Housing in WoW Dragonflight is missing, but we should keep demanding it

WoW demon Cortyn from MeinMMO is looking forward to WoW: Dragonflight. But one of the most anticipated features is missing – again.

I really enjoyed the presentation of the next World of Warcraft expansion, Dragonflight. The stream pretty much contained everything I wanted to see: A new continent, back on Azeroth. A new class. No Azerite Anima Artifact Power grind. A big world, a lot to discover. And of course dragons. Dragons as main characters, dragons as playable class, dragons as feature. I’m up for it. And really.

The announcement also had a blatant damper for me. All the – partly invented – leaks in advance and some hints indicated that player housing would finally find its way into the World of Warcraft. In my mind I had already furnished my draenei with a small splinter of the Genedar, my blood elf had put together her nethermancer witch cellar and my demon hunter had hung a few imp heads in her bedroom.

When the topic didn’t appear at all in the performance of Dragonflight, my heart felt a little heavy. That’s when I realized how much I was really looking forward to it. From a purely selfish player’s point of view, I find it absolutely incomprehensible that World of Warcraft doesn’t have housing yet, when it has become the absolute standard of the genre.

Housing would be a mega project – and would cost a lot of features

On the other hand, and looking at it more soberly, I believe Game Director Ion Hazzikostas immediately that the necessary resources for such a feature in World of Warcraft would be gigantic and would probably cost a great many other features. He explained that in an interview with Hazel a few days ago. The decision to bring housing would also be the decision not to be able to do many other features.

Just what the art team would have to do would be gigantic. After all, World of Warcraft now has 24 different races (including the allied races). If we were to take the absolute “minimum” and say that each race would have 3 different house designs, that would already be 72 houses.

And that would be just the clean house itself. All the numerous collectibles, decorations, furniture that would have to match all races, trophies and so much more – it would all take a huge amount of work.

Sure, a lot of these assets already exist in the game and you could probably just copy some of them – one would think. But it wouldn’t be that easy. Because some graphics come from vanilla, others from Battle for Azeroth. The difference in quality here alone would cause players to go on the rampage.

Also, the argument that “other games can easily do that” just falls apart when you look at it. Other games are often made with housing in mind. If this is planned from the beginning, the implementation is much easier. If you know from the outset that every object will later also have to function as a “housing object” with 360° rotation, then you plan for that.

However, a gigantic wealth of objects in World of Warcraft was not developed in this way. Anyone who plays around with programs like the “Model Viewer” or simply rotates the camera in World of Warcraft will have noticed this. For example, many objects such as pillars, boxes or entire buildings have no texture from below and from the inside. Simply because the pillar was never intended to be encountered at any angle other than the exact location it is in-game.

To do this, all items would also have to be provided with their own hitboxes for the collision – this is already not the case in the open game world, where the walls for the collision query are often simply placed “over” the finished game world afterwards.

The different peoples, whose size is sometimes drastically different (compare gnomes with tauren) would all have to function equally in such a system and work would also have to be done on collisions so that a tauren doesn’t just clip through gates that a gnome goes through could get away with jumping.

Those are just a few points. The longer you deal with the work involved in this topic, the easier it is to understand why WoW has not yet taken the step towards housing. The effort would be enormous. And probably in reality a lot bigger than we can imagine right now.

Better no housing than bad housing

In my opinion, games like SWTOR, which have added this afterwards, also show how bad housing can look like. Even if I’m making a few enemies in the SWTOR community now: Fixed bases for objects, blatant limitations and comparatively monotonous designs scared me and made sure that SWTOR as a whole fell in my favor.

I would be pretty picky about housing in WoW too. Anything that offers less customization and more limitations than WildStar had back then, I would hardly accept. I don’t want half-baked housing. If so, I want it right, with all the freedom that a feature like this should have.

So yeah: the lack of housing in Dragonflight is a criticism I’m sure I’ll have to nibble on for a while. However, I am generally positive person Demon and believe we can all wait a few more years for Housing.

But I think it’s important to keep raising the voice for this feature. The survey a few days ago showed that the longing for housing is not just a niche topic, but something that an ever-increasing part of the gamers want. So we should keep raising the issue and keep up the pressure in a friendly but firm manner.

Blizzard developers have emphasized over the past few years that they are essentially just “stewards” of Azeroth and want to create the game the community wants.

Still, a small victory: Years ago, the game director Ion Hazzikostas sounded much more averse to housing and linked this to many questions that apparently no longer play a role today. Something is moving, albeit slowly.

I am convinced that it is no longer a question of whether we WoW players will ever get housing – but only a question of “when”.

I’d rather it be sooner than later, but if they want to get it ‘right’ straight away, I can wait an expansion or two. Let’s just make sure they don’t forget either.