Posted by from MMO Champion
Player Housing Press Event - Gameplay and Interviews
Several influencers attended a press event for Player Housing! We'll be recapping new information from the videos below, so check back later today.
Preach and Dratnos Interview
Preach and Dratnos had the chance to talk to Toby Ragaini - Lead Designer on WoW and Design Lead on Housing: Neighborhoods and Jay Hwang - Principal Artist and Design Lead on Housing: Decorations.
The team started playing with prototypes early on and using them informed what things that they needed to add or change. They also had played other games with housing such as Wildstar and FFXIV.
Neighborhoods are zone sized social spaces. Some new tech was added to make neighborhoods unique, expressed by the players that live there.
The team worked to accommodate all sorts of players with differing expectations of how their neighborhood would work.
The team wanted to start with the core fantasy for players and expand from there.
When new patches come out, the design team will look through the new assets and pick some to add to housing.
Garrisons were an isolating experience and the team is determined to not recreate that. Neighborhoods exist to bring people together. There will be reasons to leave, come back, and repeat the cycle.
It would be a disaster if players came in, decorated their house, and had no reason to come back to it.
Housing won't be standalone, it needs to synergize with the rest of the game.
The team talked about uprezing old 2004 assets, but decided against it, allowing players to lean in to the nostalgia if they want (Create a house with only Vanilla assets if you want!)
Player shouldn't be forced to go and run old content for rewards and the team is thinking about how that will work. For example, if you have already done a dungeon, maybe there will be a vendor outside that sells the item you would have earned from running the dungeon the first time.
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