WoW Housing Is Finally Here, But There Is A Crack In The Foundation

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But Garrisons quickly became more of a lesson in what Blizzard shouldn’t do when it came to player housing. Barely customizable, Garrisons were also extremely isolating. With access to so many amenities in one, private location, players didn’t need to be out in the world or hanging out in one of WoW’s capital cities. Garrisons whetted players appetites for housing, but whenever Blizzard was asked about when a proper housing system might arrive, it always replied that it wanted to do the feature justice and was waiting for the right moment to make it happen.

That time is, at long last, now. Blizzard is hoping to not only avoid the pitfalls of Garrisons but also those of other MMOs with its take on virtual-home ownership. Ahead of housing’s early-access launch on December 2 as part of WoW’s 11.2.7 patch, GameSpot had the chance to sit down with WoW housing principal game designer Jesse Kurlancheek and housing senior UX designer Joanna Gianulis to discuss what it’s like to work on the most-anticipated feature in WoW history and the philosophy behind Blizzard’s approach. We also dive into aspects of Blizzard’s housing plans that players have some concerns about, like why Blizzard opted to tie a progression system to housing and why it thinks a controversial new premium currency used to buy housing items on the game’s shop is necessary.

A Home For Everyone

WoW hasn’t stopped being the top MMO on the block since its release in 2004, but plenty of its rivals beat it to the punch when it came to housing. Games like Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn, The Elder Scrolls Online, New World, and even Old School RuneScape all have their own take on player housing.

While every game approaches housing differently, WoW’s version of the feature immediately differentiates itself in one, huge way–everyone who wants a house can easily get one. In FF14, houses are costly and limited in number, with players having to enter a lottery for the chance to buy one. Snagging a starter home (or rather, a starter room) in ESO is fairly easy, but a larger apartment, house, or mansion will cost players significantly more. The same applies in New World, where owners additionally have to pay taxes on their virtual real estate, lest they lose access to housing bonuses, the ability to decorate, or invite others to their digital homestead. In Old School RuneScape, houses cost money depending on the location, with additional rooms costing even more.

By comparison, a house in WoW costs a measly 1,000 gold to purchase. That may have been a pretty penny back in the vanilla WoW days, but in 2025, players can easily snag close to 1,000 gold from a single World Quest. Houses are, effectively, free.

Additionally, size doesn’t matter in Azeroth (at least when it comes to houses). Homes all cost the same, regardless of where they are located in the housing neighborhood or what they look like on the outside. On the inside, players can have a small, single room or a lavish, multistory mansion. It’s all up to players, and it’s all the same price (though furnishing a massive home is another story entirely). If someone has already built a house in a spot coveted by another player, they can simply travel to another neighborhood where that housing plot is open. There is no scarcity or competition here.

Making a house easily available to every player who wanted one was always the goal from the very earliest design pitches for the modern incarnation of WoW housing, Kurlancheek said, so much so that it was the first bullet point on the first slide of the initial pitch presentation.

“The idea that someone who has been playing WoW for 21 years, who has thought of Azeroth as their home for that amount of time, to not have a home, just felt so wrong,” Kurlancheek said.

Even attaching a 100,000 gold cost, a reasonable price tag for most longtime WoW players, could result in some newer players having to farm gold, something Kurlancheek said wouldn’t “feel good.” Blizzard didn’t want to translate the stress of real home ownership, with taxes and mortgage payments, into Azeroth.

“I don’t want to take chores from the real world and suffuse my online gaming with them,” Kurlandcheek said. “That sort of accessibility, availability, of this new major pillar of WoW, it was really important for us to give everyone a shot.”

Becoming A Housing Main

Aside from making it available to every player, Blizzard also knew housing needed to scale to all types of players, from those content with having a one-room home with a table and a few chairs all the way to players who want to spend dozens of hours a week working on their dream mansion.

The housing system’s decorating tools allow for both extremes. On the surface, decorating one’s home can be extremely straightforward, with the ability to snap items and decorations to a grid using the basic decorating mode and call it a day. But for those who want to get into the nitty-gritty details, an advanced mode allows for all kinds of precision tools, like the ability to turn off object collision and resize and rotate items as players see fit.

“We worked really, really hard to get basic mode as comprehensive as we could and work as well as we could…but we ended up really wanting to add in the advanced mode for players who wanted to take that step and go that extra level,” Gianulis said. “And we’re all glad that we did.”

The results already speak for themselves. Even in the Midnight alpha and beta, players wasted no time putting the housing decorating system through its paces, creating feats of home engineering that prove just how powerful Blizzard’s tools can be in the right creative hands.

Striking that balance, of catering both to the players who may become housing “mains” and those who use it more casually, was a challenge, Gianulis said.

“We know a lot of WoW players, this is the game they play and they maybe haven’t played other housing games,” Gianulis said. “It should feel good to them, it should feel natural. They shouldn’t have to learn how to play this whole new game within a game.”

Housing will have a progression system to keep players leveling up their house’s capabilities, with players over time unlocking new types of rooms, the option to add more rooms, and the ability to place more decor items within their house. The fact that some of these options have to be unlocked, rather than being available from the start, has been a debated topic among WoW’s playerbase, but Kurlancheek said there is logic behind the system.

“There’s a fine line there,” Kurlancheek said. “On day one, if you came in and literally every option was unlocked from the get go, you have all the space that’s possible, it’s overwhelming in a lot of ways. You get analysis paralysis…I have 10,000 decor I can place and a house that can have 50 rooms. That’s kind of a lot to take in.”

For those who have played WoW for decades, they’ll likely start with their house level at three or four, with more options and freedom from the get-go, Kurlancheek said.

“We respect that past effort,” Kurlancheek said. “But progression is ultimately still important. You still want to unlock the skybox room, unlock the night room, unlock these other aspects of housing. We still want you to have goals.”

Housing is intended as an evergreen pillar of the game going forward, and as such, the house level system will continue to expand in future updates and expansions, Gianulis said.

“We want it to feel like it’s always been a part of the game and always will [be], so that means we’re going to be adding maybe more house levels, maybe other things,” Gianulis said.

The Hearthsteel Debate

If there is one potential pitfall Blizzard may fall into with housing, it’s in how it monetizes it. Blizzard was upfront early on with players that it would sell some housing-related items (though the majority of housing items are earnable in-game) on the in-game shop. This was expected. Blizzard has sold various mounts and cosmetic items for real money on WoW’s in-game shop for over a decade at this point.

What wasn’t known until more recently, however, was that those housing items would only be purchasable with a new premium currency called Hearthsteel. After a datamine revealed the currency, Blizzard attempted to explain its reasoning in an ill-received blog post that attempted to justify the need for a premium currency (something typically associated with mobile or free-to-play games, of which WoW is neither). The blog post stated that the use of Hearthsteel would make purchasing multiple, inexpensive items more “efficient” and that bundles of Hearthsteel available for purchase would align with item costs in a “player-friendly way.”

Feedback to Hearthsteel has been largely negative, threatening to dampen the excitement surrounding the arrival of WoW’s most-requested feature. When asked to further explain the need for Hearthsteel, and if Blizzard would be looking to rethink its approach, Kurlancheek echoed many of the blog post’s points.

He said the currency was needed for convenience, as the Battle.net shop doesn’t have a shopping cart feature to batch together multiple small purchases into one transaction. He also said there are “regulatory hurdles” Blizzard has to be mindful of when it comes to real-money purchases. Using Hearthsteel allows Blizzard to more easily issue refunds, as an example, instead of making players jump through hoops to return a chair they didn’t like.

He said that Blizzard is attempting to be as “player friendly as possible” by aligning Hearthsteel amounts with item prices so that players won’t have awkward amounts of currency left over or feel the need to strategically buy bundles in order to get the correct amount of currency.

“It’s all been in service of making this a good experience for players,” Kurlancheek said.

Part of the need from Hearthsteel stems from the need to make multiple, small transactions more convenient, Kurlancheek said. When asked if players could instead pay a higher price to gain multiple, or even unlimited, uses of an item (as opposed to only being able to buy them one at a time), and thus eliminate the need for a virtual currency, Kurlancheek said he believed it would result in “inflated prices we don’t feel good about charging.”

It didn’t sound like players should expect changes to Hearthsteel when housing launches, but Kurlancheek didn’t close the door entirely on the subject.

“I think everything in housing is an iterative process,” Kurlancheek said. “We listen to the feedback, we see what players are clamoring for, what’s not working for them, what’s causing friction, and so on, and I don’t think the shop is any different.”

Whether or not Hearthsteel will see changes, it’s clear that the arrival of housing signals a new era for WoW, in more ways than one. Only time will tell how housing will evolve over time, but it’s clear Blizzard has crafted a solid base for the feature to be built upon in the months and years to come, even if Hearthsteel could potentially become a major crack in housing’s foundation.

WoW players who preorder Midnight can buy their home starting on December 2, and Blizzard has released a step-by-step housing guide for those looking to get started as soon as possible. The patch will also introduce a prologue questline for the next expansion and a revamped new-and-returning-player experience. As for Midnight proper, the expansion was recently revealed to be launching on March 2, 2026.