Player housing tools are so good, WoW's design director hopes the game will have quests where you build things in the future: 'We really want to use them'
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."
She clarifies that she means non-specialised designers, noting that "If you're a worldbuilder, if that's your job, then you have really excellent mastery of very good complex tools. But the rest of us who are not artists are struggling the same way players would be."
So intuitive, in fact, that she feels like they'd make good questing material: "The tools that have been put together here are so intuitive and so easy to use, we really want to use them. I would love to be able to have quest objectives that involve building things, for example," she also states that she'd "love to be able to have events where we have people competitively make things."
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.
"But players are the priority right now, and making sure that we're supporting their needs for all the great creative ideas they've got."
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.
Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight