“Player accommodation is something the team has definitely thought about and discussed for a long, long time,” explained World of Warcraft game designer Ion Hazzikostas during a recent roundtable interview attended by Eurogamer. “It's certainly something the community has been asking for and wondering about for a long time, and that's not lost on us.”
Hazzikostas went on to say that while the team may have previously been hesitant to introduce player accommodation, it was not a “philosophical” decision; rather, “Frankly, we were looking at what it would take to make it real and make it real at the level of quality that our players expect and deserve… the customization options, the underlying technology required to really make it feel integrated into the world “And in the past, a lot of those pieces just weren't there… That made us choose between doing housing or doing literally everything else that went into an expansion, and everything else always won out in that balance of resources.”
Despite that, Hazzikostas revealed that the player's housing is “something that we started seriously planning a design and building for probably about five years ago… We knew at the time that this was not a feature that was going to fit within the development time frame”. of a single expansion, so we have been planning accordingly.
And while Blizzard isn't ready to get into the details of its new system just yet, Hazzikostas teased its reveal trailer, though it's not a “100 percent accurate representation of what you'll see… it captures the flavor and spirit” of what that the team is aiming for. “I dare say it's our most ambitious feature in a World of Warcraft expansion,” he continued elsewhere, “[which is] part of why it's taken so long to introduce it… We knew we couldn't really phone it up and lay a basic foundation, even if we were going to build on it in the future.”
“I think anything we do has to be great,” he added, “but especially something with so many expectations and so much history in the MMO genre like hosting. We know it has to be great.” [and] “It will be the foundation for years and years of further development and growth.”
But while player housing may be the feature currently on fans' lips, Blizzard has a lot more in store for World of Warcraft before its arrival, including the upcoming Mermaid Island, a revamped Winter Veil event, plus of the return of Plunderstorm, WoW Battle Royale style. mode. And that's in addition to next year's Undermined update, which continues the events of The War Within by taking players to the capital city of the goblin trading empire, where, among other things, they'll be able to cruise the streets in fully customizable cars. .
Elsewhere in this week's Warcraft 30th anniversary celebrations, Blizzard released its shiny new remasters of Warcraft 1 and 2. Although, as Eurogamer's Robert Purchese recently opined, “I love World of Warcraft, but I wish Blizzard would stop to look back.”