At Gamescom 2025, I had the opportunity to go hands-on with World of Warcraft's biggest new feature it's had in years.
The veteran MMORPG has entered its second decade as of this year, and remains the top option for subscription-based, persistently online games. Paying subscribers get regular massive content updates which add new dungeons, quests, story beats, and other features every few weeks — with even bigger premium expansions dropping roughly every 18 months.
At Gamescom, Blizzard fully unveiled the next expansion, Midnight, which moves forward its big apocalyptic Worldsoul Saga, while adding a variety of new features. This expansion will rebuild the Blood Elf lands of Quel'thalas, which have been left untouched in-game for almost twenty years. There will be a variety of new zones on top, as well as new features and even a new playable neutral race. But none of these represents Midnight's headline act.
After decades of pleas, Blizzard is finally adding Player Housing to World of Warcraft. The ability to curate and customize your very own dwelling is a staple of many classic MMOs, and has become popularized in adjacent genres like survival games, exemplified by Grounded and Fallout 76.
Blizzard told us during a big World of Warcraft Gamescom interview that getting Player Housing "right" is part of the reason why it took so long. I'm happy to report that they absolutely got it right, but I can't help but wonder if this is part of a bigger, potentially more ground-breaking play for WoW's long-term future.
World of Warcraft's Player Housing is as accessible as it is powerful
But first, let's talk about the hands-on experience. For the Gamescom demo, Blizzard set up a pre-made house that showcased some of the possibilities, while leaving other rooms blank for testers to try out. Naturally, I made a beeline for an empty room and started messing around.
The first thing worth mentioning here is how incredibly easy and intuitive it was to get going. Blizzard cited games like Nintendo's Animal Crossing as inspiration for Player Housing, and that shone through quite clearly.
Of course, manipulating objects with a mouse and keyboard is even easier than it is with a console controller, too, so it wasn't long before I got stuck in, placing bananas on tables and books on shelves.
Indeed, I was impressed by the granularity on offer here. Blizzard gives you the tools to snap objects seamlessly into place — basic mode, they call it. If you just want to slap a bunch of cool furniture and trophies from your grand WoW adventures down, you absolutely can. But if you want to truly make a work of architectural art, the tools are there as well.
In advanced mode, Blizzard takes off the training wheels. Here, you can easily toggle on or off object and grid snapping, and you can scale objects to comically minuscule and awkwardly large. You can also turn off 'no clipping' mode, allowing you to intersect objects with each other. Most similar base building mechanics enforce clipping generally to keep buildings looking realistic and consistent, but Blizzard opted to give players full creative control over how their creations will look.
You can also click into an object and customize its colors and, in some cases, even its textures. Want an interior that is fully furnished in black and grey in full goth fantasy? You can. Want to make an Azerothian pink Barbie doll house? Go crazy.
Players will be rewarded with furnishings and trophies based on in-game achievements, including previous accolades from prior expansions.
I was impressed by how many items there were already on offer in the demo, with hundreds of objects of all shapes, sizes, and types available for play. Blizzard has previously noted that players will be rewarded with furnishings and trophies based on in-game achievements as well, including previous accolades from prior expansions. I wonder what will await me and my illustrious 20-year career on launch day.
Each object has a number that represents how much it will cost to put down. In the demo, we had '2,500' to play with, and things like chairs and tables cost like 20 points towards that cap. It was hard in the allotted time frame to get a sense of just how much this would help or hinder creations therein, but hopefully, it will be generous.
WoW houses aren't just a single room, as I previously assumed. You can connect corridors, additional adjacent rooms of all shapes and sizes, and even add an additional floor, complete with its own floor plan. Hopefully, the build limit is beefy enough to allow us to actually fill all of that space.
Indeed, given the variety of items, clipping enabled and control over colorations, I suspect we'll see impressive works of art emerge from WoW's Player Housing system — as well as horrific amalgams of giant objects and warped furnishings.
The weirdest creations will be hidden away inside players' houses, with the neighborhood outside appearing more serene and consistent, based on both Orgrimmar (Horde) and Stormwind (Alliance) architecture.
Blizzard is even tying quests and neighborhood goals to this system, too, for players to collaborate on. It remains to be seen just how much people engage with these new mechanics, lest they become abandoned, similarly to things like Guild Achievements and so on.
You can choose who can enter your home, of course. You can keep the doors locked for all but yourself, or let it be free for anyone to come and check out. It's your space, and Blizzard wants it to feel like your fantasy home-away-from-home — and so far, I'd say they've absolutely nailed it.
But Blizzard keeps saying that this is only the beginning for housing ... whatever could they mean? Let's don some tinfoil hats and theorycraft.
... But what if the system will lead WoW players beyond simply building houses?
I've been playing World of Warcraft for 20 years at this point (yes, I'm old) and have been there for all of the game's major iterations and feature inclusions. The last time I felt so impressed with the scale and scope of a new system was probably back when Blizzard added siege weapons and its vehicle system.
It's archaic by modern standards, but Blizzard has very creatively used this "vehicle" system over the years, adapting it to all sorts of quests, activities, and features. It was originally designed for siege vehicles in battlegrounds like Wintergrasp and so on, but Blizzard has adapted it to create things like puzzle mini-games, give players flashback sequences, and practically anything that could benefit from turning the player into a "pilot" of sorts.
It's with this knowledge that I couldn't help but extrapolate what Player Housing could one day morph into. Blizzard is incredibly creative with how it uses existing systems for "unintended" purposes, and the team has just essentially given players a full-blown level design system. You can see where I'm going with this.
MMORPGs are absolutely dependent on regular content, and many of the biggest service games these days tend to have a user-generated content component (UGC). The power of the tools on offer with Player Housing truly feels like they go beyond a mere gameplay feature. You can carefully and lovingly position pebbles and small trinkets on tables if you want to. It feels far beyond what other systems offer, almost akin to a true level editor of sorts. It got me thinking.
What if Blizzard let players create and publish their own Delves? For example. Microsoft tried something similar with Gears of War 5, letting players create gauntlets using a tile-based level design system. There are other games that have been incredibly successful in this vein, such as Mario Maker, where players can create crazy Mario platform levels and publish them for other players to tackle.
It's not a stretch to imagine how Player Housing could one day be expanded upon to give WoW an infinite loop of new features.
What if Player Housing could be expanded to allow players to customize dungeons, create quests, and other events? Perhaps Blizzard could have final say on what gets made public if they wanted to keep things lore consistent, for example, but there are ways in WoW lore to circumnavigate story implications anyway.
What if these player-made dungeons were just warped visions from the Caverns of Time, for example? Perhaps they could be mini gauntlets like Torghast, or perhaps even give players the tools to create their own Brawler's Guild solo events?
There are many ways this kind of system could be constructed to create low-stakes, lore-friendly events, complete with fun rewards. Roblox, Minecraft mods, and even Fallout 76's player-made escape rooms showcase the potential of UGC when you give players the tools.
It's not a stretch to imagine how Player Housing could one day be expanded upon to give WoW an infinite loop of new features, on top of the premium curated content we've all come to expect and enjoy.
A whole neighborhood of possibilities.
If you know my work, then you probably know that World of Warcraft is absolutely my favorite game of all time. There's something so infectious about the combat, and something still so rewarding about the general gameplay loop, even if the modern product certainly contains flaws here and there (and I'll be writing on those too, of course).
But Player Housing represents something quite incredible for the game. World of Warcraft has been on a mission to broaden its appeal without compromising what it is at its core. So many games make these efforts with big trade-offs, but World of Warcraft has managed to maintain its hardcore raiding scene for most, while continuing to deliver large content patches filled with new quests and story beats. And yes, they don't always get it right, but to have managed to build something as comprehensive and complex as Player Housing in the background is incredibly impressive.
Player Housing is set to become another firm pillar for the game, which has long been notorious for its difficulty on the high-end, atop its ability to require masses of free time in order to engage with it meaningfully.
Blizzard has been working hard to make sure players who don't want to raid on a schedule in groups of 20 people, and players who don't want to get sweaty learning all of the mechanics, have options too. Soloable mini dungeon Delves have been successful to that end, and Player Housing potentially goes even further, giving, largely for the first time, creative players an outlet to truly express themselves.
It could open up a huge new market for WoW, from players who like titles like Animal Crossing or The Sims. And then there are the future UGC possibilities on top as well. I had absolutely zero expectation Player Housing would be as comprehensive as it is, and now that I've tried it, I think it could end up being the most important feature for the game's future in years.
World of Warcraft Player Housing launches in full alongside World of Warcraft: Midnight, slated for Windows PC in early 2026. Those who pre-order Midnight get early access to Player Housing before the end of 2025.
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