World of Warcraft’s player housing has been in early access for some time, and players are already building star destroyers—that’s because Blizzard’s leant more towards the freeform side of things, allowing home decorators to scale, rotate, and freely clip objects into each other to their heart’s content.
I got to speak to design director Maria Hamilton recently, who said she’s been wowed by the tools themselves: “I think the first thing that I said on seeing where they were really early on was ‘Oh my god, I want those tools’, because they are vastly better than what many designers are using for building out areas.”
It’s a pipe dream at the moment, though, because Blizzard’s hitting the ground running on improving the feature—starting with the ability to copy/paste, as well as duplicate entire batches of items in Midnight.
“We’re really at such an early stage, it’s mostly dreams on our part,” she explains, “We were coming to [player housing] pretty late, and so it was important that this really, really be good … It’s my hope that we’ll be able to get there, and it’s my hope that your quest designers will be able to build interesting quests around building.
Creative ideas indeed—I’ve already seen goblin mechs, airships, the aforementioned star destroyers, and light-knows-what-else. You give MMO players an inch, and they’ll take a meticulously crafted replica of Howl’s Moving Castle.
