On March 12, 2025, World of Warcraft received more gameplay information regarding its long-awaited Player Housing feature that will be implemented in the upcoming expansion, World of Warcraft: Midnight.
Last time Blizzard delved into Player Housing, it described its general overall premise while teasing a Neighbourhood system. This time, Blizzard is showing us work-in-progress, in-game footage of how Player Housing will look while demonstrating its furniture customization options.
Here's everything I know so far, and I have to say, it's already looking mighty impressive.
World of Warcraft Player Housing — Basic Mode
According to World of Warcraft's official website, players can decorate their home in two ways: Basic Mode or Advanced Mode (both of which can be switched anytime at the press of a keybind).
Basic Mode allows players to quickly and easily place furniture in a hurry, albeit with restrictions. Meanwhile, Advanced Mode gives players total freedom in how they want to insert furniture and even alter their size and color scheme.
Let's start with Basic Mode. In this mode, players can place or remove objects and move them around the house in a quick and easy-to-use manner.
Decorations can be placed and moved on the ground. Decorations will move on top of other objects as they bump into them or down to the ground before they reach the edge.
You can also rotate Decorations around their "up" axis with rotation snapping to 15-degree increments so they don't unintentionally unalign with other objects in a room.
Decorations have collisions with other pieces of furniture, floorboards, walls, and ceilings, so they won't move through them.
Decorations will align to the floor, ceiling, or wells depending on what sort of decor they're being placed on (e.g., rugs will automatically align to floors, and paintings will stick to walls).
Additionally, Decorations will align automatically if you move them around a corner or snap to the ground if you move them off an object.
There are special smaller types of decorations that will stick to certain larger types of decorations when arranged on them. This means that the smaller object will stay attached when you move the larger object.
This will allow you to do things like moving an entire bookshelf with all the books placed inside at once, saving you time in rearranging each object.
The game will also allow players to open a grid that will aid them in "snapping" decorations to specific locations and keep their house neatly organized.
The grid can also be shrunken down when placing objects on small surfaces like tables so you can arrange them more accurately.
World of Warcraft Player Housing — Advanced Mode
Advanced Mode is where the real fun begins in Player Housing. It effectively removes all the restrictions of Basic Mode while giving players more customization tools to rearrange their home's furniture however they desire.
For starters, there's no collision in Advanced Mode, so you can intentionally "clip" objects into walls like chairs or tables if you so choose.
You can also activate gimbals (3D controls on objects) so you can move a Decoration on all three axes and even position them in the air as if they're floating aloft via magic.
A second gimbal can be used to rotate an object on any axis freely, and a third gimbal can shrink or grow an object's size at will.
Advanced Mode can also allow players to interact and design objects with specific controls in mind to create entirely new Decorations. For example, employees at Blizzard have created fireplace garlands out of bushes, a boat's prow from a bed, and even spice racks out of paint buckets.
This mode will also let players dye the color of any piece of furniture with a variety of colors to suit their home's theme.
On top of all that, Player Housing will allow you to freely customize the design of your home's wallpaper, ceiling, and flooring in both modes. For example, you can build a home with Blood Elf-themed wallpaper, have the roof made of stone, and have a wooden floor installed.
You can even use "partition" objects to erect walls when none existed before, so you can create rooms with extra interior spaces.
Blizzard Entertainment has also stated the outside size of your home has no bearing on the size of your home inside.
This means you can potentially create a massive mansion or a home inspired by the "TARDIS" from the legendary show Dr. Who that's small on the outside but contains a massive labyrinth of rooms on the inside.
World of Warcraft's player housing system already beats Final Fantasy 14's by a country mile
I was already interested in World of Warcraft's Player Housing after seeing it looking to fulfill 6 of my most-wanted Player Housing features, but this gameplay demonstration exceeded all my expectations.
The ways you can freely arrange, resize, and change the color of furniture in World of Warcraft's Player Housing is insane.
I've never seen a housing system that intentionally lets players "clip" objects into walls or have them suspended in the air before, and that's without getting into the ability to create extra rooms for your home.
It makes the Player Housing system in Final Fantasy XIV look so archaic and restrictive by comparison, as you can't do any of this stuff in that game. It's this kind of player freedom that proves again why World of Warcraft is still one of the best PC games in the MMO genre.
I can already foresee all kinds of 'mage-style' interiors players will make where all the decor is floating in mid-air while floors and walls have arcane energy flowing through them.
Of course, we can't get too excited as we don't know how we'll be able to fit our transmog collection, how the Neighborhood system will work, and where we even get the furniture for our homes.
Blizzard Entertainment has confirmed that these burning questions and more will be addressed at a later date.
Fortunately, we will have plenty of activities to keep us busy before then, as World of Warcraft: The War Within's Undermine Patch is now live and ready to provide players with chaotic Goblin-themed challenges and hijinks.
