With the launch of 11.2.7 “The Warning” this week in retail World of Warcraft, those who have preordered the Midnight expansion have access to Blizzard’s attempt at real player housing. Unlike the Garrisons of Warlords of Draenor, this is a real, highly customizable housing feature where the foundational ideas are rooted in the customization and fun of housing being the gameplay. A lot of the hype for Midnight has been placed into player housing, as it was the first real feature that was confirmed for the expansion and Blizzard spent a long time putting out blog posts talking over features, how it would work, and the player freedom encapsulated in player housing. So…how’d they do?

The Basics

WoW’s player housing, at launch, is a pretty strategically focused implementation. There is a Horde housing district and an Alliance one, with biomes in each that attempt to represent the full range of racial identities in each faction. While the districts require a character of the appropriate faction to purchase a plot, anyone can live in the house once purchased, and Blizzard has built-in a strategic exit to the Exile’s Reach starter experience so that if you want an opposing district plot without a character of that faction, you can roll one, do the control tutorial on Exile’s Reach, and then bail immediately into Housing, which is kind of an interesting way to design it but glad to see they thought about it! Each player can have two plots – one per faction neighborhood – and the first plot is free (if that is a promotion or will change eventually is a potential wrinkle) while the second costs 1,000 gold. Each neighborhood has 55 plots and is instanced, with neighborhoods being split between Public (free-for-all with any other players), Guild (if your guild has at least 10 active accounts you can get a Neighborhood of your own), and Charter (as long as you have 10 signers, you can found a private neighborhood with friends and with tighter controls on joining and establishing).

The interface lets you toggle instances pretty easily so that you can fish for your ideal plot and once you find it open, clicking to visit it reserves it for a few minutes for you so that you can plant your flag. Guild and Charter neighborhoods both auto-spin up new subdivision instances at 80% capacity so the game never waits too long before making more room, so that is nice. The biggest difference in neighborhoods isn’t available until Midnight, however – Endeavors, which are neighborhood gameplay quests given by the game, which are managed by the game automatically in Public neighborhoods but managed by the Charter leader or Guild Master in those neighborhood types.

Once you’re planted, you can customize the outside of your house in either Human or Orc styles (with Blood and Night Elf types coming with the expansion) and a variety of color and accent choices along with a fixed placement budget of room to place items. All decor in the game has a placement cost for putting it down and then can be placed, rotated, scaled, and, when available, dyed to create the aesthetic of your choice. The outdoor budget is fairly low (200 value) which is understandable due to it being with everyone else in a potentially 55-home instance, so beware of getting too detailed! Once you get inside, you can plop down a blueprint by dropping rooms onto connection points as long as you stay within your room allotment, which is also a budget system with room values and a total house value – big rooms take 7 points against a house pool of up to 50, closets take 1 point, you get the idea. Decor and customization works the same inside, but against a substantially larger budget – my currently-max level house has an indoor decor budget over 2000 points and I’ve barely used half of it!

The system is relatively intuitive on a basic level but has a ton of deep nuances you can get into, and it is clear that Blizzard wasn’t just trying to slyly shit-talk Final Fantasy XIV when discussing housing – they really stuck the landing. WoW housing allows you to clip things into each other, offers full rotation and positional customization, scaling up or down of pieces – generally any customization you could want is pretty easily obtainable with a little bit of toying around in the housing interface. There are some warts on it I’d like to see smoothed out (if you have doors inside your house, they close and cannot be opened in Edit House mode, so you have to get out of that mode to traverse room boundaries you sealed in this way and then go back in, but since it all works off an instant toggle, it is mostly a nuisance as opposed to an actual problem). Compared to how Blizzard sometimes designs the fun out of things by overdesigning and pushing players to a defined and well-trodden path, Housing allows a ton of anarchy and chaos in the service of just having fun with the feature – and that’s pretty cool. Hopefully they lean into this more, especially since some bugs let you float your house and I hope they don’t try to “correct” for them!

The Impact of Housing

Housing is one of those things that I think players feel strangely about until they get to do it.

I knew a lot of players in WoW who were split on housing – people were either kind of excited about it or apathetic towards it. WoW has, for better and worse, cultivated a very gameplay-focused, endgame-centered style over the years. Hell, it is what I like about the game! Despite my engagement with housing in FFXIV, I also was kind of meh about the idea of housing coming to WoW – it sounded cool and like a good idea generally and competitively in the genre, but I was almost going out of my way to not read much about housing, not watch the Gamescom videos of it or people streaming it from Alpha and Beta testing of the expansion. It coming out as a live feature though…it has kind of become my jam, and I went from playing almost 0 WoW the last several weeks to playing a shitton of time just basking in my first house and tweaking every aspect of the build.

From a positive perspective, housing gives Blizzard way more options for rewards to players for content completion and other activities such that player power no longer has to be the sole carrot on a stick for people. Transmog could be hit or miss given that people do tend to settle on favorite looks, although the transmog system updates in 12.0 are going to help alleviate that a bit too and create an incentive structure that will get more people to want it without the crippling gold costs. Housing decor, though…oh man, sprinkle a bit all over the game and suddenly there’s a lot of reasons to go back and do old content or to do new things. Doing the Dragonflight meta achievement for a dog mount was neat, but a lot of work. Now though, it also gives you a replica of the Dragonflight Great Vault you can throw on a wall in your house, and suddenly a ground-locked mount (even one as cool as Taivan) no longer has to be the sole point of interest. Dungeon bosses drop decor, rep vendors carry decor, and crafters can make it – nearly every angle the game could increase gameplay through has something to do with housing and incentives built to entice you to dip a toe in.

Now, speaking a bit more neutrally to negatively, one thing Blizzard did that is a bit mixed is the handling of decor vendors. There’s a dizzying array of styles and things you can buy right now already, and Blizzard has placed those vendors all around the world in a way you would reasonably expect them to have been placed if Housing had existed for the entire run of the game. That is logical to a point – of course the Outland style vendors are going to be in Outland, where else would you expect them to be? – but the list of vendors is pretty long and a lot of vendors aren’t just on the beaten path or in hubs but spread out to spots all over the world, including 3 different vendors in different spots in Suramar or a spread of vendors all over Boralus Harbor. It is worth saying that there is little need to immediately go get all the vendor things and the clear intention here is that you see things you like in the preview in the Housing journal in-game and then commit to going out and grabbing the things, but early on, you might want all the possible options before locking into a style for your house, and thus you might be like me staying up until 1 AM on housing launch day to fly around the world getting one of everything so you can have the choices available to you right from the start.

There’s another system related to Decor I am maybe a bit more neutral to negative on – house experience. Housing has a level based on completion of Endeavors and first-time acquisition of green or higher quality decor items, and leveling up your house gives you additional room types as well as additional indoor decor placement budget and room budget to make bigger houses. Right now, since Endeavors aren’t available, the only way to level up your house and reach those higher capacities is by acquiring as much decor as possible – it doesn’t take all of it, and by the time I hit up all the vendors I was already at level 5 (the current maximum) even without buying everything, but as a system it does add a little layer of that Blizzard gameplay-focus that feels a bit out of line with housing as a feature. WoW players love to follow a guide through an ordered list of tasks to accomplish something, so I’ve seen a fair few players get salty that they “have” to go to all these vendors and it’s like, actually you don’t, but I get why it feels bad to people and it is certainly cumbersome for now even if I see the vision and kind of like it. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the jaunt down memory lane of going all over the world to seek out vendors and it was a bit of a fun, if brainless, activity to get my housing inventory stockpiled for the two plots I now own.

On the purely negative side, Blizzard has already prepared a new cash shop option for housing with its own microtransaction currency, Hearthsteel. I say purely negative because I dislike Blizzard trying to increase cash shop earnings by having a custom currency you buy for real money and items gated behind it, even if they are trying to create a thematic division and a sufficient catalog of stuff you can earn completely in-game. It’s the thing I generally hate the most about modern, live-service gaming – this need to constantly push for monetization in a game that continues to have boxed expansion purchases and a subscription fee. Not a surprise at this point but still disappointing all the same!

Secondly – dungeon drop decor feels kinda bad. It seems, at least anecdotally, that dungeon decor that can drop always does drop, so hey, if that’s accurate, neat. However, if you want multiple uses of a given piece, you gotta go farm it, and then you start bumping into lockouts and in current content you gotta win the rolls for it so that just doesn’t feel the best. In general, I think the game would benefit from a catalog learn and use system where you don’t need multiple copies of a thing, but I also get that applying that consistently reduces the clearly-desired gold sink capacity from purchaseable decor and so I kind of see the Blizzard side here even if I somewhat dislike it as a player.

Lastly, the crafting of decor is pretty neat…but you have to farm Lumber from the expansion-appropriate areas for a given craft, and that sucks. The game doesn’t explain this particularly well and it involves buying a hatchet in the town square of your neighborhood, then clicking it to activate a (non-displayed) tracking buff on your minimap so you can fly around and log. When you get to the wood, you have to click the specific hatchet embedded in the tree and not just on the tree, and you usually get one lumber piece at a time, which feels awful. Warlords of Draenor actually did this right, where the trees were default tracked, no item needed, and you could just right-click the tree anywhere to start the gathering – the new way isn’t difficult but is substantially more annoying and I am not a fan of that aspect of it.

My House! In The Middle of…A Dark Scary Forest!

To top off this post, I wanted to show off a build I made this week with minimal prep or planning. I was given two ideas from friends and guildies – a fight club ring and a hidden bathroom. So let’s check it out.

The front yard is made to blend into Brumewood, the area of the Alliance housing zone I am in (this is plot 0). I used an Undermine fountain, Duskwood trees and bushes, some basic stepping stones, a couple of different flower types, and the two wells from the Epic Edition preorder to fill out the space, along with moving my house to the rear edge of the plot. I used purple trim with the stone construction to give the house a dark and broody vibe similar to the neighborhood area as a whole, and used the trees in particular to block out my plot line so that it has a trapped in the forest feeling.

Inside, there is an unassuming and relatively open entry hallway with lots of light and some paintings to greet you (the paintings are animated!). They lead up to the door which goes into…

…the wrestling arena. Yep, of course.

I made this the centerpiece of my build, focusing on building a centered ring area with a barrier around it, strong lighting, seating for an audience, and an entrance stage with tons of little details that soothe my hyperfixated brain, like candles to simulate pyrotechnics, a full backstage area (which I’ll show in a moment), and increased lighting and decoration around it. There’s also a commentary desk! If you take the stage exit, you arrive backstage!

Backstage has a full assortment of simulated show prep things. There’s a ton of seating and storage, different spaces to chill in, and, most importantly, a bathroom with toilet and tub. You just have to know what book to pull on in order to use the facilities, so good luck!

The hallway on the right as you enter the arena is decorated from adventures with tons of mementos from all over Azeroth, which I basically just sprinkled in because I have too many cool things to not show off (the benefit of my 36/36 Mage Tower project in Legion is that I have every class hall already maxed out so I got a lot of free decor just for that!). This little hallway leads into the kitchen!

The kitchen is my best-attempt at using the small octagon room to mimic a kitchen, so there’s a cooking area with sink, storage for food and drinks, and a lot of “recipe” books on a shelf (nevermind what the K’aresh scroll is teaching us to cook…). There’s also a must have in any kitchen, the hidden treasure pile. Wait, do you mean to tell me your kitchen doesn’t have one? What a pity.

The hallway on the left of the arena leads to where the magic happens in the bedroom. This hallway has more crazy decor from all over Azeroth, including my achievement-reward slot machine from the Undermine raid which I wish was interactive!

In the bedroom, we’ve got a fun table area with some leftover Undermine takeout (why not?), the spoils of more class halls (the Priest hall banner, the Illidari banner, and the trials of Odyn from the Warrior hall), a Zandalari bed with extra pillows (insert the Millhouse eyebrow GIF here), and of course, a little prep corner with a modesty barrier for a tub and mirror.

And that’s my house!