World of Warcraft has been the dominant MMORPG for 20 years, but it’s just now catching up with competitors like Ultima Online and Final Fantasy 14 in one big way: housing. The feature will be introduced in the upcoming Midnight expansion, releasing in 2026. I got a chance to play around with it during a hands-on public demo on the floor at Gamescom, and while Blizzard has made it very easy to customize your home, I was left with a lot of questions about how housing will actually be integrated into the wider game.
Blizzard set up an enormous stage at Gamescom for streaming presentations along with a zone packed with computers where fans could play with housing for about 20 minutes. The demo started with a taped presentation about the new feature played in a little model house. The video explained that Blizzard looked to both cozy games and survival games when developing World of Warcraft‘s housing feature, and that they sought to appeal to a wide audience by offering both basic and advanced modes.
Basic mode gives you a menu of room templates you can use to build your house and a wide set of items including furniture, lighting that can be turned on and off, ovens that can be used for cooking, and animated diabolical altars for that warlock aesthetic. It also ensures your decorating follows reasonable rules, keeping you from placing a painting in the middle of a column. Advanced mode ditches those restrictions, letting you put things pretty much wherever you want, as well as shrink or grow them, a neat feature for customizing your home for tiny goblins or towering tauren.
I found the controls for both modes easy to understand and use, with the interface reminiscent of The Sims or Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It was satisfying to snap whole new rooms into place and fill them with objects that could be altered with a wide variety of colors, customizing my feasting table or the hues of my rug. By contrast, the options for wall and floor patterns felt a bit lacking.
I got bored with the demo before my time was up because I’m mostly interested in the elements of player housing that haven’t been revealed yet. Where do the items I was placing come from? Will every player be able to work from the same template, or will we craft items, buy them with gold, or earn them from completing quests? Will we start with the sizable square footage I was playing with or need to buy or earn extra rooms?
The presentation noted that players have plenty of space, so you can have rooms for all your alts, implying this will be an account-wide feature. But how will it be accessed? I was rested while visiting, which makes it an ideal place to log out for the night, but will there be portals to quest hubs? Will my friends and guildmates be able to come visit? You can build various versions of stoves for cooking, but will there be other utilities like a blacksmith anvil?
The promotional video also showed player homes surrounded by a bustling neighborhood. Will I be in a district with random other players from my server, or will I be surrounded by NPCs that I can interact with and befriend like in Mists of Pandaria? Will the area be like a garrison in Warlords of Draenor where I can add more structures that generate resources and recruit followers? Or will it be more akin to Legion’s class halls and serve as a hub I’ll periodically need to visit for quests? World of Warcraft has introduced so many ways for players to ostensibly make their mark on the world and then made them utterly irrelevant in the next expansion that I want to know how much I should care about this latest feature.
Maybe housing will be just purely cosmetic, which could give it longevity since it wouldn’t need to be balanced for each expansion. But then we’re back to the fact that I was bored with the feature after 15 minutes. I’ll need to see more before I’m ready to actually get excited about owning property in Azeroth.
