I've been annoyingly busy lately, and haven't had as much time as I would have liked to dive into World of Warcraft's housing feature, which is now live in the World of Warcraft: Midnight beta. So even though I've now had multiple tours of its features and possibilities at this point, I was blown away when I poked my head into the community and saw this:
And this:
And, holy smokes, this:
Come on. There's no way we're going to be able to make that! Well, okay, maybe no way I, a deeply mediocre interior decorator, will be able to make that.
Nevertheless, early testing for housing in WoW is proving to be quite the success. In fact, amid a lot of controversy around both add-on removal and transmog, it's nice that there's one new feature everyone's just sort of unanimously positive about.
Still, there are still plenty of questions still up in the air about how housing will work once it gets into the full game, and what its long-term future is going to be. I sat down with Jesse Kurlancheek, housing lead and principal game designer, and Joanna Giannullis, senior UX designer, to pepper them with questions specifically about housing: how will it work, what features can we expect down the line, and what the future holds. Here's our full interview below, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity:
IGN: So in the past we've sometimes seen Blizzard introduce new features and then drop them at the end of the expansion, like Pandaria's Farms, and the Garrisons in Warlordsof Draenor. Can we be reassured that housing is going to continue to be supported with new content and added to with each new expansion?
Jesse Kurlancheek: I will reassure you as much as possible that that is the case. We have a short-term, medium-term, long-term list of features and content that we want to add. We talk about what are we doing in 12.0 and 12.1 and 12.2 and beyond pretty regularly. One of the things that's most exciting about housing is that, if I ask you, "Hey, what are the three things you want most from housing?" Just rattle off, and I ask Jo[anna Giannullis] and I ask Aramis [the PR representative on the call] and I ask 10 players, I will get a dozen different answers ranging the gamut, but chances are 90, 95% of those things totally make sense in housing. It's such a wide, open field that you can't really say no to a lot of stuff, and because of that, it's really exciting to add all of these things. And you can see a through line as we talk about stuff, we want players to have this area to express themselves, to be creative, to build sort of what they want, their ideal home in Azeroth.
But then we also say, "But we want you to be amongst other players. We want you to be with your friends or Guildies. We want to give you a space that is not just yours but is ours." And then from there, where do people get excited? What sort of sparks your joy? What lights your eyes up? What do players do on day one, on month one that they want to keep doing, that they want to build on? So, we have our roadmap. We have the things that we think are really exciting. We have the things that we know players want. We know that, yeah, you want more content, you want more decor, you want more of this culture or that culture or this expansion stuff or that expansion stuff. You want to be able to have access to these types of features and we want more customization.
We want better quality of life. We want to be able to do things together that we can't right now. But then, we have things that you don't necessarily think about. When you say, oh, when we announced neighborhoods back in the spring, you'd see people sort of be like, "Oh, now that we have this sort of collaborative space, what does that mean for us?" And watching people have conversations about the what ifs with housing is very gratifying. Hopefully, that very long-winded answer reassures you that we're thinking about things as not just a single feature release, that this is a very long-running thing.
You were talking about having a space for people to hang out in. So, I log in and I go do dungeons or whatever it is I do and I play, but there's also sort of a home base that I tend to hang out in. And generally in the history of WoW, that's always been a capital city, because there's an auction house and a bank, and a bunch of other people there. And I'm wondering how you're thinking about the tension between, do I want to hang out in my house where there's no bank and no auction house, or do I want to hang out in a capital city? But if I don't hang out in a capital city, is the capital city going to be empty? How are you kind of thinking about that?
Joanna Giannullis: I think we are expecting players to sort of settle into different types. We made sure that a lot of things that you go to the capital city for, that's still where you have to go to do that. You got to go and visit your professions trainers, do your crafting orders, visit the bank, the auction house. A lot of those things are still going to be central in the city. You may still want to go there so you can see the Brutosaur parades or whatnot. There's still going to be a lot there for you. But we also wanted the neighbors to be a space where you could be more social with your friends and your Guildies because that's a little bit harder to do in those hub cities. So, we're hoping that there's a nice balance. We're also not making you choose where to put your Hearthstone, we're going to give you a hearth to your actual home so you'll be able to quickly go to either location to do the things that you need to do while you're waiting for raid or what have you.
Is there any thought to making there be practical benefits to being in the house though? I know you probably don't want to put a bank there because then everyone would just sit in there all the time, but I wonder if there's anything else? I saw this thing where tourist NPCs were coming by and taking pictures, which is really cute. I don't know, could NPCs come visit? Could there be a reason to just sit there and hang out that's practical and gameplay oriented?
Giannullis: Right now, we do have cooking stations in your house. There are a couple small things and I'm sure there's things that will happen in the future, but there are some things that you might find more enjoyable to just do in your home or your plot or your neighborhood, and there's a lot of reasons to keep returning to your neighborhood. We've got endeavors coming up with the launch Midnight and that's something that you're going to be participating in, but then those are also going to send you back out into the world. So, there should be a lot of give and take there.
Kurlancheek: We do a fairly hard line on sort of the player power aspect of stuff not coming into housing. You should never feel that, "I have to go engage in a housing loop because if I don't, I can't attune to a raid, or I won't have a 3% DPS boost or whatever." So, that sort of practical stuff is really not on the table. What you mentioned about NPCs coming by and doing cutesy, neighborly, things like that, I think is very much a part of housing. Feeling like this little part of the world that is yours and your friends is alive is important. Seeing the NPCs put the little umbrellas up when it starts raining, seeing them sort of queue up for the shops and things like that really just gives a life and a vibrancy to this place. But it's not practical, right? It's all just vibes, man.
Is there any thought to eventually doing something where two people could have possession of a house together or you could give other people permission to decorate your house? I feel like there's a budding scene of potential interior decorator professions that could spring up around this.
Kurlancheek: Yeah, one comes up a lot is, "I'm not especially creative or I'm not great with a tool set. Can my friend come over and sort of deck out my apartment or deck out my house?" Yeah, it's certainly on our radar.
Was there anything that you had to leave on the cutting room floor for this initial launch that you really wish you could have gotten in? And are you willing to say what it is?
Giannullis: So much. So much. I mean, one of the things that's known is we were able to get the outdoor rooms in for the testing, but those won't be available to players until we actually launch Midnight, just due to some technical reasons, but we were really excited to get them out. We're glad we got them out early so players could give feedback and test them and see what they like about him. But there's some things like that.
Kurlancheek: There's exterior lighting we had to disable during alpha or beta, I can't remember what, just because of the performance impacts. If everybody in your sight line put 100 lights on their lawn, that was going to cause a problem. So, we had to disable those. We're going to fix it up, get them working post-launch, post Midnight launch. Yeah, I think there've been a number of things that sort of people held near and dear to their hearts that we had to just not cut, but just be like, "That's going to wait a little bit and then we'll get to it."
In the future, there might be more to types of neighborhoods, right? We have an Alliance and a Horde neighborhood look and then there's set places in those, but are you thinking about other environments you might want to do down the line?
Kurlancheek: Yeah, I think there's, letting players make a space that they vibe with. I'm sorry, I say vibe a lot with housing.
It's very vibes-based.
Kurlancheek: It's very vibes-based. But getting players a space that they feel like they can make theirs is really important. In designing the neighborhoods, we are very intentional about trying to hit a very broad spectrum of, here are players, here are houses that are for very hermit players, that they don't want to live next to anybody. Here are houses that are in a little cute cul-de-sac, so there's 2, 3, 4 houses that a small group of friends can live in. Here's houses on the ocean, here's houses in the woods, here's houses sort of in all of these aspects. But that's not going to necessarily hit everybody's thing, and so figuring out what the large missing pieces there are is part of the early post-release sort of conversation.
Giannullis: Another thing to add to that, something that we've made an effort is going out and looking in the world, especially even in old content and finding decor or foliage, things that we could add as props and decor so that the players can make their space into what they want. So, if they've always loved a specific zone in the game, great, let's add some of those trees and some of those flowers as decor that they can buy and then put in their yard. And that's something that we're working really hard, I think, to get a variety of decor that feels like every little part of the game has its place, and you can go back to old content and get those things and then you can put them in your house.
Going back into old content and finding things, from each of you, what is the most surprising or weird or favorite thing that you found that you're like, "Oh, I have to put that in housing."
Kurlancheek: So, there's literally a spreadsheet or a form that people can fill out for, "Oh, this thing was something we should add." It's a little bit unfair being me because I can sort of nudge things a little bit harder to go in and say, "Hey, Jay," Jay's the decor lead. I'm like, "Can you add this for me? Literally just for me. I don't know if anyone else cares about it, but I would like it." And he'll be like, "Yeah, fine, that's fine."
I think the more interesting thing has been, this is a massive game, right, and seeing players pull up props that have long been forgotten about. They're like, "That was a cool prop. We should get that in." Someone posted this, it was a shark, it was a new asset. So, probably from Battle for Azeroth if I had to guess. But it was a shark that had been caught, but that was maybe still alive, I'm not quite sure. But it was a very nice, they wanted to make a fishing village on their lawn. And I was like, "That's great." And so, having people post what they're looking for is really useful for us because stuff like that shows up and we're like, "That is a great asset."
Giannullis: We also have had a lot of, this is oddly internal too. This is, everybody really wants goblin items and then trash items. Those get requested a lot. It's really fun. Yeah, people love them and one of the ones I think we added was the Johnny Trash pile. So, if you get the achievement with him back in Battle for Azeroth, and it's so funny, it's like who wants that? But as soon as you see it, you want it. You are like, "I have to have that. I don't know what for, but I know I need that." And it's so fun to see people get excited about those sort of sort of decor.
Kurlancheek: String lights. Everybody loves the string lights.
Would you ever consider making certain housing items super rare or super secretive? I'm thinking about a decoration equivalent of the Time-Lost Proto-Drake or something that's the reward at the end of a secret quest, like the Hivemind or something?
Kurlancheek: Let's see how I'm going to answer this. So, there's the catalog that shows you all the items in the game, all the decor in the game. There's a flag we can say to hide items until you've earned them. So, yeah, that.
Would you ever lock anything behind world first or make something fairly exclusive?
Kurlancheek: I think depends on your definition of fairly. So, meta achievements for expansions are pretty exclusive. And so, we have decor for meta achievements. I think where it's maybe require more conversation of stuff that's time limited. We try to generally err away from things that if, you're like, "Oh, I just need this green placard or whatever, but it was only available for some weird event or something," that kind of feels bad.
Giannullis: We've also, we talked a while back about what sort of decor would we reward for something like PvP, because we'd like to have, and this is no secret, you can get housing decor from everything in game. If there's a way you can earn something in game, we're going to let you get housing decor that way. So, we wanted to do something for PvP and it was like, okay, well if we do this and then other people that don't PvP want it, is that going to feel bad? And so, the concept of trophies came up and you can see some of that early stuff is showing up on the beta. So, I think there's been real conscious effort to make sure that if it's something that you can get from something very exclusive, it's not something that we expect everybody to want to have a ton of in their house or it's something that you can get a version of another way. But if you see that specific version, you know they did something awesome to get it. It's a balance there.
There's been real conscious effort to make sure that if it's something that's very exclusive, it's not something that we expect everybody to want to have a ton of.When I log in on December 2nd and I have access to this feature, I'm just immediately going to have a bunch of decor already, right? Because I have achievements that exist, I have things that I have done before, so I should just have a bunch of stuff?
Kurlancheek: You will, if you've been playing hard for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, you will potentially log into 150, 200 things that you will just get spammed with and showered with and be able to be like, "Oh yeah, I remember when I did that quest in MoP or something and it gave me whatever it gave me." And the meta achievements kick in and you start with this very eclectic mix.
I'm sure whatever I have is totally mismatched and makes no sense.
Giannullis: Well, we also start you with the starter packs, which have some more streamlined modern items. Yeah. So, you'll have a mix of some wild stuff and then some, okay, at least I have a bed and a chair. So, we're going to start you with a good mix of things, I think.
Are you looking into any eventual copy-paste functionality or the ability to save custom item combinations? I know that's something a lot of people have been asking about.
Giannullis: A lot of people have asked about that. Definitely copy-paste. Being able, once you get something just right in advanced mode, not having to do it all over again. We're definitely keeping an eye on everything that people are asking for. There's a lot of things that people want. There's a lot of things we want to do, so it's just trying to decide what's going to help players the most.
Yeah, I mean the next question is basically the same one about export strings. If people want to decorate a house, show people and then have someone else copy it if they have those items.
Kurlancheek: Yeah, I think when we talk about any feature that's sort of in housing, it's what is sort of maximally useful across that spectrum of different players. And so, when you talk about something like importing or exporting strings of stuff, that helps the interior designer type player who wants to sort of provide services. It helps the players that are not necessarily super creative, right, are not really jazzed about the mechanical side of decorating. They have a vision but don't want use the tool set.
It helps the players that they like to browse. You just sort of, I have a room for this and room for that, a room for this and a room for that. And also, I think maybe the most compelling part about it is it helps players have a sense of ownership where you might not already. So, if you're a great decorator and I'm a less good decorator, and you make your little pirate cave and like a great pirate cave, "I'm going to take that pirate cave, but I don't like that she doesn't have sharks in the water," or whatever. And then, I throw a bunch of sharks in the water. Now that's sort of mine in a way that remixing of content in general is sort of a part of the internet. Being able to do that in game is also really valuable.
How are you thinking about things like housing contests and stuff like that? I don't know. I think about Race to World First and how that's a tune-in event, and I feel like I would watch an interior decorating show.
Giannullis: The thing is we've already seen a bunch of creators pop up that are like, "I'm a housing creator, this is what I'm doing." And they're starting to run their own challenges and contests, and so that's really exciting to see. I think we're all kind of watching that to see what sort of activities the players are getting up to.
Kurlancheek: Yeah, and how we can sort of build tools to support whatever that sort of shenanigans of being, right? A Trial of Style kind of thing. What do players need to be able to do that? What sort of functionality makes sense to better enable that?
Giannullis: I remember talking about how many people you can even have in your house at a time, and it was something that we were working really hard to make sure we could get that to a good place because we know people want to have parties, they want to do all these different things and we're trying to make sure that what we're building is supporting that and can handle that.
Is there a limit to how many people can come into your house at a time?
Kurlancheek: There is, there is. We're still figuring out where the line is. We do our stress testing and throw a ton of bots into a very decorated house. What happens? In the neighborhoods, regardless of what the solution or whatever the number is there, everybody who lives in the neighborhood can come into the neighborhood. So, if there's 55 players and the max number of players is 100, say, then we reserve those 55 lots or 55 places for people that live there. So, you can always come into your house.
So I know we can decorate the exteriors of our houses. Is there any thought to stuff like, okay, my guild has our neighborhood together. We can collectively decorate the parts of the outside that are not attached to a house. Can we build a little community center?
Kurlancheek: Yes. The idea of us building together is super compelling, I think. As soon as players can build something themselves, we want to build things together. And so, what that ends up being depends on what people are trying to do or what is interesting for them. If it is just us coming together in the town square and hanging up balloons or whatever, because we're having a birthday party, what does that look like? Versus we want to build a racetrack for our mounts around the outside of a town and what does that look like? Versus we want to do prop hunts and dueling things and all of these different potential pieces of stuff. What's juicy?
It feels really wild to talk about it. It feels like we're almost discussing a completely different game than WoW, like a game within a game. I could very easily just do this all the time and then my raid team would wonder why I'm not there.
Kurlancheek: That's an actual problem, by the way, that there are people that are finding housing really compelling and be like, "I don't know if I can make it to a raid tonight. I'm busy with my house."
I don't know that that's a problem you even need to solve, but you were talking about having creators that just want to do housing. And I don't know, has that changed the team's perspective on how they approach this? Has that changed the perspective of the holistic design of the game?
Giannullis: I think we've already always started wanting to make sure that we were kind of in it for the long haul. This is a feature that we know is going to live in the game for some time to come, and we're going to be adding more to it with every, not just every patch, but in future expansions and we want to keep growing it. And so, when you say like, "Oh, well what about all these things we got?" It's like, yeah, over time, yeah, let's do it. Tell us what you want and let's see what we can do.
The idea of us building together is super compelling, I think. As soon as players can build something themselves, we want to build things together.This is how we eventually get the dance hall. This is the way.
Kurlancheek:
Oh, dance hall is, that's a real low hanging fruit. People are going to toss that together right quick.
I'm sure they already have.
What is the biggest piece of feedback you're seeing from players right now and what do you plan to do to address it?
Kurlancheek: I'm going to reframe that to critical feedback because the biggest piece of feedback is just, "We want, give us more decor, give us more features, give us more of this, that and the other thing." I think one of the things that gets talked about most frequently is outdoor decor limits are too low. People want to be able to build more stuff outside their house. We're trying. We're going to see where things land and sort of, we want players to be as creative as they want to be. And placing restrictions on folks is never the goal in any of our sort of guiding principles.
Giannullis: I know a lot of players are giving feedback about bits and pieces of the UI and the UX for the actual act of decorating, and there's not a strong one. There's a lot of things and things that we know will help players decorate. I think we're just trying to keep all of those in mind. We're keeping accessibility in mind a lot as well. We know that there's some things that might work for one player but not another. So, we're just keeping in our eyes open to what we're seeing and trying to make sure that's all stuff that we'll be able to address in the future.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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