Housing is the new big feature in World of Warcraft. But is it really brand new? No, because it was already considered back in Vanilla times…
The biggest innovation of World of Warcraft Midnight is Housing. It is one of the major “selling points” of the expansion, after players have been pleading for it for almost 20 years. But is Housing in WoW really entirely “new”? No, it is not – because even one of the very first WoW versions had Housing.
Where was this shown? The player Grayvves posted an old video on the WoW subreddit. It comes from the pre-alpha of the game and is therefore already over 21 years old. The short clip gives a first glimpse of how Housing could have looked if it had become a feature at the launch of World of Warcraft.
Just an idea, not a real feature
What was Housing like back then? The video comes from the pre-alpha of World of Warcraft. Back then, Housing was apparently just a small experiment by a few developers and the feature was ultimately discarded.
More than a rough idea was probably not the case back then, even if some parallels can still be recognized. The character can actually take a skill from their spellbook to “summon” a house, which then appears as a permanent object in the game world. This works – but nothing more. The house lacks numerous textures and is nothing more than a “standard human hut” from the forest of Elwynn.
The place where the “feature” could be tested doesn’t even exist in the game. It is simply an experimental environment where the developers even wrote messages on the ground with the textures. They did this more often back then to mark where certain content was being tested or simply to write “developer notes”.
That Housing was once considered in the first version of World of Warcraft could long be substantiated with the game data. Because in the game’s assets, there were some wooden beams that had the addition “Player Housing” – even if they were ultimately never used.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how much the feature has changed over the years. The original idea is certainly no comparison to the result we now have in Midnight, which gives us nearly complete freedom and a lot of customization options. But if it hadn’t gone that way, we probably couldn’t build any large, dark caves and many other projects today.
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