Blizzard has announced that two decades after its release, World of Warcraft is finally going to let players build a home and live in it. The feature has long been requested by WoW players and now it’s finally coming in the game’s next expansion.
Player housing is a big part of many other popular MMORPGs, like The Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy 14, and New World. But it’s never been a feature in World of Warcraft, even though files left in the game indicate that Blizzard had worked on a version of it early in WoW’s development. The company has even joked about player housing in the past, too. But now, finally, after 20 years, Blizzard is actually doing it, though it likely won’t be in the game for at least another year or more.
On November 13, during Blizzard’s 3o years of Warcraft event, the studio revealed a lot of plans and updates for various Warcraft games. The presentation’s segment about the future of WoW was capped off with a very tiny tease about player housing. Here’s that teaser:
PC Gamer spoke to WoW director Ion Hazzikostas about the teaser and confirmed that, yes, Blizzard is bringing player homes to the MMORPG. However, as seen in the teaser, this feature won’t be added until the next expansion, Midnight. So why tease it now?
“We want to give players a little sneak preview of some of what the team is cooking,” Hazzikostas explained to PC Gamer. “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.”
According to Hazzikostas, Blizzard wants to hear “what people are excited about, what they expect, and what they’d like to see from housing” in World of Warcraft. The plan is for that input to help “guide the team’s development efforts” on player housing.
“[Player housing] 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,” said Hazzikostas, who also explained that another reason housing is happening now is that Blizzard has developed new tech behind the scenes in WoW to make this feature possible.
So now people can stop bugging Blizzard about player housing in World of Warcraft and start bugging them about how much they don’t like the way player housing works in WoW once it’s available in game.