World of Warcraft Housing Could Give Final Fantasy XIV A Reason To Worry
WoW’s player housing looks equally cozy and chaotic.
Back in February, Blizzard Entertainment announced a brand-new housing feature coming to World of Warcraft. It takes some clear cues from Final Fantasy XIV’s approach to player homes, which led to the obvious question of whether WoW would replicate the worst problems of its competitor’s housing or find a way to rise above them. In a new blog post, it’s clear that at least when it comes to interior design, WoW seems to be learning all the right lessons from Final Fantasy XIV.
The new WoW blog post focuses entirely on how players will be able to arrange objects within their houses, but if that sounds boring, you might not understand how seriously some players take housing. Player homes represent one of the biggest forms of customization in massively multiplayer RPGs, letting anyone design not just their own character, but an entire building that they can show off to their friends. Some of the biggest issues with housing in WoW revolve around the restrictions on how you place furniture, which makes WoW’s chaotically open-ended approach all the more exciting.
World of Warcraft is finally adding player housing in an update this year.
The first thing that’s apparent from a series of short video clips in the blog is that WoW’s decorating system looks extremely intuitive. Clicking any item in building mode will let you simply move it around the room using the mouse, and a grid automatically appears to help you keep things aligned. You can also enable a snap-to-grid function, like you’d find in image editing software, to keep everything lined up. Items will automatically stack with each other if you place one on top of another, and moving the bottom object will move everything on top of it. If, for instance, I were making an accurate replica of my apartment, I could cover my in-game coffee table with books and empty coffee cups, and they would stay on top of the table when I moved it.
But things really get interesting in WoW’s advanced building mode. The first thing this mode does is turn off collision detection for objects, meaning you can move two items into each other, or even into walls. That alone could enable some truly creative object combinations — or sheer chaos, depending on the player.
The housing toolset in WoW lets players resize and position objects to make custom decorations.
Advanced mode also gives you finer control over objects’ placement, including rotation on all axes and, maybe the most exciting part of the whole blog, their vertical positioning. In Final Fantasy XIV, getting an object to float off the ground — if you want to build a custom staircase or a loft bed, for instance — is a total pain, requiring players to exploit a bug in the system to slowly nudge it higher and higher. In WoW, you’ll be able to simply lift objects off the ground and place them wherever you want, whether you’re connecting them to walls or just leaving them floating. Blizzard’s blog even takes a potshot at Final Fantasy XIV’s limitations, noting that you can make objects float “without having to jump through hoops.”
Objects can also be resized in advanced mode, which also sounds like it will enable some wild design ideas, especially when combined with the mode’s other functions. Blizzard notes that combining the rotation, scale, and other controls from advanced mode has already let testers turn paint buckets into spice racks and bushes into garlands.
On top of just rearranging furniture, you’ll be able to actually build interior walls in your house, splitting it up into new rooms however you see fit. Taken all together, it’s clear that WoW’s housing designers have paid close attention to how other MMORPGs handle player homes and are avoiding making the same mistakes. Even with all the restrictions, players have made some incredible creations in Final Fantasy XIV, from dance clubs to aquariums, all at considerable effort. Unless WoW screws the whole thing up in some way we haven’t seen yet, the people of Azeroth could have even wilder attractions to look forward to. Blizzard says it will share more about exteriors in the future, but even from what’s already been shown off, spending a cozy night redecorating could soon become one of the most exciting parts of WoW.
