or end up being more of a calamity.