A new housing system will be coming to the land of Azeroth in World of Warcraft, and Blizzard shared some details on how it will work earlier today, along with a little bit of shade towards rival MMO Final Fantasy XIV. In the blog post, the housing is described as having a “wide adoption” focus, being accessible to any and all players who want go get a house. In this section, they explicitly state “no exorbitant requirements or high purchase costs, no lotteries […] and if your subscription lapses […] your house doesn’t get repossessed”. Ouch!
For those unaware, Final Fantasy XIV has an infamously bad housing system. Plots of land are limited and are given on a first come first serve basis. Players without a home must then join a lottery to try and get to purchase a house when one gets freed up by another player going a month without being subscribed to the game. If you yourself then go a month without playing, your house is taken and put back to the lottery. It’s severely off-putting system for those trying to join the digital housing market (yes this is a real sentence), and one that World of Warcraft explicitly calls out in trying to avoid it.
Houses in World of Warcraft will apparently be widely customizable, and shared across your characters. This means that despite there being one Alliance and one Hoard housing zone each, characters of opposing factions will be able to still use the same houses you own regardless of how they align in the story.
In the future, more housing districts will become available for all players, but to start there will be only two. These housing zones will have Neighborhoods, which will home roughly fifty plots each, and can be either public or made private to share with guilds or friends – another feature Final Fantasy XIV is missing!
Are you interested in trying out the new social offering for World of Warcraft? Are you happy to see the lessons they seem to have learned from Final Fantasy XIV? Let us know in the comments below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more breaking gaming news and coverage!
“We won’t repo your house. But your nick, that we’ll totally erase if you haven’t played in a while.”
So if everyone in your neighborhood quits playing, will you be there completely alone?