Jeff Kaplan on Player Housing
MTV's news site has an interview with Jeff Kaplan, the lead game designer for World of Warcraft, at the launch of The Burning Crusade. He commented on player housing in the game, among other topics.
Another small but potentially profound concept for "WoW" is player-generated housing. Gamers don't have a room of their own for their characters to live and decorate right now. This matters to Kaplan, who is a big fan of "Animal Crossing," the Nintendo franchise centered around cultivating a home and sense of unique, personal space. "I think housing can take 'World of Warcraft' to the next level," Kaplan said. "I want to make sure that when we introduce player housing to 'World of Warcraft' we do it right and give the feature the credit that it deserves, which is a massive amount of production time on the programming, design and art time. It's something we actually wanted to do for the original shipping game." But it's not coming, he said, until it's a "Blizzard-quality feature."
That's an interesting take, and coming from Kaplan himself, it's very encouraging. I wouldn't have thought, though, that player housing - generally a fairly simple concept - could take WoW to any "next level", unless they've got something really innovative - or really immersive - in mind.
Posted by Drew Shiel at January 25, 2007 1:03 PM
I think they should do something like Asheron's Call did for their house make. What I mean is make it where you can portal to houseing area's.
Posted by: Buck at July 8, 2007 8:44 AM
well... GET ON WITH IT SON!!
Posted by: wowdude at April 23, 2007 10:37 PM