The upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft, titled Midnight, is set to launch on March 2. This latest chapter brings a host of new features and systems, with player housing being the most anticipated addition. With launch day finally here and players able to dive into the expansion, those who have been waiting for this feature can at last explore it for themselves.
With that in mind, we wanted to learn more about how the system works and what fans can expect when they jump in. While attending the Northrend Live event in Toronto, I had the opportunity to sit down with Toby Reganey, lead housing designer for Midnight, to ask about this long-awaited feature and what players can look forward to.
Thanks for joining me today, Toby. Could you start with a quick introduction to who you are and how you came to your current role as the design lead for housing in World of Warcraft?
Toby Reganey: Yeah, my name is Toby Reganey. I’m a design lead on World of Warcraft, and I’m focused on player housing. I’ve been with Blizzard for over three years now. I came in through the acquisition of a company called Proletariat, and I have been working on housing for several years now.
It’s been, as I mentioned, the focus of my team and me. I would have to say it’s been a great fit for me personally, because I have been working on MMOs going back to the 90s and early 2000s. So this is something that I think players have been asking for since then. So to be able to deliver a feature like that is pretty cool. That doesn’t come around often in one’s career.
I want to get into housing in a moment, but just out of curiosity, you said you’ve been working on MMOs that long. Can you give me some highlights on the MMOs you’ve worked on over the years?
Toby Reganey: So I was the lead designer of a game called Asheron’s Call back in the late 90s. And after that, Matrix Online. Ironically, it was World of Warcraft that made me rethink whether I wanted to commit to MMOs because, honestly, World of Warcraft was so dominant that it was like, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to compete against WoW”. So, of course, the irony is now I’ve joined the most powerful MMO ever.
You have previously mentioned that there have been some challenges working housing into WoW. Can you unpack a little bit of what the greatest difficulties were in trying to build a housing engine, essentially within the World of Warcraft engine?
Toby Reganey: Yeah, I think so, kind of multiple axes there. There’s the client side; just to make sure it can support the hundreds of different items that players are going to want to decorate with, and we had to be very careful about the budget. And you can see that, as you know, the interior budget is much more generous than the plot that you have on the outside. And the reason, of course, is that your interior is entirely focused and dedicated to that single space. Whereas the, the plot on the outside, you have to share with all the players. So, that’s a challenge.
There’s a second challenge on the backend side in terms of the server architecture. There are thousands of neighbourhoods and growing, and we wanted to be able to offer smaller spaces that players ultimately can feel like it’s not just their house, it’s their community. We didn’t have to do that. We could have had the homes just exist in separate pocket spaces, but we wanted to recapture some of the old-school magic of early MMOs, where you felt like there was a tight-knit community there.
The neighbourhoods are very explicitly intended to produce that again or to cultivate it, I guess I should say. You’re going to seeupcoming features that promote that. Endeavours is the first one. And if you’re familiar with it, we give people a really fat bonus if they join together with other users.
So that’s a big part of how we’re thinking about this in the long term, right? It would have been much cheaper for us to just say, here’s your house interior, and you just put a magical portal somewhere in the world, and that’s it. But we wanted to make sure that there was that social space and that sort of beyond individual expression. Housing really is about the social component.
You’ve highlighted some of the most difficult and important aspects of the system. What has been the most fun part of this project for you over the last few years?
Toby Reganey: I think because early on we said that player housing would not involve power in any way, like in terms of individual player power, it freed us from a lot of the constraints that a lot of the game has to deal with, frankly. And so we’re able to be a little more whimsical, a little more fun, even in some of the endeavour activities. If you want to do dungeons and raids as part of the endeavor you can do that. That’s awesome! But we also put a lot of effort into silly things that are more fun, and it’s lower stakes, you know; it’s not quite life or death.
From the initial data, players are enjoying that. They’re really resonating with it. And they’re doing other stuff too, but I feel like we were able to have the most fun by kind of meeting players where they are. That’s been a big part of player housing, in that it has a huge spectrum of appeal across the very different segments within the World of Warcraft audience.
Regarding players working together and things like that, you’ve talked about endeavours. I don’t know what you can share, but what are some other ways you want to bring that community piece into housing?
Toby Reganey: I can’t share specifics that I’d love to, but I’ll give you a higher-level picture. Ultimately, in the same way that the house is an expression of an individual player, we want the neighbourhood to be an expression of that community. So that means neighbourhoods will differentiate from each other.
How they do that and the specifics, I can’t focus on right now. But the first step, again, is endeavours where you’re depending on the endeavour that your neighbourhood is doing, has very different things going on, right? Different NPCs, different decorations and stuff like that. We want to give players increasing control over what they or their community would want to change or affect in their environment. We want to see if we can empower that.
You mentioned earlier that the data reveals certain things. Is there anything that has surprised you or that you didn’t expect as we’ve gone through early access?
Toby Reganey: So the big thing is that we were surprised just by the breadth of the wow audience that was interested in this. The sort of wisdom prior to launch was that housing would be a more casual, maybe solo kind of quester type experience, and the hardcore raiders would not be interested.
But that’s not been the case. Every single major segment of the World of Warcraft audience is interested. But separate from that, World of Warcraft is driven by motivating players personally by rewarding them, right? You do something, and you get a reward. A lot of the rewards of housing are intrinsic, right? There’s no reward whether you put the rug over there or over there. That is entirely up to you and what you want to do.
There was uncertainty about whether World of Warcraft players would bother. If there’s no benefit for me in putting the rug anywhere, it doesn’t matter. I won’t do it. And that hasn’t been the case at all. There’s this sort of surprise and also a breath of relief that World of Warcraft players are just like anyone else. They’ll take the time to invest in something if they think it’s theirs.
So what happens now is you’ve got mounts and transmogs, which were always kind of the two big ways that players kind of express themselves and now housing. So we’ve added another axis to that dimension.
What’s on your wish list? And I’m not asking for confirmation of features. I’m just curious. What’s on your wish list moving forward? What would you like to see long-term in housing?
Toby Reganey: So I am excited because we’re not just talking about Midnight cadence of patches for player housing. We’re talking about expansions 13 and 14. There’s a momentum there. My hope is that players continue to engage with the feature and show the enthusiasm and excitement, because we want to support that, right?
I want to support that. I want to be able to give players more options, more flexibility, and more opportunities to express themselves in their community, in a way that isn’t a grind you feel like, “oh, I have to do this because I need this thing to give me the 0.5%”. It’s very much in that category of, “No, I’m doing this because it’s cool”. And I want to maintain that perspective. That’s really cool.
Final question for you. What are you going to level first through the Midnight Expansion?
You know, I love that Devourer spec. I just think it’s cool. Right? The visuals are amazing. I have no idea if it’ll fit in the meta or whatever, but I kind of don’t care. I’m just like, I’m going to do that.
Thanks to Toby Reganey for taking the time to answer our questions about World of Warcraft Housing in the upcoming expansion, Midnight. Be sure to keep a lookout for our review in the coming weeks, and for all things Gaming and culture, keep the browser bookmarked to cgmagonline.com.
