I live in a neighbourhood IRL, it sucks. Constant noise, always being conscious of my privacy, having to feign being nice whenever I see my next door neighbour who’s nephew keeps parking his car on my front nature strip.
My dream is to one day own a property in a rural area where I don’t have anyone living within arms reach of me and not seeing a giant apartment block eyesore whenever I step out of my front door, just pure serenity.
So when it comes to the escapism of playing any of my MMO’s, the fantasy is to own a home in a remote area, out in the woods near a water source like a waterfall or river, and live my best life through my character.
After reading the latest article regarding Blizzards intentions to force us to not only live in a designated area, but also live in a neighbourhood…any hype I had for the housing system in WoW is already dead.
Blizzard, please reconsider this approach, I know you’re an Indie company with limited resources but surely if you make the effort, you can create the tech needed to have homes in different areas. If other MMO’s who have had this (looking at ESO) for decades can do it, you can too.
I have kids that live next door who pop their heads over our back fence all the time, even though we’ve told them off several times. If we didn’t have every blind in the house closed majority of the time there would be nothing to prevent the kids, and anyone else for that matter peeping directly into our house, so yeah it’s not my imagination if that’s what you’re implying, lack of privacy is a thing in close neighbourhoods.
I like how they tried to tie logic into the limited choice options. Like just say “We want to focus on minimal variation so we can get it right producing less content and expand from there”
Don’t give the bs “we want the game to feel alive so we’re going to phase you in the same zone with the random strangers so that when half of them quit the game you’re walking around a neighbourhood with vacant housing”
If everyone gets their own instanced house, than it just becomes garrisons 2.0 and we lose any semblance of social interaction that we have left.
People are already dead silent in dungeon runs. You don’t even get a hello or goodbye anymore. It’s really sad to be honest with you, so I’m glad we’re being “forced” into neighborhoods where we’ll see other people from time to time.
Those two are antithetical to each other, because MMOs are specifically designed to promote and in some cases even force social interactions. What you want to play is Skyrim, and not a MMO.
Neighbourhoods are good for folks. But if you still insist on not having these things… don’t use 'em, and just make more liberal use of your Garrison instead.
This is a MMO, not a singleplayer game. If you still want a MMO-esque game wherein you can be mostly antisocial, your best bet would maybe be Palia and you just never ever leave your plot.
Your experience of the game would likely be dreadful, but… that’s essentially what you are asking for in regards to what MMOs are on offer.
I would prefer something like Thrall had escaped to before being found in BfA. Give me a little farm house/hut in the middle of b.f.nowhere and let me chill.
Luckily my irl neighbors are pretty solid, and none of us really bug each other. They might dislike when I fire up a motorcycle I’m working on or something, but there’s no like ugly glares across the lawn at anyone. It isn’t a subdivision (thank god) but the average house is still like 10-15 feet apart on my block. But even IRL I’d prefer having no neighbors within 1/4 mile… That would be nice
OP’s RL hermitage goals aside, I do agree that I don’t want my character to live in a suburb. I think its cool to have that exist for social/guild purposes, but I also think it would be good to have single house options available like many popular housing systems in other games.
I don’t want the neighborhoods to go away, but I hope they add other options to the game eventually.
It’s about player choice, some of us choose to be antisocial. You walk into a Mcdonalds and get people upset with you because you DIDN’T order a burger? No.
Recently there was a large discussion amongst the Hunter community regarding forced removal of pets for MM hunters in 11.1, which the majority revolted against due the implications it had on player choice.
Ultimately the solution has been to give the choice back to the MM hunters in the form of a choice node. Despite not liking pets myself as an MM main (ironic I know) I appreciated the desire others had to retain their freedom of choice.
If Blizzard plants their feet with neighbourhoods being the foundation for player housing, players like myself (and I’m sure many others) who would prefer to live like a recluse, will end up hating housing in WoW.
Keep neighbourhoods, but add a different option, that’s all.
No, actually what I want to play is the game I’ve been playing for 20 years, but not be cemented into a single playstyle. WoW is an MMO but we haven’t been forced to play with other people for a very long time, you could argue that the game could be played solo since Vanilla.
The game has changed a lot over the years to cater to the solo audience, the latest example of that is Delves. If your preference is to play socially that’s great, but WoW is not a social only game, it reaches a large audience of players with different preferences.
