WoW can only “save” one thing for me: Housing

WoW demon Cortyn longs for a feature in World of Warcraft. Housing. After 17 years it’s a shame that that’s still missing.

Even though I’m currently having a lot of fun with Patch 9.1.5, I increasingly notice that my guild colleagues and I are slowly running out of breath. We still have our two guild evenings a week in which we do dungeons, farm transmogs or collect achievements. But more and more often we stop doing it after an hour or two.

The current content is simply exhausted for us. It’s not basically boring, but we have achieved what we wanted to achieve and just to get the last item to 252, visiting 10 dungeons a week is simply no longer worthwhile. The perfect equip is not that important to us.

There are always conversations about what kind of little “in between” games you could play together. And that in turn led to the consideration of what World of Warcraft would have to bring so that we would want to spend hundreds of hours in a row in Azeroth again.

We talked about features that are missing. About something essential that all other major MMORPGs have these days and that is missing in World of Warcraft.

It kept coming back to one point: housing.

To be quite honest: I think it’s a shame that it doesn’t exist yet.

The fact that after almost two decades in World of Warcraft I still have no way of creating a place from which I can say “This is where my elf lives” or “This is my witch’s lair” is just embarrassing.

That after 8 expansions with numerous continents, new classes and graphic revisions on an RPG realm I still have to say: “Yes, my character lives … in this fictional house. Yes, there are NPCs in there, but let’s pretend it’s another house or just sit on the roof and play it out in our minds. ”That’s just embarrassing for World of Warcraft.

Housing cannot make the world any emptier

One argument against housing was always the concern that the players would then go to waste alone in their houses and that social interaction would practically no longer take place at all. This is a fallacy that pretty much every other major MMORPG refutes.

Housing doesn’t make the players in the community even loners.

That this is the case can be said with a very brief review of WildStar. I still remember how much fun it was to set up a tavern together in WildStar or to “hop through the neighborhood” for hours and admire what other players have built. How a Granok from the guild simply lived in a huge beer barrel, an Aurin created a small, own forest or a human created his seedy red light district, which was available for rogue RP.

It’s very similar with Final Fantas XIV. When I see videos of any nightclubs or noble villas where people meet to party, chat or just jump around – at the Nether, I’m so jealous.

Housing doesn’t make people sit alone in their house. If you do it well, the houses are little hotspots, offer space for creative play, a common place to just chat a bit or the basis for role play.

Above all, the argument that “the game world is so much emptier then” is irrelevant anyway. The game world in World of Warcraft is practically empty, apart from capitals and the latest expansion.

This is not (only) due to the decreasing number of players, but above all to the fact that in World of Warcraft there are 14 different shards per realm during the level phase. If you activate the “Chromie time” while leveling, you will get into your own shard in which only your current expansion is active. That whole exists 7 times. This number is doubled if you also activate war mode.

The huge world of World of Warcraft is already fragmented into 14 shards – plus a few more that create additional “phases” of an area depending on the progress of the quest.

Meeting another player during normal quests, that doesn’t happen outside of the Shadowlands anymore. At least not on my realm.

Housing would therefore not further separate the players from one another, but instead create new starting points. The most beautiful houses in the guild would be the new hotspots or would give guilds a communal space that further strengthens the feeling of togetherness.

WoW can housing – but unfortunately not officially

But what annoys me even more is: I know that World of Warcraft basically works. I have a few friends who play WoW on semi-legal servers, where they can create their own areas and easily access all of the game’s assets. When I see something like that, I’m always very impressed – and at the same time have to grind my teeth that WoW just doesn’t have something like that. At least not officially.

It would be so easy to implement in theory. World of Warcraft would “only” have to copy the housing 1: 1. Let the players create their own instances, which are modeled after small stretches of road from Stormwind, Orgrimmar, a piece of forest or, if you like, a demon palace.

Creates a new tab in the “Collections” window and accommodates the thousands upon thousands of assets that are in World of Warcraft.

The numerous lamps, beds, closets, plants, statues and all the other objects that are all over World of Warcraft. Distribute them as additional loot in all dungeons and raids, incorporate them into the craft trades, into archeology or as special objects in the world that have to be found first. Link it to certain successes and – if you absolutely have to – pack a few of them as premium items in the in-game shop.

I know my teammates and myself. A huge range of housing objects distributed all over the game world would completely rekindle our fire for WoW. I have a transmog fetishist in the guild who wears a new outfit almost every 20 minutes. If you let go of such a system, the day must have more than 24 hours.

Housing can stand all on its own

In the past, it has been emphasized over and over again that while housing needs to be thought about, a way of connecting it to the rest of the gameplay has to be found. So housing has to offer some advantage or gameplay aspect that is in touch with the rest of the game.

My opinion on this: no. Just no.

Housing can exist all by itself, in a vacuum, so to speak. It can be content that has little or no relation to the rest of the game. It doesn’t require any additional gameplay incentives.

In most other games, housing is primarily a creative pastime in which you think more about your own character and lifestyle – and thus find an even more bond with the game. There is also the social aspect when you can proudly show friends the in-game house and enjoy creative uses of objects.

Of course, I realize that the World of Warcraft engine would probably take a lot of work and the effort on the part of the developers

We’ve been in World of Warcraft for almost 17 years. Some make short trips into the world, for others it has become a daily ritual, part of everyday life. The fact that we still do not have a home of our own in this “second home” should change quickly.

Individualization and self-presentation have a very special value in MMORPGs, which cannot be measured in character values ​​or gameplay elements. You also brought new character adaptations because this gave the players the opportunity to express themselves better and to be able to represent themselves in the world.

Now do it with housing. And if you have to hire old WildStar developers to do it. Just do it.

Please.