WoW's new housing system is "several expansions" in the making, dev says

MMOs have long provided the ultimate escapist fantasy. You can be anyone, do anything, and live out the life you always wanted. But more so than mastery over magic and the plaudits of being some sort of prophetic chosen one, the one thing MMOs truly grant me that I'll likely never be able to experience in the real world (at least, based on how the market's going) is the joy of owning property. Whether I'm offering up bones at my Gilded Altar in Old School Runescape, or agonizing over the design of my Final Fantasy 14 mojo dojo casa house, nothing beats coming home after a long day's work. World of Warcraft's upcoming Midnight expansion will finally introduce the feature to the legendary MMO, and, speaking to Lauren at Gamescom, associate game director Paul Kubit and combat lead Jade Martin explain why it's taken so long for it to let the denizens of Azeroth become landlords.

Player housing has been a mainstay in some of the best MMOs for time immemorial. Runescape added the feature, alongside the Construction skill, all the way back in 2006. Final Fantasy 14, meanwhile, added it a few months after A Realm Reborn launched in 2013. Alongside collecting drip, decking out your condo is a core component of endgame expression. Genre-mate Guild Wars 2 took note, introducing Homesteads with last year's Janthir Wilds expansion. Like World of Warcraft, Throne and Liberty's adding housing this year.

WoW's own system is shaping up nicely. From what we know so far, there'll be Alliance and Horde zones where you can purchase affordable housing. You'll also have as much or as little control as you want over how decor behaves, thanks to its two customization modes. Considering how long WoW's been around for, it's surprising that it's taken over 20 years to hop on the bandwagon. Lauren asks the Kubit and Martin why this has been the case, and the former says it's because it's required a ton of time and effort to get right.

"Honestly, the 'why now?' and 'what took so long?' are tightly intertwined with one another, because we set some constraints on ourselves," Kubit begins. "We wanted to do housing for so long, but we also wanted to do it right. We didn't want to do a slap dash job of it and say, 'okay, well, you can have a house, and you can customize it in one of three ways.' It was really important to us to allow players boundless self-expression of building their house, really give them a deeply social experience, and also build something that was going to be around for the long term; that it wasn't just a feature of that expansion that then went away when we moved onto the next one.

"Those constraints meant this was going to be a task which took a long time, and we've been working on it for a long time. We made the decision to work on housing several expansions back, and we've been building up the tool sets, building up the arsenal of decor that players can collect, building up all the technology and everything to be able to get to the point where we're sharing it now."

Doing the napkin math, "several expansions" seemingly charts Blizz's housing plans back as far as Legion - a feature a decade in the making. For many, potential Sylvanas screentime will be the highlight of Midnight. For me, it's finally having a place for myself and the gang to hangout while knocking back a Darkmoon P.I.E or ten. Plus a few bottles of Voidwine… and several Cenarion Spirits.

If you're looking to bolster your WoW experience ahead of Midnight, then dive into our guide to the best WoW addons. If you want to get some practice in before housing drops, then hop into some of the best building games you can play right now.

How do you plan to deck out your dream house in WoW? Come and share your plans with us over in our community Discord server.

Additional reporting by Lauren Bergin at Gamescom.