For almost as long as World of Warcraft has been around, players have been asking to be able to put down more permanent roots in its fantasy world of Azeroth in the form of player-owned housing—a feature that has spent decades flourishing in other MMOs following in the wake of Warcraft‘s rejuvenation of the genre, while largely being kept at arms length in WoW itself. Late last year, Blizzard announced that it would finally be acquiescing to those demands, and now, the studio is beginning to highlight how it’ll all work—and some key ways it wants differentiate its own version from similar players in the MMO space.
Today Blizzard revealed the first early details of how it plans for player housing to work when the function goes live with the release of the two-decade-old game’s next expansion, Midnight. It is, unsurprisingly, similar in a lot of ways to how player housing has worked for years in other MMORPGs like The Elder Scrolls Online or, perhaps most famously in the genre right now, Final Fantasy XIV, where player housing is an incredibly popular, and occasionally controversial, feature. At launch players will be able to build homes in two residential zones: one for each of Warcraft‘s primary factions, with an Alliance housing area inspired by the human civilizations in Elwynn Forest, and a Horde area inspired by the rocky deserts of Durotar. From there, they’ll be able to claim a plot in a neighborhood, customize a house as much as they want (using a mix of items procured in-game or via Warcraft‘s real-world cash shop), and then use it as a social hub for other players, and across their own characters, regardless of what faction they belong to. A Night Elf can’t buy land in Horde territory, but they can show up and relax among the Tauren and Goblins in a home established by a Horde character on their player’s account.
All this is pretty standard for what players have not just wanted, but come to expect from a housing feature through years of watching other MMOs adopt the function while Blizzard repeatedly pushed back on it. World of Warcraft is late to the game here, and Blizzard clearly understands that. But in being late to the game, Warcraft has been allowed the opportunity to look at stress points in the system’s adoption elsewhere, and start planning to avoid it—especially, it seems, with casting a mind’s eye to the issues Final Fantasy XIV players have with how Square-Enix handles player housing.
How Blizzard plans to approach that is two-fold in ways that particularly seem pointed at Final Fantasy XIV. The first is a play towards broad accessibility: player housing in World of Warcraft won’t be tied to players’ in-game financial status (or more specifically, won’t be restricted by “exorbitant requirements or high purchase costs”), and won’t be distributed through a lottery system. The second is maintenance: once a player has a house, they won’t lose it or their plot of land, even if their subscription to the game lapses.
“Wide adoption is a primary consideration for us as well. Most players should want a house in Azeroth, and if a player wants a house in Azeroth, they can have a house in Azeroth,” Blizzard’s development blog reads in part. “Furthermore, Housing is being designed to scale with the player’s interest. If someone wants to spend dozens of hours a week on their house, that’s great! If they’re only interested in coming and going once or twice a month, that’s great, too!”
Why that feels particularly pointed towards FFXIV players is that those are some of the biggest grumbles they have about the game’s otherwise wildly adored housing system. A house in FFXIV is incredibly hard to get, not only because a plot of land can cost tens of millions depending on size, but since 2022, the majority of access to those plots has been managed by a lottery system that holds your bid in escrow, in an attempt to mitigate large groups of players banding together resources to buy out whole neighborhoods worth of limited land across Eorzea’s myriad housing wards.
Not only is there a randomized and price-based barrier, once you do have a plot, you have to keep regularly playing FFXIV to maintain ownership—players have 45 days since they last entered their house (not just logging into the game, but actually visiting the plot) before Square-Enix demolishes it, takes back your land, and puts it back up for sale. It’s a controversial aspect of the system, one that the developers have had to repeatedly suspend in recent years to accommodate real-life events, ranging from mild things like the difficulty of logging into the game around the launch of Endwalker, or more recently when demolition was suspended across North American servers to allow players impacted by the LA wildfires time to eventually log into their virtual homes to save them from destruction. Kind of grim!
Blizzard might be incredibly late to the game on player housing, but at least it’s using that to its advantage in potentially improving on areas of stress other pioneers in the MMO field have faced implementing it themselves. Time will tell just what World of Warcraft‘s housing system looks like in-game—Midnight is expected to release sometime later this year or into early next—but the dream of affordable housing for all might be achievable in Azeroth, at least.
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