Blizzard has big plans for World of Warcraft's player housing, and you won't have to wait long to see what's next: 'This is a system that we're not just setting up to last for the launch of Midnight, but for years to come'

When World of Warcraft: Midnight launches on March 2, it will bring with it an enormous new feature: player housing. The system is currently in early access, and even now there are new additions underway for the near future, as well as discussions happening about further off ideas.

We exclusively interviewed five Blizzard leaders about their upcoming player housing plans.

"We are adding the biggest single feature that a WoW expansion has ever added to the game," senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says. "We're pulling from 20 years' worth of content, from those cultures, from those expansions. This is a system that we're not just setting up to last for the launch of Midnight, but for years to come."

Vice president and executive producer Holly Longdale says the feature, which launched in early access December 2, immediately captivated both players and developers.

"I've worked in housing systems before, and I'm so proud of the team because we're almost a victim of our own success," she says. "There is a giant backlog [of requests], and I think every time the housing team does an interview or reads comments, oh, we're adding another one to the list. It's a problem for me too. I want everything now."

What is available now—a quick recap

Early access to housing has allowed WoW players who pre-ordered Midnight to pick one Horde and one Alliance neighborhood per Battle.net account. They can choose between public neighborhoods, guild neighborhoods, or create their own with nine friends and a neighborhood charter.

Inside those instanced neighborhoods, they can choose a plot and build a house, then collect decor items (more than 1,200 and counting) to add to it. Each item can be scaled, turned, flipped, in some cases dyed, and/or freely mashed with other objects or into the exterior or interior structure of the house.

Decor items have a budget number or cost, and there is a limit to the total cost of items that can be placed inside and outside the house. That number rises as you gain housing experience and move along a reputation-like renown track, currently capped at level 5. Neighborhood quests and activities aren't live yet.

If you don't like a neighbor's yard full of wooden flamingoes, you can easily pick up and move your house to another plot. For more egregious issues, reporting tools allow players to notify Blizzard of offensive neighborhood names or housing construction.

New things coming (actually) soon

The 12.0 prepatch for the new Midnight expansion launches January 20 and will bring neighborhood-wide quest Endeavors. Hazzikostas says we'll also be able to earn more housing experience, perks for the neighborhood, and a "bunch" of additional decor items, pushing the number "well into four digits."

Neighborhood-level systems will also debut with that patch, he says, without adding specifics. Principal designer and housing lead Jesse Kurlancheek says that guild halls may go live relatively quickly, though they're not expecting them for the pre-patch. Longdale tells us a housing-specific roadmap releasing "a bit closer to launch" will spell out the housing-related items coming over the next year,

Hazzikostas says co-decorating of houses is on the roadmap, so if you want help with your plot, it's on the way. Couples who play WoW, rejoice: "Co-ownership is something that we are looking at," lead prop artist and housing art lead Jay Hwang says.

Other things coming soon, either after 12.0 or after the expansion's launch on March 2 (early access for people who pre-order it starts February 27):

• New decor drops from Midnight's first set of raids, with a guaranteed number of items from each boss that has decor, Kurlancheek says. The count will scale with raid size, will be personal loot, and will include bad luck protection;
• New renown levels. Extra housing XP earned before those go live will be applied to the new levels, Kurlancheek confirms. He expects the housing journey to add 5-10 levels per major patch;
• "Exterior rooms," which allow daylight and exterior scenes indoors in houses;
• Night elf and blood elf exteriors to join the already-existing orc and human flavors;
• Generously-sized "medium" home exteriors;
• More-visible plot boundaries, allowing players to figure out where they can push the edges of their land; and
• Interactive objects, allowing players to hold a glass, a book, or play a game with their Diablo IV expansion pre-order bonus chess set.

New things, coming Soon™

Blizzard is also working on a pile of housing goodies that may not be too far behind. Import and export of rooms, collections of objects and perhaps entire houses are on the list.

"I want to share my build with someone," Longdale says.

"It's giving players the ability to say, I made this really cool room and I want to be able to share it, or I saw something that friend made, or a streamer, that I want to be able to bring into my house," associate game director and Midnight expansion lead Paul Kubit says. "Or, 'I made my chair the exact right color and the exact right size and the exact right orientation, and now I want six of them.'"

Other items on the way:

• The limits to exterior decor will rise, and the current prohibition on exterior lighting will drop;
• Mounts and pets you've collected will be allowed to wander your home, Hazzikostas says. Hunter pets and player alt characters are harder, for technical reasons;
• New decor items will also allow you to mimic other cultures and biomes inside and outside your house, including snow; and
• Flavor animations for some decor items, where you click and something happens (Kurlancheek gave the example of a cauldron that would bubble.)

Things that Blizzard is keeping an eye on (not soon)

Developers are considering more-nuanced neighborhood controls for leaders, but only if players want them. One small addition might be a permission for guild ranks that would allow guild leaders to determine whether characters can build a house in the guild neighborhood, Kurlancheek says.

Other additions in discussion, but not in progress:

• Basement levels, which aren't currently possible due to technical limitations;
• More communal spaces and event support. Examples given were a lap track, a player-controlled ticketed play on a communal stage, large-scale roleplaying events, or interactive Sleep No More-style interactive narrative houses using interactive objects; and
• Future neighborhood areas, either by expanding existing neighborhoods or creating new ones.

"For Midnight, we've dug our heels into a couple of neighborhoods around Orgrimmar and Stormwind, so that you don't have to make that hard choice of, 'My buddies don't want to live in Grizzly Hills, but I do,'" Kubit says.

A key area of focus: housing decor costs and structure

For now, leaders are happy with the decision to make housing items individual purchases (one cup at a time, for example, or one chair). But that's also something they're watching closely.

"It was a deliberate decision," Kubit says. "You can only ride mounts one at a time. Same with transmog, you can only wear one outfit at a time, so those by their definition are like, duplicates don't mean as much. With many pets, you'll have up to three of that type. That sort of maps how we treat candlesticks and furniture and windows."

Decor is also more meaningful if you can't just paint a thousand of an item, he says. Things that are being actively tweaked now are the decor budgets for individual items, the actual cost to buy on vendors/in effort, and creating clusters of items that are less expensive (flagstone paths, for example, and clusters of plants).

But all our interviewees agree that for those decisions and for future features, players have been driving development.

"There's very little that we would say, 'You're not going to get it at all,' " Hazzikostas says. "It really is about prioritization based on what we're seeing and hearing."

"Players may not know this, that in posting a goofy chair video that they've now just sideswiped our development, but it's very much happening," Kurlancheek says.

"We don't want to be overly prescriptive," Longdale says. "We want to support the things that the community decides to do. We're doing this together."