WoW

I’m always astonished at the ingenuity players can wield when given a solid house-building system. Heck, even when I was playing City of Heroes: Homecoming, fans were wrangling a decades-old base builder to make some true works of art out of scraps. World of Warcraft, however, appears to be making a proper effort to do so wrangle-free.

While my colleagues are at Gamescom and still in the process of getting their hands in it, streamer AnnieFuschia was able to pull an answer from a dev (thanks, WoWHead) on whether or not an import function, “kinda like how we share talents”, would be coming along with the feature in Midnight.

She got an answer in the affirmative—which is just one more thing Blizzard seems to be doing right with its player housing. So far, I’ve been mightily impressed by what I’ve seen: Object scaling and rotation, optional but basically unlimited clipping, and a very versatile layout system that puts the other competition to shame.

Mind, Blizzard’s had a lot of time to slowly learn from the foibles of other MMOs, which have all had player housing features for far longer than World of Warcraft—it’s one major area, really, where the game was lagging behind. Unless we count Garrisons, and, like, why would you do that.

It’s unclear whether this’ll be limited to just entire housing layouts, or whether players will be able to save and share their own furnishing creations. Again, I have to emphasise how clutch this sort of thing is.

In most MMOs, housing wizards can often make entirely new bits of furniture by clipping and rotating items into each other. When I took a tour of ESO’s busy player housing community, for instance, I spoke with Hachiko Chan, who would create “the illusion of Japanese-style doors and windows by combining beds and lanterns. Or soft sofas and armchairs, simply using stools and grain bags.”

If Blizzard’s able to let you copy the decorations of others via an import system, that’ll do a huge amount to keep the housing community alive—sharing and building on other peoples’ cobbled-together creations to just straight-up make whatever you want. I’m excited to get stuck in when the feature goes live (for people who own Midnight) on the final patch of The War Within.

Harvey’s history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he’s since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G’raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He’ll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don’t ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.