I’ve been living in for the better part of 20 years, so it’s about time I finally got my own place. Backpacking from inn to inn across Azeroth (and Draenor, and the Shadowlands) is great, but I’ve long wanted somewhere to hang up my boots, plant some roots, and call my own. After more than two decades, Blizzard is finally introducing housing to WoW in the upcoming Midnight expansion, and I got a chance to go hands-on with the new feature during a recent trip to the studio’s Bost🦹on office.
After A Decade Of Requests, World Of Warcraft P🧸layer Housing Is In Development 𒆙
It's finally happening.
WoW is my only MMO, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Giving my Mag’har Orc Hunter his own cozy little cabin where💖 his pets could relax after a long day of grinding sounded nice, but outside of placing the furniture and painting the walls, it was hard to imagine there꧑ being much depth to homemaking in WoW. But after spending a few hours just barely scratching the surface of what the new housing tech can do, I can safely say this is one of World of Warcraft's most impressive features yet.
Barbarian Dreamhouse
It sounds so simp🅷le: you buy a houseﷺ, then you decorate that house, and that’s about it. But if you’re imagining some kind of Animal Crossing-style home decorator diversion, you’re thinking way too small. Even The Sims, which is known for its robust and customizable decor options, falls short of WoW’s new housing system in many ways. But before we get too deep into the nitty gritty of living in an itty bitty city, let’s talk about how housing in WoW is going to work.
Prospective Azerothian homeowners can look forward to developmen꧂ts in one of two new regions, depending on their character’s faction. Within each instanced zone are a variety of biome options, like seaside, forested, or mountainous, which can support neighborhoods of up to around 50 houses, or roughly 𒅌the size of a typical guild.
Notably, houses will not cost a fortune to own, nor will the💟 availability of property be limited. Blizzard wants everyone who is interested in owning a house to have the opportunity to do so. Getting a house won’t be hard, but decorating it will take some work. While the specifics haven’t been announced yet, all🐲 varieties of decor will be rewarded through WoW’s various game modes and play styles, as well as through purchase in the in-game shop.
Once you have a house, you can decide on a layout. You’re allowed up to ten rooms, which can be arranged any way you’d like using a variety of room types (large rooms, hallways, closets, etc), but there’s no reason a room has to only b🧜e one room. Using different-sized wall segments as partitions, you can turn one room into several, or reshape a room to fit the aesthetic or utility you’re looking for. This is one of the most important things to know about WoW’s housing: your house isn’t a playset to fill with little plastic chairs and tables, it’s a Lego baseplate you can build anything you want onto.
Creative Mind Of An Interior Designer, Practical Mind Of A Game Developer
Blizzard let me loose on my own home project without much direction to see how I would take to the tools. I got a hold of the vari💮ous menu and customization options pretty quickly and got started mak🎐ing my dull, but remarkably well-decorated, library.
If you’re familiar with the snap-placement system that various survival-crafting games like Ark, Rust, and Valhe🥀im use, you’ll have no problem picking up the controls here. Ev💖en if you aren’t, decorating your house isn’t nearly as complicated as the giant suite of customization options would lead you to believe. After a couple of hours of experimenting, I was placing, resizing, recoloring, and combining decor with the speed of a druid farming herbs in travel form.
The placement system is really elegant 𝐆in the way it helps you rough things into the environment and fine-tune them after. When in building mode, you’ll have a menu of all your available decor, separated by category (more on that later,) which you can click to activate and then place anywhere you’d like in your home. In the basic building mode, your objects will snap into place on an invisible grid, making it easy to line up bookshelves and tables against walls or center a nice painting on the wall.
Once you get things in the general area you want them to be in, switching to expert mode will allow you to nudge that painting a few inches to the left or right, rotate it, scale it up or down, or, if you’re feeling bold, put that painting somewhere a paintinꦆg is nevꦺer supposed to be, and use it as something that isn’t a painting at all.
After an hour or so of designing my ideal Elven li๊brary, complete with floor-to-ceiling book shelves, comfy chairs, a cozy fireplace, and a nice long table wher꧅e I can spread out my various rare documents and peculiar objects, I felt pretty satisfied with my work. That’s when one of Blizzard’s devs sat down to demonstrate what this system is really capable of in the right person’s hands.
Anything Can Be Everything
Getting back to the Lego analogy, the secret to really unlocking the potential of housing is to forget what items are supposed to be and treat them like colored blocks that can snap together to create anything. For example, you can take a night stand, sink it into a table so that just the top of the night stand is exposed, anဣd now you’ve got a kitchen stovetop. Take some barrels, shrink them down, and clip them through the night stand, and they look just like burners. At one point during the demo, a tall pole being used to represent a sup💧port beam was clipping through the manufactured second floor the artist had created in the room, so he put a pillow on top of it, turning it into a fairly convincing pet bed.
Note: This preview only covered house interiors. Blizzard won’t be showing off exterior house customization until later𝔉.
By thinking outside the box, you can do so much more with this system than you might think. Armed with new creative knowledge, I went back to my library and started over. First I used some wall pieces to change the shape of the room into something more distinctly WoW (there 🔯aren’t many square rooms in World of Warcraft, after all) and used some partitions to section off different parts of the library for different purposes. This allowed me to create a little reading corner with dim lighting and reposition my fireplace to make it look like it's actually built into the wall.
I then took window length curtains and dragged them into the ceiling so that only about a foot of each was visible, creating a decorative trim around the tops of the wall that functioned to cover up s꧑ome of my less-than-perfect seams. Before long, my little library was transformed from a box filled with furniture to a beautiful, hand-crafted WoW library that wouldn’t look out of place in Dalaran or Suramar, if I do say so myself.
While I toiled away in my library, other people around me had completely different visions for their home. One was working on a fighting dojo with a full-size wrestling ring in the center, while another was turning their entire house into one big obstacle course. With my second room, I decided to work on a skatepark, using angledꦓ platforms to build a half-pipe and increasing the size of tents and then sinking them into the floor to create little ramps and grind rails. The level of granularity in placement and customization you have allows you turn your house into anything you could dream of.
My only real concern right now is the potential for menu fatigue. With just a few hundred items to work with, I ended up spending a good chunk of my time just scrolling through pages to find things. Considering th🌸e hundreds of thousands of assets that have been added to WoW over the years, most of which will be converted into housing decor, it could get pretty overwhelming pretty fast. But this is a work in progress, and I’m hopeful the UI experts at Blizzard will find solutions.
There’s a lot more to housing than just designing your dream house, and we’ll have to see how social features, monetization, and integration with the rest of WoW works, but as far as interior customization goes, I’m incredibly impressed. Blizzard’s decor system is designed to offer as much freedom to players as possible while keeping things user-friendly and intuitive, and from what I’ve seen so far🅠, they nailed it.
Your comment has not been saved