Player Housing in World of Warcraft Recap
This weekend we're taking a look at what we know so far about player housing!
Release Date
Player housing is coming to World of Warcraft in late 2025, likely as part of the World of Warcraft: Midnight pre-expansion patch. While we don’t currently have a release date, the World of Warcraft 2025 roadmap shows it in early Winter.
Blizzard's Pillars of Player Housing
The team's goal is to introduce player housing in World of Warcraft with a player-first mindset. To that end, they have three main pillars of player housing in mind:
- Boundless Self-Expression: The goal is to ensure every player can build a house that suits their style and preferences, with personal tastes, colors, decor items, and inspiration providing the backdrop for role-playing or a hangout session with guild mates.
- Deeply Social: Housing, like the rest of World of Warcraft, aims to offer a profoundly social gameplay element where players can interact and progress with friends, neighbors, guilds, and the server.
- Long-Lasting Journey: Blizzard wants player housing to become a long-term, evergreen addition to the game, with a unique roadmap, new mechanics spread across future updates and expansions, and no "end-game" in sight.
Player Housing Customization
As of now, we know that player housing in World of Warcraft will offer "hundreds and hundreds of decorations and house customizations" available for everyone to earn and unlock via in-game rewards, quests, and some available for real money in the cash shop.
Alongside the decor options, Blizzard is providing players with all of the tools necessary to completely tailor their home’s interior to their liking, including:
- Object Placement - Place decor pieces on a grid-based snap system to ensure your layout is clean and tidy. You can also place additional decor pieces on top of objects, like flagons of ale and cooked dishes, to liven up the living space.
- Advanced Clipping - In Advanced decoration mode, none of the game’s decor options have collision, meaning you can get wild with how you interact and place items in your interior space. If you want to stick a table halfway into the wall to create a unique shelf, go right ahead!
- Advanced Floating - You can float any object, raising or lowering any decor item in the game to your liking. We suspect this will be used abundantly to craft parkour and challenge environments for guild members to tackle.
- Advanced Rotation - If you don’t like every object on a static grid because it’s too perfect, then know that you can rotate objects freely on any axis. Turn that chair sideways to give the sense that someone lives here!
- Advanced Sizing - Is your chair too small? Too big? Your dwarf hunter shouldn’t share the same chair with your orc warrior, so feel free to scale that armchair down to a more appropriate size.
- Dye - New object assets (not legacy assets that use existing art) will support a dye system. If you have a favorite color, let’s say green, but a unique decor piece that meshes well with your interior only comes in red, what then? Well, you can dye the piece in various colors, and you can even swap out the wood stain and metal hue, too.
Ceilings, Walls, and Floors - You can also swap out wallpaper, ceiling, and flooring materials to craft the perfect abode for any aesthetic you have in mind!
Exterior - Blizzard hasn't shared information about the exterior yet, other than to say that the inside doesn't have to be as big as the outside
Player Housing Styles
Blizzard has revealed the Folk and Rugged art styles, with more in the works. According to some strings that were accidentally shipped, players may also get a Opulent style.
Player Housing Unlocks in World of Warcraft
Unlock requirements haven't been shared yet, but the team did say that they want Housing to be available to everyone. To that end, there won't be any high costs or requirements to unlock housing.
Your house and housing rewards will be shared across your Warband, so characters from both factions can come and visit. Players can also visit their friends and guildmates across factions as well.
Player Housing Neighborhoods
Blizzard is working on Neighborhoods, a small zone that includes approximately 50 houses, allowing players to live beside each other, work together (in what way currently remains unclear), and share rewards for being a part of the Neighborhood (again, it’s unclear precisely what the rewards include or how they’re acquired).
Public Neighborhoods
These instanced and persistent public zones will be crafted by the Blizzard servers and maintained as necessary. They will allow players from across the server to meet and live alongside each other for years to come (unless you move out!)
Private Neighborhoods
Conversely, a Private Neighborhood allows you and your friend group or guild members the opportunity to create the ultimate clubhouse…well, up to fifty clubhouses. The group may build houses, progress through Neighborhood development, and customize the area together.
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