Last year, Blizzard announced a long-awaited, long-requested (read: decades) feature for World of Warcraft: Player Housing. And now, we have new details on how it’ll all work.
World of Warcraft’s official website has just posted a small preview of its long-awaited Player Housing feature, which is scheduled to be implemented in the World of Warcraft: Midnight expansion launching later this year. The preview details what the developer’s intentions are with Player Housing, how it will work in-game, and hints on what owning a house will cost.
Here are all the important details you need to know from this announcement.
For those unaware, Player Housing is a gameplay system where a player or a guild can buy houses to live in. Player Housing has been featured in other MMORPGs like Final Fantasy 14, Elder Scrolls Online, and Star Wars: The Old Republic, yet Blizzard’s 20+ year-old MMORPG juggernaut until it was announced back in late 2024.
Blizzard begins the preview for World of Warcraft‘s Player Housing by stating that it is designed to be easy-to-use for casual players while having a ton of advanced customization tools for hardcore players so they lavishly design their homes to express their creativity.
Blizzard then states that Player Housing is built to be evergreen content for the game, not just a one-in-done deal. Player Housing will even have its own personal roadmap where the system will receive new content updates in every future World of Warcraft patch and expansion.
On the technical side of things, Blizzard has confirmed Player Housing will have two Housing Zones available when it launches, one for the Horde and one for the Alliance.
The design of the Alliance Housing zone will be inspired by locales like the Elwynn Forest, Westfall, and Duskwood, while the Horde Housing zone will look reminiscent of Durotar’s coastline areas and Azshara. Blizzard says they’re planning to make two zones to start with because they plan on taking a ‘quality-over-quantity’ approach and not spread the zones thin so players can see and socialize with each other more frequently.
Blizzard then goes on to explain that Player Housing will offer hundreds upon hundreds of decorations and customization items for your house that are earned as in-game rewards while there will be a small handful of paid cosmetic Player Housing items you can buy in the cash shop.
As for how a player acquires a house, Blizzard hasn’t stated what the actual process will entail. However, Blizzard has confirmed that Housing will be available to everyone and that obtaining a home will not involve exorbitant requirements, high purchase costs, lotteries, or onerous upkeeps. Plus, your house won’t get repossessed if your account subscription expires so you get to keep it if you’re having a break from World of Warcraft.
Player houses can also be shared with your Warband so all your created characters will be able to visit them regardless of whether they’re Horde or Alliance. In addition, Housing rewards are shared amongst your Warband so you can acquire decorations no matter what character you play as.
On top of that, a player’s friends or guildmates can visit their house and vice versa with minimal faction restrictions. For example, a player’s Human character can’t buy a house in the Horde Housing zone but their Troll character who’s a part of the Warband as the Human can, and then that Human character can visit that Horde home as if it were their house.
Blizzard then closes out the preview by teasing the concept of Neighborhoods. Player houses will be organized into roughly fifty plot Neighborhoods so players can live side by side, work together, and form a small community.
Neighborhoods will be instanced but also persistent so player neighbors can see and interact with each other. World of Warcraft will feature two types of Neighborhoods:
- Public Neighborhoods, which will be maintained by the game’s servers.
- Private Neighborhoods that are created by guilds or circles of friends so they can build and customize their personal Neighborhood without being bothered by the general public.
World of Warcraft’s Player Housing premise shows promise
From the sounds of this preview, World of Warcraft is already promising to fulfill some of my six most requested features for Player Housing, such as making player houses account-wide available for a player’s Warband, unlocking decorations through in-game content, and making houses for individual players and guilds.
The biggest request that I’m happy Blizzard is fulfilling is that players won’t have to spend a small fortune to buy a house, pray to Lady Luck on lotteries to buy a house, or be forced to stay subscribed just to keep their home if they don’t like playing. This already puts it leagues better than the Player Housing system I experienced in Final Fantasy 14 where my Free Company couldn’t get a house for two years because of these aforementioned costs that World of Warcraft is planning to avoid.
Granted, it is concerning that World of Warcraft’s Player Housing will have a Neighborhood system like Final Fantasy 14 did as FF14’s Neighborhoods had limited plots of land to work with. However, World of Warcraft has far greater server resources at its disposal so I’m hopeful that it won’t have the same problems as FF14 did.
Now, all that remains is a full gameplay demonstration of how Player Housing will work in execution and what the actual process of acquiring a house will entail. All of which will most likely be revealed in the lead-up to World of Warcraft: Midnight’s full release during the Summer of 2025.
In the meantime, we’ll be keeping ourselves busy hunting Gallywix and The Harbinger in the World of Warcraft’s Undermine Patch.
