Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Nebron]

By the way, what would you expect from player housing?
People wanted it for years now and I was always wondering - apart from RP - what utilities would such a feature provide?

[Joshuaj]

World revamp in 11.2 then? Any believers

Most likely not. The best you're gonna get is MAYBE a Northern EK update in Midnight, but that's it.

[Kiivar86]

Actually, there is still hope for console. There are rumours Xbox is coming out with a new version "soon" that is more like a console-shaped PC, which would support both console games and PC games under one platform.

If true, Blizzard could simply allow you to choose between m+k and a controller, using the same client.

Oh for sure, I do think it is an inevitability. Its an untapped market for WoW and most MMOs are on consoles now too, so it'll happen at some point. But my main thing was people going "Xbox gaming branding = console announcement" as its been that way for a year now. But eventually it'll be true, I'm sure.

Yeah, no XBOX news. Should've listened to you.

Also, it ain't a curse if there's still a chance for this not to happen.

All good! Like I said above, I do think it'll happen, but god only knows when (truth be told I am a little surprised it hasn't happened yet).

Fingers crossed. I need to be able to have a Draenei or Gilnean themed house!

By the way, what would you expect from player housing?
People wanted it for years now and I was always wondering - apart from RP - what utilities would such a feature provide?

Well, I'm a collector so the ability to display things, armor and weapon transmogs, as well as other doohickies. That was something I wish the garrison had more of, you had a few statue places and could only have one of a handful, whoopee. Even if no one else ever sees it, it'll be fun to play with, at least for me.

[Nymrohd]

Very possible, though I think players are going to want to have different housing and décor themed around different characters, so we'll see.

I'd be disappointed if we can have only one house.

[Sondrelk]

By the way, what would you expect from player housing?
People wanted it for years now and I was always wondering - apart from RP - what utilities would such a feature provide?

More cosmetics for players to farm. Not unlike how pet battles gave us the actual pet battles, but also another level of cosmetics to farm and show off.

[Khaza-R]

Imagine we get monkey's paw'd:

"You get housing finally..."

Monkey's Paw: It's faction specific housing, and you're stuck with an Orc house, and a Human house!

I mean. That's very likely for the base version given the faction flags in the preview.

But it doesn't mean there won't be new aesthetics to unlock.

[milkmustache]

By the way, what would you expect from player housing?
People wanted it for years now and I was always wondering - apart from RP - what utilities would such a feature provide?

Yea, this is a big thing here. They have to make certain to not relive the faults of the Garrison. How do they make housing something that players will want to spend time in and working towards without taking away from the capital cities?

[Zers Editor]

I have a strong feeling that the climax will partly involve Xal'atath abducting Faerin (she will get arrogant and let herself get drained, as teased during the finale of the campaign, and ripe for kidnapping) and by having her saved, Anduin will complete his supposed rebound.

[Ersula]

I'm surprised that Siren Isle is coming that late into December. Do they not expect there to be bugs that need to be fixed before they go on vacation later on that week?

Yes, but on the other hand, this was content from BFA so I'm sure that was enough time to straighten it out.

[Joshuaj]

By the way, what would you expect from player housing?
People wanted it for years now and I was always wondering - apart from RP - what utilities would such a feature provide?

Neat furniture placements, the ability to actually sleep (meaning, I want to see unique sleep animations while in bed), a garage so I could put my 11.1 car in there for cosmetic purposes (imagine seeing your 11.1 car in the garage), a TV for my player character to watch from (Like it can showcase anything on the screen, it would just be cool to have a TV in WoW lol), the ability to have your pets be placed within the house (so they can always be there without the need to summon or dismiss them), a shower and bathroom cause why not?, and those things like that.

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And yes, showering with armor on would be funny and cool

[Nymrohd]

Housing is one of those features where I think players will just have to accept that it will take ages for it to grow into greatness.
Start it out simple, and then gradually give players more and more features, variants on houses, and maybe even locations to place the house.
Let's not forget it took a full expansion for battle pets to get a proper challenging feature in Timeless isle. Before then the best you got were loads of basic trainer fights.

ESO has such a tiny budget compared to WoW and when they rolled Housing out, they had one House per zone (about 20 houses) and over 2000 furnishings.

I really hope there is strong profession integration with housing. Wonder which profession would cover woodworking needs.

[Kathranis]

Probably. But I could imagine housing being such a potentially hardware intensive feature the developers will attempt to limit how many different houses exist.

I don't know how hardware intensive it'll be since you can still only login to one character per time, and the housing will probably be instanced. They've already built everything to accommodate hundreds of thousands of players simultaneously accessing different kinds of instanced content for different group sizes.

I wonder if they'll use something like the fog walls for Delves for near-seamless instancing?

The bigger concern is probably just the amount of additional data that would have to be stored per-character or per-warband, either way. Depending on how customizable the houses and decorations are. Will you be able to fine tune and position your furniture, or will there just a bunch of predefined slots to swap out doodads?

There's also Void Storage, which has already been deprecated for Cataclysm Classic. That's 160 reserved storage slots per character they could potentially free up.

[Joshuaj]

Me in 11.1

[Nymrohd]

I don't know how hardware intensive it'll be since you can still only login to one character per time, and the housing will probably be instanced. They've already built everything to accommodate hundreds of thousands of players simultaneously accessing different kinds of instanced content for different group sizes.

I wonder if they'll use something like the fog walls for Delves for near-seamless instancing?

The bigger concern is probably just the amount of additional data that would have to be stored per-character or per-warband, either way. Depending on how customizable the houses and decorations are. Will you be able to fine tune and position your furniture, or will there just a bunch of predefined slots to swap out doodads?

There's also Void Storage, which has already been deprecated for Cataclysm Classic. That's 160 reserved storage slots per character they could potentially free up.

Personally I'd wish they use the Garrison phasing tech. If they give multiple housing options, it will be far more spread out so it shouldn't be crashing.
Also, I am using Void Storage, what do you mean there?

[Cheezits]

I personally hope housing is instanced ala ESO and there isn't any game-breaking stuff like "place your house wherever and live next to 9000 other people".

[Joshuaj]

I want a garage in housing. I wanna place my 11.1 car in there.

[Nymrohd]

World revamp in 11.2 then? Any believers

Not coming this decade.

[Kathranis]

ESO has such a tiny budget compared to WoW and when they rolled Housing out, they had one House per zone (about 20 houses) and over 2000 furnishings.

I really hope there is strong profession integration with housing. Wonder which profession would cover woodworking needs.

See, the thing with housing is it's a way they can utilize a shitload of assets they've already got built and sitting in the game files. It's really just a matter of turning the countless doodads in the game into collection objects, populating the game world with them (via drops, treasures, quests, achievements), and giving you a way to display them in a house of your choice.

I imagine that it'll launch with a somewhat limited scope in comparison to the twenty years worth of assets they've got to pull from, and naturally they'll want to grow it and implement more things over time to keep players engaged with it.

But some things I can say with near certainty:

• Players will want to be able to choose where there house is, just having instanced apartments in Stormwind and Orgrimmar isn't going to cut it.
• Players will want to choose what type of house they have -- size, style, racial theme, etc.
• Players will want to be able to actually choose the placement of their decorations so that their space feels unique, I don't think just socketing trophies onto slots on the wall will be satisfying.
• Players probably won't be satisfied with just a single warband house. It really does need to be handled per-character, so your goblin can have their house in Undermine and your blood elf in Eversong Woods, your dwarf in Khaz Modan, your worgen in Grizzly Hills, etc.

Personally, the idea I've had in my head for a while now is a "Homestead Act" system. Horde and Alliance decide to reward every hero of Azeroth for their service by bestowing them a land-grant. This allows each character to claim a plot of land from one of various zones in the game and build a homestead there. There might be requirements to claiming these plots, like driving off monsters, completing certain quests, or reaching reputation/renown milestones.

After you've chosen your plot of land you can then build your house. They could probably have whole game systems built around this. Different styles of housing for different races and reputation factions... maybe even a whole secondary profession like Architecture.

They can then use phasing and Delve style instancing so that other players can visit your house, and maybe some sort of overhauled Hearthstone or key system to give you and maybe even other players quick access to it.

At the same time I think those systems could be fleshed out to also allow for a parallel Guild Housing feature, and maybe even a Warband Barracks feature or something like that.

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Personally I'd wish they use the Garrison phasing tech. If they give multiple housing options, it will be far more spread out so it shouldn't be crashing.
Also, I am using Void Storage, what do you mean there?

I mean they can deprecate it. Most players aren't using Void Storage across all their characters, but it's reserved storage. They can replace it with a reclamation vendor to recover items that are rare or no longer obtainable and give players a chance to migrate their items out of it before removing it entirely.

[Alanar]

Undermine.

All I can say is: Yes!

One if not the last pieces of original content we were never able to go to, until this moment. Different cartels fighting over controll with their own trade princes and Galkywix return and undermine being huge is exactly how I pictured it in my mind. Even helping them or choosing one rather sounds like a cool idea. Looks like a solid idea. Undermine looks great so far!

[Cheezits]

I think house placing is the biggest jump for tech, unless it is like ESO where the house model is out in the world and is phased once you purchase it/enter the premises.

Actually placing it wherever? Not going to happen.