Looking back at the Tillers farm, the garrison system, the cut content from garrisons I’ve seen on youtube vids, and just other housing systems from other games (most of which I’ve admittedly never played), I’m cautiously optimistic. I know what can be done, I’m sure most of you do too, but will Blizzard do it is the issue. They have other considerations that we might not be even considering right now, but again we know there’s a lot of potential to customize.
-Out of everything, my biggest fear would be getting locked into Stormwind and Org forever. I’d like multiple zones to pick from to place our house. My biggest gripe with the garrisons back in WoD was getting locked into Shadowmoon and locked out of Frostfire for my garrison. It was just a depressing thing to watch the WoD beta progress and come to the realization we weren’t going to be able to choose a zone for our garrisons and I wouldn’t get to have my snow fort. If at the outset it’s initially locked into certain cities but with the potential for future expansion into other disused zones I’d be ok with it, but who knows how this will play out.
-Secondary hope would be aesthethics. The garrisons were extremely narrow in their style choice: Horde got classic Orc, Alliance got classic Human. The limit to our customization was banners on the walls, what race of guards we got, and placing the buildings in certain plots. The trailer showed an elf walking into a mostly Human styled home, so at the start we can without a doubt expect the Warcraft Human vibe as an option. If they do any sort of faction division for housing I would expect the Horde to get their Orc spike hut vibe. If not, then that means Horde will be getting a Human house too. Again, if it’s just at the outset and they follow through with adding additional racial themes for the interiors I don’t see it as an issue. Draenei not having actual Draenic buildings on Draenor in WoD was a sad reality. I don’t want or need 100% new assets for housing, there are untold thousands of assets in the game they could use, I just want to be able to make it look like a place my characters would reasonably take their shoes off and relax in. I’d hope for color options too at some point, I’d really like orange instead of blue or red.
-On the topic of interiors, I don’t know how deep they’re going to get with customizing interiors of homes but it’s going to be bare bones at the start, it always is. As much as I would like to be able to turn my home into a man-cave bar, I think at the outset we’ll get just a couple basic templates, if we get multiple templates at all. We certainly will be able to place trophies on the walls, but I don’t know if we’ll be placing chairs where we want and putting down centaur skin rugs on the floor at the start. Maybe some day though.
-We don’t need resource gathering in these. It would be cool if I could display some Dark Iron ingots or an ore node of my choice with a pickaxe in it as a trophy, but I don’t need or want a basement mineshaft with a daily quest to collect 10 housium ore so I can upgrade the house. That turns it into a chore. Just use it as a gold sink like everyone expects it to be, don’t tie additional currencies to it. This was an annoying problem with the Garrison dockyard.
On a final note, I’ve made peace with the fact they’re going to put stuff up on the bnet shop for housing. Prepare for the Atomic Shop treatment. Don’t even bother trying to fight it, it’s going to happen.
it is Player Housing afterall. it’d be weird to have just anyone walk in off the streets and just be wandering through your house…