World of Warcraft Is Trying To Avoid Final Fantasy XIV’s Mistakes With Its New Housing System

World of Warcraft’s biggest competition comes from Final Fantasy XIV, and though the two have plenty in common, Final Fantasy XIV has always been more known for its social side. WoW developer Blizzard Entertainment could be trying to change that dynamic, though, as it’s recently detailed some big updates coming to the massively multiplayer online RPG. Two recent blog posts spell out WoW’s plans for its upcoming housing system, as well as a broad outline of what Blizzard calls its Social Initiative to improve the ways that fans play WoW together.

For years, Final Fantasy XIV has offered players access to in-game housing and WoW players have been asking for a similar feature. Player houses act as social spaces where individuals or groups can decorate their own homes and use them as hubs for socializing and crafting together. However, Final Fantasy XIV’s housing system has several controversial quirks, limiting how many houses exist on each server and kicking players out of their houses if they go too long without using them. Blizzard explicitly says it won’t be following the same route in WoW.

“As a part of our focus on wide adoption, we wanted to ensure that Housing is available to everyone,” Blizzard writes in a blog post. “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 doesn’t get repossessed!).”

WoW’s housing system looks like it could take a much different shape from Final Fantasy XIV’s in plenty of other ways, too. For one, WoW will feature just two housing zones to start with as opposed to Final Fantasy XIV’s current five. Alliance players will live in a zone modeled after the game’s Elwynn Forest, while the Horde zone resembles the desert of Durotar. According to Blizzard, the decision to limit housing zones is meant to keep players in close proximity so they can interact with each other.

Encouraging interaction between players seems to be a core tenet of WoW’s housing. Each player house will be situated in a neighborhood of 50 homes, so you’ll have plenty of company nearby. Blizzard says neighborhoods will let players “live next to each other, work together, and share in the rewards of being part of the Neighborhood.” While it’s not clear exactly what that means yet, it does sound like Blizzard could be planning ways to reward player interaction within neighborhoods, rather than leaving them as spaces that allow players to passively exist alongside each other. By default, players will get a home in a public neighborhood with random neighbors, but it’s also possible to create a private neighborhood where every house could be owned by a member of the same guild.

Player housing is set to arrive in WoW’s next expansion, Midnight, which doesn’t yet have a release date. At the same time that it announced player housing, Blizzard also detailed a wide-reaching new plan to improve WoW’s community, which could begin before Midnight arrives and continue to evolve well past the expansion.

Blizzard says WoW’s Social Initiative will focus on making its community more welcoming and rewarding to participate in. That could include unspecified rewards for positive behavior, more tools to connect players with one another, and even some formal support for players in the game’s hardcore role-playing community. One possible model Blizzard could follow for some of those functions is Final Fantasy XIV’s community finder, a tool to connect individuals with guilds and other player groups. Blizzard says it’s already working on overhauling WoW’s in-game friends list and group-finding tools, and working on integrating the game with social media platforms (a function that actually used to exist until super genius Elon Musk ruined Twitter’s API integration).

There’s still a lot that has yet to be revealed about both WoW’s player housing and its Social Initiative, but they both sound like positive steps for the game. Final Fantasy XIV’s positive community is one of the game’s biggest selling points for newcomers, so it makes sense to try to bring some of that same spirit to WoW. And if Blizzard’s ambitions for housing actually pan out, WoW could end up beating Final Fantasy XIV at its own game.