Blizzard: WOW housing may never happen

By Robert Purchese Published 7 March, 2011

Keeps falling off to-do list.

The mighty World of Warcraft has everything - everything, that is, but player housing. And now game producer J Allen Brack has told Eurogamer that it might never happen - WOW could be without player housing forever.

"Player-housing has been on the list of something we want to do even back before the original realm box [first game release] shipped - it was a feature that didn't make that," Brack told us. "It's one of those things we talk about every expansion - what would this look like in WOW?"

"I don't necessarily think that it'll ever actually happen for WOW because the thing that we want to do is... I don't think it's sufficient enough for us in WOW to just say, 'Hey we have player housing - great.' There's got to be some reason to have that, there's got to be gameplay behind that, stuff that happens.

"So thinking about the content creation we need in order to make that successful, as well as the other content creation that we need to do just to keep the game going, makes that..." Allen trailed off. "[Player housing] has fallen off the list of things that we're willing to tackle on a per-expansion basis I guess one, two, three times now - so we'll see what happens for the next time."

Player housing refers to when you or I can buy a house, in-game, for our avatar or perhaps our guild. Ultima Online featured housing integrally, although many MMOs today prefer to instance-off player housing, keeping the main world free thousands of players' pads.

According to a leaked release schedule, Blizzard has two more expansions planned for World of Warcraft - one next year and one in 2013. The last expansion, Cataclysm, let Blizzard's now vastly more experienced team tear up and redesign the old world of Azeroth under the guise of mega-dragon Deathwing returning and treating the world as a rockstar would a hotel room.

The next World of Warcraft patch is 4.1, which Oli Welsh found out for Eurogamer would not include the Firelands raid as was previously planned. Why? The community hasn't progressed through enough Cataclysm content yet. Chop chop.

Firelands brings back boss-supremo Ragnaros, a giant fiery Elemental Lord. He'll be vastly more powerful that he was at the bottom of classic WOW raid Molten Core, where he was but a projection of his true self and spent his time prattling to lizards.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm - the sundering of Azeroth.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (23) Latest comment 8 months ago

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  • Murton #1 1 year ago

    I never understood why housing wasn't in WoW. The game is effectively a reskinned EQ2, which had player housing. If I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's likely a case of the design work and instancing just not being done, but there's been plenty of time since release to add it in.

    Not that housing matters that much, with the exception of those who actually RP in game they're generally used to store stuff that the owner doesn't want to carry around or sell anyway.

  • Yuroko #2 1 year ago

    Player housing is pointless. A guild house would be ok though. A place to meet up, guild bank, personal bank and add access to the auction house as well. I liked the guild houses in Eq1. You had a portal in there you could buy stones for to port you around the world. Great for getting everyone to the raid zone quickly.

    For you muppets with the neg hammer - I'm saying it will be pointless in WoW to have player housing. No one would use them cause then they wouldn't be able to hover 2inches above the ground on their massive mounts outside the AH in Stormwind causing muchos lag for me when I hearth to the inn there!
    Edited by Yuroko at 07/03/11 @ 16:46

  • Haloboy #3 1 year ago

    How many houses could you fit in Goldshire then? You'd have to build them in the trees!

  • Eraysor #4 1 year ago

    I don't really understand the point of housing; I wouldn't care about my own and I wouldn't want to visit anyone else's. Only reason Blizzard would ever implement it is for microtransaction revenue.

  • Murton #5 1 year ago

    "Player housing is pointless."

    Like so many things that depends on implementation, talk to someone who played SWG about player housing and they'll tell you how very wrong you are.

    EDIT
    @ Haloboy: with the exception of SWG every player owned space in every MMO i've played has been instance based. There's nothing wrong with having everyone live in about 6 buildings as long as they get a personal instance. Alternatively there's housing districts used in LOTRO where the street is an instance and your house is a permanent construct within that instance. There's plenty of ways to house the entire playerbase in a relatively small area, just requires a little creativity in the implementation of it.
    Edited by Murton at 07/03/11 @ 16:20

  • stevetuck #6 1 year ago

    Why did the gnome laugh while running through Elwynn Forest?..... Because the grass was tickling his balls!

  • login_name #7 1 year ago

    At this point, they might as well forget it.

    I love player housing (mainly due to SWG) but WoW doesn't strike me as the type of game that would benefit from its inclusion.

  • Vyggo #8 1 year ago

    I always really like the idea of player housing in mmo's, but the implementation has never grabbed me in any of them. Guess it doesn't really fit the kind of player I am.

  • Yuroko #9 1 year ago

    @Murton
    Perhaps you can enlighten me how wrong I am. You said player housing doesn't matter yourself in your original post. What did SWG do that was so right?
    Edited by Yuroko at 07/03/11 @ 16:39

  • StooMonster #10 1 year ago

    Club Penguin has housing.

  • drxym #11 1 year ago

    LOTRO has housing and I can't say I'd be very interested in it. Houses sit in their own instances and require upkeep, slots to collect various bits of crap to turn into furniture / decor, and ultimately just gives you a pretty room. A room which gets flagged as derelict if you don't make your payments.

    I think a guild house would be more appealing, especially if it could be decked out with things like crafting stations, vendors, storage slots, auctioneers etc. and be upgraded in size and design in interesting ways. And if the house existed as some physical thing people could pass by, perhaps even interact with if there was a vendor there.

    Of course this is all thinking about it in the conventional boring way of things. Player housing has been done in more interesting ways. Look at A Tale in the Desert - basically you set up wherever you like but you really need other players so it makes sense to stick close to other people and build a community where you must interact with neighbours. Or EVE where you can make a settlement anywhere but be prepared to defend it. Or granddaddy of modern MMOs, Ultima which pioneered building houses anywhere but had to address issues to like property theft, robberies, land grabs and urban sprawl which it eventually did.

    I think WOW being WOW will probably go for some lameass approach where the house is a private instance. Which would be a pity really.
    Edited by drxym at 07/03/11 @ 16:40

  • levitate #12 1 year ago

    Only MMO I've really played with player housing (I didn't play LOTRO enough) was Anarchy Online. Sure it was a cool thing to claim a city for the guild and it was fun having your own flat with some stuff there. But at the end of the day it's pretty pointless.

    Could be effective if you find things with, let's say, archeaology and then if you combine it with other things you'll have a lamp. Or something. Otherwise I'm sure Blizzard Store can provide thousands of items for the players to put into their "homes".

  • jack_klugman #13 1 year ago

    My house has housing!

  • Laserbream #14 1 year ago

    God, I remember when UO got housing. It was Brittania one moment, and in a blink of an eye it looked like sodding Milton Keynes with the odd lizardman wandering about forlornly.

  • Gaol #15 1 year ago

    Add me to the list of people who saw what fun player created cities were in SWG. WoW has gone completely the other way, with each player levelling through the same treadmill. Not that that's automatically a bad thing, but some alternative would be nice.

    Ages since we had a decent sandbox. And I don't include hours travelling through warp gates before anyone starts :p

  • butler` #16 1 year ago

    I literally can't think of anything WoW needs less.

    Instanced housing (which, realistically, it's going to have to be) is just going to further segregate the already disparate communities seen on most servers.

    Guild housing is a better idea, but suffers from the same problems. Guilds don't need any more of an excuse to bubble themselves off from the wider community.

    What they need is ways of making people interact in places that aren't instanced. You know, like in the olden days when you had world PvP - or even PvE, like Kazzak.

  • epiazk #17 1 year ago

    @butler`

    Couldn't agree more. I think the LFD tool combined with the multi-server dungeoning is the biggest of the problems though. Way back 5 years ago when I first hit 60, I spent all of my time doing almost constant strat/scholo/lbrs/ubrs etc runs. I got to know so many people that way, my "bubble" as you put it was constantly expanding. Now when I started raiding it pretty much leveled off as I was no longer doing anything other guild based stuff. But hey, they were a good replacement.

    At the minute though, I have nothing. I can literally join a fecking dungeon, hear nothing other than "stam buff plaz" from the tank, and bam off we go with not a word spoken for 30 minutes as its likely the last time any of us will see each other anyway.

    Only continued social contact in wow as of right now is the guild. Blah!

    Also, as someone who played SWG, it was utter tosh for anyone that didn't own a fucking factory. Any game where all the fun is had by god damn merchants is not for me. Also, wow preceded EQ2, and the original design team from EQ were the principle designers of the entire Vanilla content of wow, they have since left. Also, no WoW cant instance them, if you seriously think they could your brain dead, this isn't ultima with 5 people in it, Literally every section of land would be covered in housing if they offered it people. Additionally, Blizz has complained that segregating the community is a huge negative, they cities to be busy with lots of nonsense happening.

    I don't give a rats ass about housing, I just hope they do something that puts the players back in touch with one another, WoW more than any other game I've ever seen has a hugely diverse player base, socially it has the ability to hit waaayyy above it weight and id like to see something that encourages those players to communicate as much as they once did.

  • curtlikesmeat #18 1 year ago

    "What they need is ways of making people interact in places that aren't instanced. You know, like in the olden days when you had world PvP - or even PvE, like Kazzak."

    This. It needs to be not instanced. I think they're basically saying they don't want to do it unless they can come up with a really innovative way of doing it.... and I don't see how they can, short of creating a new 'uber-city', walling off that area and allowing that only for expansion. If your account goes inactive, you lose it in a month. Let players sell houses to each other etc. Offer a few prime houses in Stormwind etc. as well since there's plenty of vacant buildings there.

    And whilst you're at it, give people a reason to go to inns as well - wouldn't it be great for those areas outside the bank to just have a few people milling about, not half the server, then you go to an inn and there's music playing and it's rammed with people.

  • makeamazing #19 1 year ago

    Ultima online had housing for years. and too be honest... its a great idea... but it didnt take long that all the good spots were taken and there was no where good to build. I always wanted to build something in moonglow (the place i always played in/visited), but there was no way i would find a spot. Other games have done out of the way instanced housing in another area, and its not really a good idea as it feels to separate. If you can have instances something like a hotel complex in the main cities and towns, that would be enough for me in an mmo (not that i have time to play WOW at the moment anyway).

  • AOFanboi #20 1 year ago

    Player cities wrecked the charm of Anarchy Online - much of the landscape was flattened to accommodate them, and their sterile same-insh buildings added little to the game's look.

    But in a sense they worked in both AO and SW:G since both games had vast expanses with, well, practically nothing in them. WoW? Not so much, content all over the place.

  • butler` #21 1 year ago

    @epiazk

    amen

    paid-transfers, phasing, increasingly heavy use of instances, and creating easy, often instant, ways of accessing those instances (LFG system) - it's all fantastic on paper, great for casuals (and thus Blizzard's revenues), and most importantly its consistent and sustainable

    but at what cost?

    conversely, vanilla WoW, even with my rose-tinted glasses put to one side, had far more character and a much better sense of community, but it wasn't sustainable - it has to be appreciated for what it was in isolation, knowing that it can and will never be that 'good' again

  • Spekingur #22 1 year ago

    Best way of introducing player/guild housing in WoW would be to have instances. I'd prefer to see something akin to DAoC housing rather than LotRO housing. DAoC allowed more variations.

    If it was 'each guild has a housing instance' type of thing then you would want to make sure that people would visit, i.e. that there would be a point to the district. Thus some kind of mechanism would have to be put in that would possibly encourage other people than guild members to visit. I guess that then Blizzard would have to create some kind of an editor type of thing to allow people to configure the area as they would see fit and to set up events. Would be perfect RP guilds/servers.

  • masteryodason #23 8 months ago

    i will never understand why they dont have ingame houseing even if its a design problem just have each race have a house theme of what there race is like tauren would have native american themed where as orc houseing would be in a cave with a door or exit that u go throug and u just go back to where you were when you clicked go to home or something and have bigger other houses that u can upgrade to fore i guess gold or something the peaple at blizz are probly just trying to make it harder than it needs to be