World of Warcraft copies the best concepts from other games – and makes them better. The housing is once again clear evidence of this.
With the latest presentation of housing in World of Warcraft it is clear where the journey is headed. Blizzard takes the popular feature from other MMORPGs and finally grants it to its own player base – after many years of begging and pleading. Fans immediately find parallels to other games, such as Final Fantasy, WildStar, or SWTOR. But many of the annoyances here do not exist. Blizzard copies and polishes.
Now one might say: Too bad, if a company can “only copy”. But if we’re honest, this is what made Blizzard great. Blizzard was once known for taking good and successful ideas and seeing what could be improved and refined. World of Warcraft was born out of these thoughts. Some of the developers were fans of the MMORPG “EverQuest”, but found some features so annoying that they wanted to improve it with their own MMORPG.
Therefore, World of Warcraft has always been designed to allow players to achieve success alone in the game. Raids and dungeons were all instantiated, so players did not have to fight others for the bosses – and there were no draconian penalties, such as losing gained XP or even “reverse leveling”.
The same can basically be said for many other games from Blizzard. Overwatch has clearly drawn some inspiration from Team Fortress, improving it through lovable and detailed characters and a lot of polishing – if we set aside the whole debacle surrounding the never-released PvE mode.
Back to the Roots: What Made Blizzard Great
For a while, it seemed like Blizzard had lost this talent. Now at least World of Warcraft shows: No, they can still do it.
Because that’s exactly what they have done again with housing. The first clips of the housing feature on the official WoW website already give a good insight into the possibilities that are coming.
World of Warcraft simply “sat out” this feature for several decades. While other MMORPGs experimented with housing, Blizzard waited. Now, after the feature has long been established in all other major MMOs, World of Warcraft follows suit and mercilessly dismantles what annoys in other MMORPGs:
- There is no rent. Your house belongs to you, forever.
- There is no restricted building space. Everyone can have a house.
- Extreme customization options: Size, arrangement, and exact position of all objects can be adjusted.
- Much freedom: You can create your own rooms, color objects, and connect multiple items into new objects.
While there are still some details about housing that are not known, it is already obvious: Blizzard has taken all the things that fans of Final Fantasy XIV or SW:TOR are annoyed by, combined it with everything that is loved in other MMORPGs (like WildStar) and cast it into the setting of World of Warcraft.
Some may scoff and say that Blizzard proves again how good they are at copying. I, on the other hand, say this with genuine joy – because I want exactly the features that other MMORPGs have had for a long time. Just better. Taking something existing and improving it, that’s what Blizzard simply could do. And I am very glad if they prove that again now.
