So what is Origins?
Habbo Hotel: Origins is now available for you all to login to, and play through the Habbo Launcher. If you played in 2005, the hotel should feel exactly as you remember it. We’ve been meticulous about ensuring the “feel” of the hotel mimics how things were over 18 years ago. That means roller stacking, the hand, and sparkly HC badges. There are no sellable clothing items, no LTDs, no Collectibles and no pet dragons. There’s less than 10 badges in the whole game!
There have been a number of small changes necessary for the game to meet modern compliance and safety regulations: The call for help flow is different, we’ve added additional options to your profile (online/offline status, enabling/disabling friend requests, etc), support for you to manage your data through GDPR requests/erasures and forced TOTP registration/login to help protect your accounts.
Going forward, we plan to involve you - the community - in binding decisions. We want your input, your voice, and your say on the direction of what happens next. Habbo Hotel: Origins will not follow the same path Habbo did, where we go from here is up to you.
Do we introduce Trax? What about SnowStorm? Should we replace the console with the instant messenger? These are the types of questions we want you to help us answer, and we will do it through the new InfoBus Park.
The park has gone through a couple of changes. We’ve added Kiosk booths previously only used in the Finnish hotel, right now these contain supplementary poll information, but eventually will be used to access results of past polls.
Voting still occurs in the InfoBus itself but poll results will not be visible until the poll period has closed, here is an example of the new poll results window. You can see the total number of votes, the percentage of votes for each option. Each hotel will only be able to view their own hotel's results.
A question on a poll is considered a pass if all three Origins hotels have a supermajority (>70% of votes, excluding skips, are “Yes”).
The first poll.
We know that releasing a version of Habbo dated to 2005 is going to immediately spur memories of Hobba’s, or player moderators, so we want our first poll to recognize that.
Hobba’s are not going to return as they were in 2005 - the world is a different place, with much tighter controls on user privacy, and service moderation, but we recognize that Hobba’s provided a meaningful role in Habbo’s history and so we’re going to be asking you exactly whether Hobba’s should return, and if they do, what powers they should or should not have.
The poll will run for 2 weeks, to give you all time to vote. When voting you will be presented with a ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Skip’ option. Only Yes and No counts towards the vote tally - allowing you to skip a question if you don’t have an opinion or don’t wish to share your opinion on a question. Voting will require an active HC Membership.
So what’s next?
We have a small team that's been preparing for this launch for a couple of months now - most of this team have been with Habbo for well over a decade, some who worked on Habbo in 2005. We’ve dug out around 100 old campaigns from 2004-2008, and with your input, plan to run through them with tweaks where necessary.
We plan to get your support in adding content you’re all familiar with, but also exposing you to content that never made it into the Habbo, here’s a sneak peak of one such example - but more on that in the future.
We hope you enjoy Habbo Hotel: Origins as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together. We’re all checked in, will you join us?