On November 13, 2024, during Warcraft’s 30th Anniversary Direct, Blizzard dropped a major bombshell announcement at the end of the event – player housing will finally be added to World of Warcraft in the upcoming Midnight expansion.
For the uninitiated: player housing is a gameplay feature that allows players to buy a house and decorate it with all kinds of furniture, trophies, and other items they acquired throughout their adventures. Player housing is a popular feature in the MMORPG genre, having been in titles like Final Fantasy 14, Ultima Online, and Elder Scrolls Online, to name a few. Yet strangely, World of Warcraft has never had player housing despite being one of the most popular and best-selling MMORPGs in history.
There were plans for player housing all the way back when the game was first conceived, but we're finally going to get it when the World of Warcraft: Midnight expansion launches sometime in late 2025. So, while we wait, I've put together a list of things I want to see in World of Warcraft player housing, from decorations to purchase requirements.
1. Let us decorate our house with rewards obtained from challenging content
One feature I’m looking forward to the most for player housing is being able to decorate my house with special items obtained during my adventures. This might include having display racks for weapons and armor sets I've obtained in dungeons and raids, trophies obtained from slaying the game’s bosses, and other nicknacks like toys.
Blizzard has already hinted this will be a key feature during World of Warcraft’s player housing teaser trailer, which showed a player’s house containing the head of the infamous dragon boss, Onyxia, alongside a set of weapons, a Goblin shredder miniature, and a Warcraft Rumble toy.
What I’m hoping for with decorations is that there will be special trophies you can obtain for your house by completing old raids and dungeons and by beating current seasonal raids and dungeons at harder difficulty levels (like Heroic-tier Raids and Mythic+ tier dungeons).
Not only will this incentivize players to push themselves to tackle challenging content, but it will also give them an excuse to revisit classic WoW dungeons and raids beyond farming for cosmetic gear and mounts. Not to mention, it’s a chance to show off just how skilled you are as a player to your friends if you obtain trophies of the most challenging enemies in the game at their highest difficulty levels.
2. Player housing types – One for players and one for guilds
Certain MMORPGs with player housing, like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Lord of the Rings Online, allow players to have two different kinds of housing – a personal house and a Guild Hall. A Personal house is a home that a player personally owns and can rent rooms out to their personal friends or even strangers. Meanwhile, a Guild Hall is a house that is shared between an entire player guild.
Having both a Personal home and Guild Hall would be beneficial in their own unique ways, depending on the player. For example, a Personal home would be ideal for solo players to set up shop and relax if they want some alone time or hang out with their best friends privately. Plus, a personal home and renting the rooms out to private tenants could also be a neat way to earn extra pocket money, provided they don’t cause trouble and earn their keep.
Meanwhile, a Guild Hall would be a good place for your guild mates to hang out and set up fun group activities such as group decorating, small parties, or even fashion competitions.
3. A wide variety of interesting locales to set up houses
Another feature of player housing I would like to see is giving us a wide range of interesting places to buy and set up houses. While it is a no-brainer for purchasable houses to be set up in the home cities of the Horde and Alliance factions like Orgrimmar and Stormwind, I would like it if we could buy houses in other locales with more diverse scenery like the Dragon Isles, Northrend, or Pandaria.
We could go even further in the scope of Azeroth and potentially buy houses in other worlds like the Shadowlands or Outland. Buying houses in locales such as these would not provide gorgeous scenic views to look at, but it would provide extra roleplaying immersion for players with certain classes.
For example, you could have a Death Knight player living in a house in Northrend as they wage war against the Scourge. Meanwhile, a Druid player could live in the Emerald Dream as they tend to the growth of the new World Tree.
4. Avoid server issues from Final Fantasy 14's neighborhood system
One feature I hope World of Warcraft’s player housing doesn't have is a neighborhood system like the one seen in Final Fantasy 14. Why, you may ask? Well, during my time playing Final Fantasy 14, the leader of the Free Company I'm a part of spent TWO YEARS trying to obtain a Medium house for our group. We'd been stuck in a smaller, cheap-looking house with barely any room due to a lack of available houses to purchase.
You see, the neighborhood system in Final Fantasy 14 only allowed small, limited plots of land for houses due to the neighborhood housing taking up tons of server resources. The problem is there was always more demand than there were available houses, which forced many people to wait for literally years for houses to go on sale (which can cost people potentially millions of Gil).
On top of that, due to the limited plots of land available, players in Final Fantasy 14 could be forcibly evicted by the game and lose their house if they don’t log in within 40 days. It's gross how this feature manipulates people to stay subscribed to the game even if they don’t feel like playing anymore or just want to take a break.
Now granted, World of Warcraft has tons more server resources at its disposal, so it may be able to avoid the server limitations that Final Fantasy 14 had (if it decides to adopt a Neighbourhood system). Dynamic and clever use of server phasing could side-step issues that emerged from Final Fantasy 14, while also promoting a sense of community.
5. Don't lock player housing behind a massive grind
I'm also hoping that acquiring a house is easy. Buying a house in MMORPGs usually requires a metric ton of money and, in some cases — like Lords of the Rings Online — additional weekly bills to pay in order to maintain it.
Unfortunately, most casual players don’t have guildmates they can rely on for extra cash or the free time to earn hundreds of thousands of gold needed to buy a house for themselves. So, what I’m hoping is that the cost to buy isn’t too extreme for poorer players. Better yet, I hope players can obtain a house through a special series of quests rather than money.
A house obtained through a quest chain doesn’t even have to be extravagant. It could be a small, humble placeholder house that serves as a tutorial for teaching player housing basics to new players. It could teach them how to set up decorations, set up rooms for rent, and buy the more expensive, gigantic houses once they have the necessary funds to move into their ideal dream home.
6. Have a player's house be account-wide available with the rest of their Warband.
One of the coolest features that World of Warcraft: The War Within expansion brought is Warbands. This feature allowed a player's currency, gear, toys, cosmetic appearances, and other items to be shareable between all the characters they made on their account. I loved Warbands because it made level progression and gear collecting so much faster and more convenient between a player's main character and their backup alt-characters.
As such, I'm hoping that when player housing arrives, it will be tied to the Warbands feature. This would allow a player to share their house with all the characters they made on their account instead of having to buy a house individually for each one. If nothing else, players will save tons of money in the process if they do have a shared home.
At last, our Champions of Azeroth will finally have a place to call home
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And there you have our list of the features we hope to see in World of Warcraft's upcoming player housing. Even though I’m still a rookie to the game, I'm really looking forward to this feature.
Being able to kick back and relax in a house you own instead of resting at inns all the time in World of Warcraft would be a nice change of pace and make one of Blizzard Entertainment’s best PC games feel more immersive than it already is.
I can’t wait to own a house and lavish it with all the trophies I’ve obtained from killing Raid bosses and Mythic+ dungeon bosses when player housing goes live alongside the World of Warcraft: Midnight expansion in 2025.
