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In a press roundtable following the Warcraft 30th anniversary direct, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas stated that player housing is the “most ambitious feature in a WoW expansion ever”.
In a response to a question from the press, Hazzikostas stated, “Dare I say it’s our most ambitious feature in a WoW expansion ever. Part of why it’s taken such a long time to present it is that we knew we couldn’t really phone it in and put out a barebones foundation, even if we were to build on it in the future. I think everything we do needs to be great, but especially something with so much expectation and so much history across the MMO genre. We know it needs to be excellent, and it’ll be a foundation for years and years of further development and growth upon those foundations to follow.”
Ahead of this question, we asked why the development team shifted from the prior stance against implementing player housing, to the new embrace of the feature. Hazzikostas’s response revealed more about why the feature is being revealed now.
“Player housing is something that the team has thought about and discussed for a long, long time. It’s something the community has been asking for and wondering about for a long time, and that’s not lost on us. When you say it wasn’t embraced in the past, there wasn’t anything philosophical that was standing in the way, in that we didn’t have a feeling it wasn’t a good idea or thought it wouldn’t be an improvement to the social ecosystem of the MMO.”
“I think frankly we were looking at what it would take to make it real, and make it at the quality level our players expect and deserve. That includes our resources, customisation options, the underlying tech required to have it really feel integrated into the world. In the past, many of those pieces just weren’t there, in that we had to choose between doing housing or everything else in an expansion, and everything else just won out.”
It’s something we’ve been working on in the background for a few years at this point. It’s something we knew would take more than one expansion development cycle to create, and we’re really excited to finally bring it to players with Midnight. We’ll have a lot more details to share on exactly it’ll work, what it is, what it isn’t, where it’s going in the year ahead. But really, we wanted to pull back the curtain a little bit and give players a peak of what’ coming on the horizon.
“Maybe a bit selfishly, to kick of discussion among the community about housing, on what they want it to be and what they want it to not be. That way, we can check our instincts and make sure we’re on the right track with our development.”
More updates can be expected, according to Hazzikostas, over 2025 through blog posts and similar official Blizzard platforms. So we’ll have to sit back and wait for more news!