Why I love player housing in MMOs

As World of Warcraft: Midnight gears up, Blizzard’s released its player housing early for those who’ve pre-ordered the expansion—I won’t wax poetic about the system (even though it really is quite good) instead, I wanna talk about player housing in general:

Why it’s good, what it means, and how it relates to the broader ecosystem of MMORPGs as a genre. Because it really is crucial, even if it did take Blizzard 21 bloody years to get with the program.

MMOs are, in a lot of ways, about expression. In ye olden days of the internet, there was (and still is) a game called Second Life—this game is pretty much built on top of player-submitted stuff. Custom avatars, and, more to the point, UGC residencies that take place on a “grid”.

Crucially, the thing has straight-up 3D modelling software in it, meaning players can not only look however they’d damn well please, but they can also create spaces for themselves, too. And while most MMORPGs today are focused more on hitting stuff and gearing up, there’s a reason most of them incorporate player housing into their systems: It rules.

Most MMO players joke that the true endgame is fashion—and they’d be right, because you are liable to get so attached to your character, you’ll simply want to spend hours dressing them up. In a way, MMOs are about ownership: Here is a big wide world, and here is a character that’s yours to play with. Go play action figures with your friends.

Player housing, however, extends the power over your character (how they dress, what class they are, who you decide to talk to) and lets you reach tendrils out into the game world. Of course, in our digital hellscape, we can’t even be said to own the games we’ve got on Steam, let alone have any physical, tangible control over these virtual bits of land—but the feeling of having a place in a world to call yours is deeply compelling.

What’s even more compelling is what people do with them. I’ve been roleplaying for over a decade and a half, and over the spread of MMOs I’ve done that in, I’ve been to so many immersive places that nonetheless never saw an official developer’s hand—bar the assets that were kitbashed together to make them.

I’ve been to pagodas floating in space and grimy criminal nightclubs, ice cream parlors and parks, casinos and airships, and too many fight clubs to count—I have seen someone grab all of The Elder Scrolls online’s housing assets and, by jamming them hard enough into each other, recreated a nearly pitch-perfect facsimile of Howl’s Moving Castle.

People get endlessly creative, and a robust housing system really provides the white lie that MMOs are trying to sell you: A functionally endless world full of places to explore. You could spend hundreds of hours just combing through Final Fantasy 14’s neighbourhoods alone.

Home is the Heart

What cemented player housing as a crucial brick in the MMO ecosystem, however, was a stint in City of Heroes’ (now-officially sanctioned) private server, Homecoming. I’d reinstalled the game mostly for nostalgia’s sake, but I was also surprised to find a humble and relentlessly active roleplay community, still kicking: Galvanised by the doors swinging open to a game they thought was dead for years.

(Image credit: NCSoft)

Helping this was the fact that City of Heroes also has a base editor—back in the day, it was far more limited in how it could be used, mostly weaponised for awkward guild-based PvP. But given the resources to do so, Homecoming’s devs removed a whole bunch of limitations to both access and in-game cost.

The result was pretty absurd. Since you were able to break out of the bounds of the tiny square boxes the original base builder put you in, you could layer geometry on top of that and, well, basically just engage in level design. I knew people who spent hundreds of hours crafting sprawling cityscapes, parks, islands, and interdimensional restaurants.

All this in a game that had been “shut down” for over a decade! Point being, giving players absolute freedom in a specific box will draw in a specific kind of person: Someone utterly dedicated to creating rich spaces teeming with detail and beauty. Or they might just clip eight barrels into each other to make a dong, and you know what? Good. They’re part of that beating heart, too.

My point is that housing in MMOs—even if it’s taken a hell of a long time to arrive in one of the biggest ones—is as important as getting fat loot, dressing up your little guy, or pumping huge damage numbers. It’s the easiest way to make a game feel not only lived in, but loved: Nobody’s going to spend 30 minutes painstakingly clipping four wastebaskets into a crate just to make a stove (this is something I have actually done) if they don’t care.