For a while, there have been rumblings that World of Warcraft characters will get a new home base of sorts, perhaps a little like garrisons in the Warlords of Draenor expansion. This new system has been dubbed housing.

In a news article “A First Look at Housing” from February 2025, Blizzard describes some of their design priorities: customization (adjusting the widest possible range of features in your house), ability to socialize (unlike garrisons, player housing is supposed to encourage interacting), and longevity (like pet battling or transmog, it is here to stay).

In addition, it’s designed to scale with the player’s interest, namely spending as little or as much time as you want on housing. However, they didn’t yet say whether it’s possible to skip entirely. If, as it’s likely, there will be introductory quests to unlock housing, it should be a simple matter to just not do anything house-related.

I mean, I am one of those geeks who will want to dive in right away and fine-tune things to my heart’s content. But not everyone cares about the same kinds of gaming. (I’m still miffed at Blizzard trying to force pvp on all players. Nope, that won’t happen; I refuse, and if it means I won’t see some of the story or get certain rewards, then I won’t. Anyway.)

To begin with, Alliance will apparently have one housing zone (inspired mainly by Elwynn Forest, with some Westfall and Duskwood sprinkled in) and Horde another one (inspired by Durotar, its coastline, and Azshara), with “more possible places to live in the future”.

It’s still unclear how the system will work exactly. For example, how players will access their zones and the houses within has not yet been revealed. What we do know is that “[y]our houses are also shared amongst your Warband with your different characters being able to come and go” regardless of faction, and that “[h]ousing rewards are also shared across your Warband”. But does that mean we can have, say, multiple Horde houses and no Alliance ones at all? They do use a plural in your houses. Or are players limited at launch to one on the Horde and another on the Alliance side?

It seems there are also two decoration themes, one dubbed folk (which looks a little more Alliance-flavored) and the other rugged (more Horde style). Whether we’ll be able to mix and match items between the themes is still unclear, though. It’s reportedly been confirmed that players will be allowed to mix and match aesthetics.

The ability to visit your friends’ or guildmates’ houses sounds fabulous. But in addition to housing zones, there are also neighborhoods, which are instanced and can be either public or private, with room for 50 houses. That raises more questions—what about houses within a public neighborhood? (Or private, for that matter.) Is just anyone able to walk right in, or will there be some limits at the plot boundary (like in a real-life town)? Will we be able to name our private neighborhoods? Or houses? What will happen to cities—will everyone just decamp to housing zones when not conducting, say, auction house business, visiting a barbershop, or training? Can we pull out mounts in housing zones? Will there even be a reason to visit an auction house in a city, if your mount can provide for you?

Currently decoration edits are divided into two modes, basic and advanced. While the basic mode allows you to quickly place items in a, well, basic order, the advanced mode barely restricts you: the post “A Look at Housing Interior Design” from March 2025 says that “[i]nternally using this, [Blizzard] employees have taken bushes and made them into garland [sic] for their fireplaces, constructed a boat’s prow from a bed, or made paint buckets into small spice racks for their kitchens.”

There’s a short compilation video of some work-in-progress customization options:

A place in Azeroth of your very own by World of Warcraft on YouTube

Looks absolutely fantastic! Even if all of the assets might not work exactly like this in the final version, it looks like there will, indeed, be a massive amount of details you can tweak, from floorplan to moving windows to placing objects on top of others to adjusting some of the colors, and more.

Another fantastic (literally!) feature is that the house interiors will not be limited by the exterior footprint. (Think of the mage tower in Stormwind.) Apparently the inside can also follow a different style than the outside, but more than that we do not yet know.

I find this concept of player housing very exciting! I’m tracking the release info, so I’ll know when to block time off in my calendar and what real-life events I might have to work around. At the moment there’s only speculation, though. The most specific I’ve seen so far is prior to the next expansion (WoW: Midnight) maybe around mid-December, while “winter 2025” is confirmed but still aggravatingly unspecific.

It’s currently also unclear whether players will be required to purchase Midnight in order to access housing.

Ohwell. As long as it’s actually a good system, I can wait. But it would be a treat to get to play in new housing over the Christmas break, wouldn’t it?

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