World of Warcraft's getting its own player housing, which'll be dropping either on—or just a little before—the release of its next expansion, Midnight. Blizzard's been drip-feeding details over the past few months, mostly by subtly elbowing Final Fantasy 14 for the woes of its own system.
The styling-on-Square Enix is proceeding apace. In a blog titled A Look at Housing Interior Design, Blizzard shared some very exciting details—namely, how placing, rotating, and scaling furniture is all going to work. It's all subject to change, naturally, and there's "a lot of work-in-progress assets and UIs as well as using some terms that are not finalized", but it's all also looking super promising.
There'll be two modes available to you when placing furniture in your player housing: basic and advanced. In basic mode, furniture can be shuffled around either freeform or by snapping to a grid. Basic mode decor items will have collisions with other bits of furniture, and also 'parent' to other objects. For instance, if you put a bunch of items on a table, then move that table around, the objects you placed'll be glued to it.
Which is all well and good, but as I've discovered over my time playing MMOs, the more powerful tools you give your housebuilders, the wilder they'll get with kitbashing stuff together. Blizzard is fully aware of this fact, which is why "advanced mode effectively turns off a lot of the rules of basic mode, but also offers up additional tools of its own as well." Here's a clip shared by Blizzard:
Advanced mode lets you clip, rotate, and even scale objects into each other, meaning you can absolutely build a fridge out of 20 different objects, meticulously shunted into each other like some kind of horrific scrap artist's masterpiece. FF14 catches another stray here, as these controls also let you float objects "up into the air without having to jump through hoops".
For those not in the know, in FF14's housing system, you need to do shenanigans like force-colliding lofts into furniture to make it float (here's a video tutorial). You could also, hypothetically, use ToS-violating mods that Square Enix forbids but doesn't really do anything about.
"Internally using this," the blog boasts, "employees have taken bushes and made them into garland for their fireplaces, constructed a boat’s prow from a bed, or made paint buckets into small spice racks for their kitchens."
While WoW's late to the party, I will say that it's also reaping the rewards of doing this now, after every other MMO has already figured out what players do and don't like about their housing systems. As such, Blizzard's been able to build the system from the ground up to allow for maximum freedom.
But this, along with a complete lack of "onerous upkeep" or housing lotteries, makes me feel like WoW's housing system really is just going to beat up FF14's and take its lunch money in most regards, whether it comes to the actual placement of furniture or the user-friendliness of the system itself.
Which is rough, given Final Fantasy 14's been sluggish in terms of updating its secondary systems. If WoW pulls off this kind of player housing without a hitch (there will probably be some hitches) while also keeping up its content cadence? Square Enix is gonna need to properly prove it's not just having laps run around it in the years to come. And maybe give its player housing an overdue overhaul—'there's technical debt' can only get you so far.
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