What can we expect from Habbo & Sulake in 2012?

 

Yesterday, Paul LaFontaine (CEO of Sulake) participated in a tour around 5 different Habbo Hotels and he visited a few other hotels today. In the tours he was answering any questions that users put forward (as long as they were sensible and not too personal) and this led to many ideas about future updates that we could be seeing in Habbo this year. Just some of the popular topics of his talks were games, pets and mobile services! It’s time to explore some of the topics covered in quite a bit of detail…

 

Many users were shouting out questions that were related to clothes, such as “Will norm users be receiving new clothes?”, “Will gloves be arriving in the clothing section any time soon?” and “Will customisable clothes be introduced?”. Paul managed to answer a few questions in regards to clothing and it seems as if the different types of clothing will expand this year due to the possible arrival of gloves and with the customisable clothes idea being considered as a future update. Unfortunately, there was no say on whether non-VIP users would receive any new clothing items or not, so only time will tell on that issue!

 

Another fairly hot topic on Fansites and Habbo this week was whether a mass unban would occur. The idea was first brought up by Paul in the .com hotel and quickly spread around all other hotels with many users keen to ask about the mass unban. Paul eventually said that a “Fresh start with bans is coming!” and if the programme does go ahead “Sulake will be careful about certain types of people being unbanned.” – e.g. hackers – they’ll make sure they remain banned. Users were fairly anxious at first due to little information about who would be unbanned, but the reassurance from Paul about hackers not regaining their account was good news to all. The only annoyance from the mass unban could be the fact that many users have battled with customer support for months to retrieve a permanently banned account… it may all have been in vain if this mass unban takes place.

 

Don’t you just love them, the cute pixel pets! Many users are keen to gather as many pets as possible but a small majority claim that there are simply too many pets and that releasing more is simply repetitive and boring. Paul did state though that “New pets are coming” so it looks like you’ll have to endure a few more of the pixel pets. Horses were the main pet that everyone was focused on, (unfortunately) the horses won’t be able to fly but wings are being developed for the horses to wear… to make them look a bit more magical! Paul also mentioned that more updates would be arriving for horses soon.

 

A few of you may have seen this video today http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jba_YYPQucg which shows a staff member using Habbo Hotel on their phone (via good flash compatibility). The general reception about the idea was quite negative due to the amount of lagg the user was experiencing and there is still confusion as to whether Sulake actually plan to bring Habbo to IOS devices. Paul stated that he “loves Habbo for IOS – developing it more” and that there would be “Habbo Mobile for 2012.” However, some staff members Tweeted today that they would not be developing Habbo for mobile platforms, hence the confusion about whether Habbo is coming to mobile or not. Paul also quickly added that “Habbo might go HTML5 to support all browsers such as PS3.”

 

There were also some disappointed faces in regards to mobile platforms due to Paul LaFo announcing that Sulake are “probably not bringing Niko to android devices.” Instead they will be focusing on other mobile games.

 

Will Battleball return? What about Wobble Squabble? When will new games arrive? These were just a few of the questions surrounding games inside Habbo. Battleball has been mentioned a lot over the past few months and there is a clear sense of desperation for it to be returned in it’s former glory but Sulake still insist that they will “maybe update” it – not a definitive yes. As for Wobble Squabble, there are no plans as of yet to bring it back into the hotel and Lido Diving was not brought up in the talks we attended. Paul also revealed that a new game would be released this month and that a “very big game” will be released sometime in early summer!

 

Public rooms! Paul stated that he would probably bring back public rooms as places to meet – not simply to hold campaigns and quests in! However he only commented a little on public rooms, so we’ll have to wait and see how this idea develops in the future. 

We can’t list every single update in detail because that would fill up an awful lot of space! Some of the other things that Paul mentioned though were “a button to select all friends in console”, which has been wanted by many users for quite a long time, however there are fears it would cause invitation spam. “New rares will be released in the future” and there was also some talks about trying to make some rares truly limited as opposed to the catalogue rares that are given out today.

Finally, Paul announced that the “Illumina” (new client design) will be out in about 3 months… exciting times for Habbo users! It seems as if we have a lot to look forward to in 2012!
 

Are you pleased by the potential updates arriving in 2012? Share your views by posting them below!