For those who are able to watch, please follow along live on Youtube.
The team has taken the stage! Join Jay Hwang, Joanna Gianulis, Kat Dolan, and Taylor Garcia as we dive right into Player Housing.
Player Housing had several goals in development: freedom in creation, fitting the world, and providing a different experience for everyone.
Minecraft, Final Fantasy, and more were inspirations for WoW player housing - players were already in these other worlds, and with well-established communities, there were tons of great ideas for what works and what doesn't.
Housing was originally attempted to be slotted into Stormwind and Orgrimmar, but it just wasn't feasible to make it work.
During the development process, there were several bugs involving Decor placement, including floating objects, stuttering NPCs, and the Horde Neighborhood being filled with slime.
Technical Challenges
There were tons of engineering disciplines involved in trying to get Housing off the ground - with so many features interacting, there's tons of legacy code to work with.
Dyes were a big difficulty to work around, and it's not easy to just take that system and apply it to gear - they're very different systems.
Lighting was a well-know technical limitation - with players being able to do anything, it meant that they were far more efficient at finding every way to break the neighborhoods.
Being able to click and drag a 3D object was surprisingly difficult, and accidentally resulted in floating houses. That was, though, a really great accidental addition!
Since Player Housing isn't a power-centric feature, no one has to be the "fun police", meaning there are a lot more possibilities to allow players to be creative.
Look & Feel
Advanced Mode almost wasn't a thing - but thankfully, after more internal testing, Blizzard realized just how important having that level of control was.
When Housing was still being developed, clipping was intentionally left in to allow players to creatively use Decor to create alternative structures, such as walls, tables, or bars.
New modular Decor pieces will be coming in the future to allow players to create unique structures.
Sneak Peeks
The team is working on a copy/paste feature that will allow players to drag over multiple pieces of Decor to move them all simultaneously.
Mannequins are coming to World of Warcraft to let players display the gear that they've earned in their Houses.
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