Im curious to see what people’s thoughts are on garrisons and if an evolved feature from what they were in WOD would’ve been favoured upon.
Whether it’s a garrison, farm, house or mini castle, the way it would help the player is by giving them some downtime to work on their building instead of focusing on the endless item grind. Or perhaps, it may give other players an option to experience the game from another lense if raiding ain’t their thing.
I’d view the feature playing out as such: The player chooses which part of Azeroth they want their building constructed. The garrison (or whichever you chose from the above) starts off as a minor building and overtime expands into something a lot more larger with NPC’s walking around (profession trainers, repair merchants etc, mission tables etc). Depending on what type of building you choose to construct will determine what you can do in it.
Garrison expansion would work through the completion of daily or weekly quests which start at the garrison and send the player out to Azeroth, visiting zones such as Pandaria, Outland, Northrend, Eastern Kingdoms etc to collect resources to build their settlement. Think food, wood metals etc. These items would be used to customise the house, set up its interior or exterior design. Players could even hang their most memorable achievements on a wall. I think this is a great way to also get the player engaged with the feature & as a way to make old zones feel alive again.
Sharding would be use to prevent players from seeing millions of houses clustering around the world.
Given Blizzard’s penchant for reusing assets, a Draenor centric Light vs Void expansion would be an excellent excuse to revisit Garrisons as an invasion kick off point/base of operations.
Sharding would prevent this from happening. But this idea you suggested could open a new style of PvP, where garrison owners flag their garrison as ‘PvP’ which allows it to be raided by other players, and allows you to raid other players garrisons and take over it.
Personally I’m all for housing, would love to customize my own place. But I don’t really think Blizz will do it on a true scale, or should do it.
It’s just a massive amount of work, players I think underestimate the scale of what needs to happen. And for housing to really succeed it has to be an optional fluffy non-required side feature. Unlike garrisons which were the opposite of that, one of its flaws.
So that amount of effort for something not central would likely take away from the rest of the end game and future content being developed. I can get why Blizz never prioritized it.
This was one of the features I actually enjoyed. For this first time in all of WoW, I actually felt like my character had a literal impact on the world around him. Not just static choices on rails. To me this is one of the biggest shortfalls of WoW compared to other MMOs. Our characters dont really influence the world around them any differently than almost any other character does.
SWTOR for instance gives you conversation options that dont change the overall story too dramatically, but do allow you to have a sense of individuality and immersion into the story to the level of which WoW has never offered.
I just went back to my garrison after not being there for years. Is there much point in spending time building it up? It seems the resources required are many expansions old.
Most of the bonuses are Draenor-specific if you’re interested in doing Draenor content. Things like the mount speed increase from the stables and the rep bonus from the trading post can be nice, for example.
The only thing I can think of that’s that’s probably useful in general is the garrison AH, which can be expensive and/or require some grinding to build.
Every player housing thread I must once again remind Blizzard that implementation of a Wildstar style player housing system in WoW would be like a license to print money for themselves.
Bliz needs to give the Wildstar Devs that did the housing there a job. I’ve been saying this for a while now.
It doesn’t have to be a WS housing clone, however, I would like to be able to pick the kind of housing I want in my plot of land. Meaning I’d like to see all the races housing open across all characters, however, any extra stuff I’d want for the house (furniture, paintings, whatever) I’d actually have to go do stuff for to acquire the things.
Also, I know people will whine about this: but no profession buildings or personal AH’s. We still need reasons not to just stay in our house all day.
With the long boi existing having a personal AH is kind of a moot point if you have that mount. For a personal AH I’d want what they did in WoD. You have to collect materials from different activities and construct it yourself. Not everyone will put in the effort to do so but for those that do they should get that benefit.
Watch out, don’t mention basic features that almost every other MMORPG has that pretty much carries their casual engagement or you’ll be told it’s a waste of resources, or that garri-
Oops, too late.
Garrisons were a garbage piss-poor not even close to an attempt at player housing, and anybody that compares it clearly has never played another MMORPG in their life, and is pretty much the reason this community is a joke. Complaining about additional features, lol.
The game desperately needs ever-green content that has a nearly infinite time sink potential. Transmog just ain’t it with how outdated the system is, but housing in combination with transmog even on older systems would be plenty to keep people occupied outside raid/arena/m+ nights, and is essentially end game in several other games for people who aren’t interested in that content.
The majority of assets that can be used for housing already exist.
It’s literally just them taking the time to build instances we can drag and drop things with, and we can just use the way that toys work already. We can already place things in the world. There’s no reason that just wouldn’t work for housing in the most simple way they can implement it.
It’s a resource sink, but once it’s in, it can be updated forever like pet battles with minimal effort. It’s not a hard concept.
To be honest i would love to see fully customizable player housing in WOW. Garrisons just didnt fit the bill. Being able to find a plot of land that can be purchased in an instanced form, build the house or already pre built, add to the house or outside the house. Making professions to make furniture or other accessories. Even activision could benefit with adding items for housing to the cash shop. It just seems weird that blizzard is so combative about adding this feature to the game.