IGN Housing Interview
Shared Homes and Interior Decorators
As a part of the recent Housing Early Access Trailer, Blizzard teased the idea of weddings between players, whether official or through community driven events. Though avoiding the question of multiple players sharing possession of a house, the lead developer did relate that the team is thinking about ways players could help decorate each other's homes.
IGN
Is there any thought to eventually doing something where two people could have possession of a house together or you could give other people permission to decorate your house? I feel like there's a budding scene of potential interior decorator professions that could spring up around this.
Kurlancheek: Yeah, one comes up a lot is, "I'm not especially creative or I'm not great with a tool set. Can my friend come over and sort of deck out my apartment or deck out my house?" Yeah, it's certainly on our radar.
Features in Development
To no surprise, some features didn't make it in time for early access, though that doesn't mean they won't make it into a future update. The full expansion launch already includes endeavors, increased housing level caps, new types of houses, and Night/Blood elf themes, but the developers are also working on restoring some of those cut features, such as customizable exterior lighting!
IGN
Was there anything that you had to leave on the cutting room floor for this initial launch that you really wish you could have gotten in? And are you willing to say what it is?
Giannullis: So much. So much. I mean, one of the things that's known is we were able to get the outdoor rooms in for the testing, but those won't be available to players until we actually launch Midnight, just due to some technical reasons, but we were really excited to get them out. We're glad we got them out early so players could give feedback and test them and see what they like about him. But there's some things like that.
Kurlancheek: There's exterior lighting we had to disable during alpha or beta, I can't remember what, just because of the performance impacts. If everybody in your sight line put 100 lights on their lawn, that was going to cause a problem. So, we had to disable those. We're going to fix it up, get them working post-launch, post Midnight launch. Yeah, I think there've been a number of things that sort of people held near and dear to their hearts that we had to just not cut, but just be like, "That's going to wait a little bit and then we'll get to it."
Future Features Under Consideration
And of course, some features are still under consideration. Saving decor layouts to quickly repopulate rooms, copy-paste functions to streamline mass creation, and importing/exporting entire layouts are all popular requests that the team has seen and heard from players, but while there are a lot of features we'd like to see, the team is making an effort to prioritize ones they think will benefit players the most.
IGN
Are you looking into any eventual copy-paste functionality or the ability to save custom item combinations? I know that's something a lot of people have been asking about.
Giannullis: A lot of people have asked about that. Definitely copy-paste. Being able, once you get something just right in advanced mode, not having to do it all over again. We're definitely keeping an eye on everything that people are asking for. There's a lot of things that people want. There's a lot of things we want to do, so it's just trying to decide what's going to help players the most.
Yeah, I mean the next question is basically the same one about export strings. If people want to decorate a house, show people and then have someone else copy it if they have those items.
Kurlancheek: Yeah, I think when we talk about any feature that's sort of in housing, it's what is sort of maximally useful across that spectrum of different players. And so, when you talk about something like importing or exporting strings of stuff, that helps the interior designer type player who wants to sort of provide services. It helps the players that are not necessarily super creative, right, are not really jazzed about the mechanical side of decorating. They have a vision but don't want use the tool set.
How are you thinking about things like housing contests and stuff like that? I don't know. I think about Race to World First and how that's a tune-in event, and I feel like I would watch an interior decorating show.
Giannullis: The thing is we've already seen a bunch of creators pop up that are like, "I'm a housing creator, this is what I'm doing." And they're starting to run their own challenges and contests, and so that's really exciting to see. I think we're all kind of watching that to see what sort of activities the players are getting up to.
Kurlancheek: Yeah, and how we can sort of build tools to support whatever that sort of shenanigans of being, right? A Trial of Style kind of thing. What do players need to be able to do that? What sort of functionality makes sense to better enable that?
Giannullis: I remember talking about how many people you can even have in your house at a time, and it was something that we were working really hard to make sure we could get that to a good place because we know people want to have parties, they want to do all these different things and we're trying to make sure that what we're building is supporting that and can handle that.
