Well played, Blizzard.
It only took two decades, but Blizzard is finally adding player housing to World of Warcraft, which’ll be coming with the Midnight expansion. That’s still a ways away, but that hasn’t stopped Blizzard from doing a big ol’ blog post diving into the developer’s core principles for the process, with enough word count to throw shade at one of its biggest MMO competitors.
The post goes over loads of stuff, which I’ll get to, but as a primary Final Fantasy 14 gamer I couldn’t help but have a chuckle at the segment titled A Home for Everyone. “As part of our focus on wide adoption, we wanted to ensure that Housing is available to everyone,” the post read. “If you want a house, you can have a house. No exorbitant requirements or high purchase costs, no lotteries, and no onerous upkeep (and if your subscription lapses, don’t worry, your house won’t get repossessed!)”
If you ask me, that’s a clear stab at Square Enix’s, quite frankly, atrocious housing system. It’s taken many forms over the years, but its one consistency is that it’s largely terrible. Years ago, houses would be priced based on server economy, which was changed to a flat rate per plot once cross-server travel happened. They’re pretty expensive, too, ranging from 3 million gil for a fifth-class small plot, all the way to an eye-watering 50 million gil for a large house in a prime location.
The more egregious aspects of Final Fantasy 14’s systems comes from actually obtaining (and maintaining) land, however. Houses aren’t instanced, which already creates a supply far outweighed by its demand. It used to be hours of clicking on a placard while battling an invisible timer, waiting for it to end while hoping you’d be the first one to click ‘buy’ once it was finally up. It’s since been swapped to a lottery system, where you simply chuck your money at an empty plot and pray that your number is the one drawn. A better system, but still not a good one. Oh, and you have to enter your house once every 45 days otherwise it gets taken away from you. Nothing like paying real-life money for virtual rent.
I struggle to think of another MMO that maintains this system—I mean, why would they, it’s terrible for everyone—and with Final Fantasy 14 arguably being WoW’s biggest competition in the MMO space, it makes sense that Blizzard would want to make a cheeky statement at Square Enix’s expense.
Honestly, reading the blog post and I really like the sound of what Blizzard is doing with its player housing, and I wish Square Enix would take a leaf out of its book. There’ll be two housing zones at launch—one for Alliance, inspired by Elwynn Forest, Westfall, and Duskwood, and one for Horde with touches of Durotar and Azshara—with the developer admitting that “zones are a lot of work” and that focusing on two high-quality ones was more important than fragmenting into lots of mediocre ones.
The separation doesn’t mean that you can’t hang out with your friends (or alts) on the other side, though. “Your houses are also shared amongst your Warband with your different characters being able to come and go as you see fit (so your Orc character can hang out in your Alliance house without a problem),” the blog post reads, adding that housing rewards are also shared.
“Furthermore, it’s not just Warbands that cross factional lines but friendships as well, so you’ll be able to live in or visit your friends’ or guildmates’ houses and their neighborhoods with minimal restrictions regarding faction. For example, while it’s not possible for your Human character to buy a house in the Horde zone, your Troll character in the same Warband can, and then your Human can use it as if it were their own.”
Cheeky jabs aside, something that really caught my eye is neighbourhoods, something Blizzard teases at the end of its blog post. “Houses are organised into roughly fifty plot Neighborhoods, letting players live next to each other, work together, and share in the rewards of being part of the Neighborhood. Neighborhoods are instanced but crucially also persistent so your neighbors can be your neighbors for years to come (or until one of you moves).”
There’ll be public neighbourhoods, which’ll let you live among strangers, but you’ll also have the ability to create private ones too for friends or guilds to share. I absolutely love the sound of that, especially as someone who always fancied the idea of trying to snag housing plots next to my pals in Final Fantasy 14.
Being able to customise and progress with your best buds by your side really plays into Blizzard’s emphasis on housing being a player-first mechanic and I gotta say, it’s the most tempted I’ve been to give WoW another try in years. Maybe Midnights will be the expansion to finally draw me back in.
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