World of Warcraft’s Midnight expansion will finally add player housing, and Blizzard says the team has been building the feature across multiple past expansions. Developers said at Gamescom that they preferred long-term work to a quick, limited system, so housing has been quietly under construction for years.
MMOs have offered housing for ages, from Runescape’s Construction to Final Fantasy 14’s post-A Realm Reborn additions. Blizzard’s housing in World of Warcraft is ready to include Alliance and Horde zones where you can purchase affordable housing. There will also be two customization modes that let you choose how much control you want over decor, and the housing decoration system is designed to allow players to mix simple tweaks with deeper building options.
“Honestly, the ‘why now?’ and ‘what took so long?’ are tightly intertwined with one another, because we set some constraints on ourselves,” Kubit begins. “We wanted to do housing for so long, but we also wanted to do it right. We didn’t want to do a slap dash job of it and say, ‘okay, well, you can have a house, and you can customize it in one of three ways.’ It was really important to us to allow players boundless self-expression of building their house, really give them a deeply social experience, and also build something that was going to be around for the long term; that it wasn’t just a feature of that expansion that then went away when we moved onto the next one.”
Kubit adds that the team “made the decision to work on housing several expansions back,” so by rough math the work likely stretches back to Legion-era planning. Who wouldn’t want a place to stash trophies and bottles of Voidwine for a rainy raid night? Suppose you care more about Midnight’s story beats than housing. In that case, there’s also speculation about possible Sylvanas screen time in the expansion. Want to prepare for housing before Midnight lands?
Got a house design in mind? Talk about it down in the comments below – I’m curious what folks will build.
