World of Warcraft: Midnight is here, and with it the long-awaited arrival of player housing in Blizzard’s two-decade-old MMORPG. It’s a wildly impressive system that allows for boundless creativity, even if there’s still significant room for improvement.
For my full thoughts on WoW’s 11th expansion, check out GameSpot’s WoW: Midnight review, but as Midnight’s biggest selling point, housing is worth digging into in greater detail. With 20 years’ worth of hopes and dreams attached to housing in WoW, Blizzard finally pulling the trigger on the feature is a big deal, and one that filled many players, myself included, with anxiety regarding whether Blizzard was up to the task.
Thankfully, Blizzard’s vision for housing mostly delivers, avoiding many of the housing pitfalls seen in other contemporary MMOs. You get your house for free. You can put your house anywhere in the game’s designated housing area as long as the plot you want isn’t occupied, and if it is, you can just keep visiting identical instances of the same neighborhood until you find one where it isn’t. You can make a neighborhood of just your friends or guildmates. You don’t have to pay taxes on your home. You can easily move to a new plot or neighborhood. Players with millions of gold (or a higher credit card limit) don’t get to buy a mansion while you can only afford a small shack. Everyone gets the same house, but both the inside and outside can be customized largely how you see fit.
At least for now, players can only have a home in the game’s two faction-coded housing districts. That will be disappointing to those who want to be able to put down a house anywhere in Azeroth, but I found the variety in the two neighborhoods to be satisfying. Each neighborhood has multiple biomes based on its faction’s low-level zones, meaning whether you want a house by the beach, in a spooky forest, or atop a cliff, there’s a plot for you to claim as your own. The only real bummer currently related to this is players don’t have many options when it comes to the default exterior appearance of their home. The Alliance can currently choose between human and night elf-themed homes while the Horde has blood elf or orc exteriors to choose from. As a dwarf main, that’s a little disappointing. It makes me feel as if I can’t have the home of my dreams yet, though Blizzard has promised options for each of the game’s races will be coming in future updates.
Forcing players to all have houses in one designated area ensures the space is a social one. I had a great time visiting different neighborhoods and houses or having friends give me a tour of theirs, laughing at other people’s absurd creations or being astonished by them along the way. WoW desperately needed new social spaces, and housing provides just that.
Where WoW housing truly shines is in the near endless creativity it enables. Blizzard’s house-decorating tools are as robust as they are easy to use, though the whole process can be time-consuming without a few sorely needed quality-of-life features. For those who want to simply plop down some of their decor in a room and call it a day, Blizzard’s basic housing tools make it simple. For those who want to go wild, an advanced decorating mode allows for all kinds of nonsense that seems impractical until you see what a skilled decorator can do with it. Decor, for example, can be partially placed in walls or under the floor. They can be flipped upside down or changed dramatically in size. Decor can even be placed within other pieces of decor, essentially allowing players to create all-new decorations.
The tools Blizzard has given players are outstanding in the right hands, but they could still be better. Decorating can take a lot of time, in part because of what Blizzard’s tools can’t currently do. If you make an elaborate creation by combining multiple pieces of decor, you can’t save that object and easily paste it. If you want another, you’ll have to spend the time to make it again. There’s also no way to easily place multiple pieces of decor without repeatedly going back and clicking on an item in the decor menu, making the process of creating custom walls, ceilings, or floors consisting of a large number of decor monotonous. Blizzard has already announced some of these features and more are coming in future housing updates, but as it is right now, be prepared to sink a lot of time into getting your house just the way you like it, one microadjustment at a time.
Earning the decor needed to make the dream home you see in your head can also be a bit of a grind. This is largely due to Blizzard’s choice to make each decor item single-use. Unlike earning a cosmetic transmog that can be used over and over again, decor is closer to a consumable, albeit one that can be used again if you pick it back up. That means players who want to fill their yard with a particular kind of tree or have a matching set of chairs will need to earn or purchase that decor multiple times. Blizzard in a recent hotfix did make buying decor from certain vendors significantly cheaper, but there’s still much more that needs to be done to make it less of a chore to acquire multiples of the same decor.
It’s not hard to see how this becomes an issue. Blizzard isn’t shy about giving away single pieces of decor as quest items or as drops in dungeons, but those who want a consistent theme for their home will likely want multiples of these items. After all, what good is a single chair or light fixture? Buying enough decor to fill an entire room or home can quickly become a currency and time sink. I get that Blizzard wants housing to feel like a game in and of itself complete with its own challenges and rewards, but the grind for decor isn’t made an easier pill to swallow when Blizzard is more than happy to sell decor items on its in-game shop via a new premium currency. Though it might not be Blizzard’s intent, the fact that it can feel like a slog to obtain certain decor makes the idea of spending real money more appealing, threatening to undercut the integrity of the entire housing system. It doesn’t ruin what is otherwise a remarkable feature overall, but it’s still a bad feeling I couldn’t shake as I decorated my house.
For those who don’t care about housing, there’s good news–you don’t have to. Housing does touch many other areas of the game (mostly in the form of rewards), but for those who have no interest, Blizzard doesn’t make you decorate your house. You can simply ignore it if you so choose and continue to play WoW as you always have.
As for those who want a house but are content with doing the bare minimum, Blizzard’s housing system allows for that too. Joining a neighborhood and just playing the game normally is enough to contribute towards neighborhood-wide goals and earn housing-rewards through the Endeavour system. Housing does have its own progression system, but it’s wisely one that is self-contained. Those who put in the time to hunt down every piece of rare decor they can get their hands on will level-up their house faster than those who don’t, with higher housing levels allowing for higher decor limits and access to special types of rooms. That Blizzard locks some additional decorating possibilities behind a lengthy grind is a little disappointing, but I never felt like I was limited in what I was able to achieve from the start. Blizzard’s tools are wildly flexible, and it gives you more than enough decor limit to hit the ground running with your creations.
What Blizzard has made, and more importantly what its tools allow for, is an important achievement. It may currently be lacking some useful features and the decor grind needs adjustment, but Blizzard has laid a solid foundation for WoW’s housing future, one that can be improved brick-by-brick.
