Big updates are coming to player housing in Guild Wars 2's next expansion

Guild Wars 2's player housing is getting a big update next month, with the launch of the Visions of Eternity expansion. Players will have the chance to up sticks, trading the rustic homeliness of the existing Janthir plot for an island paradise instead. But more than just a prime piece of real estate, the most interesting part of the update is the ability to save and share your builds.

You'll need both the previous and the new expansion if you want to move to the new plot—Janthir Wilds to access player housing, and Visions of Eternity for the new map itself. When the latter releases, you can talk to Deft Lahar in your homestead to change your active plot. All your decorations will be packed away, and the island will become your base of operations.

It's a striking space, and this time all of its buildings are pre-made based on in-game decorations. That means you can remove them at will—you'll no longer need to work around a big, permanent house in the centre of the map.

Because the new plot replaces your current homestead, ArenaNet has created a way to save your build so you can easily reload it if you ever decide to switch back. The new system lets you save multiple homestead builds that can be loaded in a click of a button—letting you save multiple designs for each plot. If you're in the habit of creating themed builds around Halloween or Christmas, you can save them as separate templates and swap to them when the festivities begin.

Each build you save is stored as an XML file on your PC. That means you can share them with other players—just drop someone else's XML file into the relevant folder, and it'll be available to load in-game.

An in-game warning will let you know if you're trying to load a housing layout that you don't own all the decorations for—you can go ahead and load it with those decorations missing if you want, but you can also bring up a list of every item you're missing, giving you the chance to craft it first.

You can also modify the XML files directly. They take the form of a big list containing all the parts included in a build, along with their position. Theoretically you can use this to share specific sections of your homestead—a particular house or decorative feature—that others can then copy and paste into their own XML files.

And look, as someone who's never been particularly adept at creative building, I'm happy for the community to take the lead. Hopefully this will lead to a major boost for the community side of homesteads—letting dedicated builders share their cool creations with the playerbase at large. And it's not just solo builders that will see the benefit. ArenaNet is also porting the build save function to guild halls as well.

It certainly addresses one of the issues with the current implementation of player housing—that beyond inviting a small party of players, there isn't really any way to show off your work. Hopefully ArenaNet will continue to iterate on the feature, addressing some of the other pain points that still exist—including the decoration limit.