The construction of the new Housing system in Azeroth is underway, and we’re taking you behind the scenes to give you an early look at what the Housing development team has been working on. Watch your step, and don’t mind the dust. Hard hats are not required.

Welcome home, adventurers!

We’re excited to kick off our first look at Housing in World of Warcraft and share some of our philosophies and plans for this new feature with you. First up, we’re focusing on our high-level design pillars for Housing as well as talking about a few key areas of Housing as we lay the foundation for future discussions. We have lots to cover, so let’s jump in!

Fortifying Housing with Pillars

When developing such a large new feature, it’s useful to start by first defining its pillars. They help the development team get on the same page before we start building, as well as providing a guiding light when making decisions and identifying priorities. It’s important to note that while these pillars are broad in scope by their nature, they aren’t all-encompassing. Just because something isn’t mentioned in a pillar doesn’t mean it’s not important or isn’t part of the feature.

Our Three Pillars for Housing

• Boundless Self-Expression: Our highest priority is to allow players to build a house that shows off their own personal tastes or their Warband’s, acts as a desired backdrop for roleplaying, or just allows players to create something in a flight of fancy. The toolset should be easy enough for someone with no 3D experience to be comfortable with and use successfully, but it should also be powerful enough that players can surprise us with their creations or drill down to get the tiniest details just right. The gamut of decor options spans not just the cultures of Azeroth but the many expansions of World of Warcraft as well.
• Deeply Social: World of Warcraft is more fun with other players, and Housing should be no different. While players can enjoy housing purely on their own, its systems are designed at a fundamental level to encourage interacting, playing, and progressing with friends, neighbors, guilds, and the wider community in a meaningful way.
• Long-Lasting Journey: Housing is being built as an evergreen addition to the game, with its own roadmap, reaching across multiple patches and into future expansions. Housing isn’t something players should expect to “finish”, but instead continually look forward to the next housing release, be it new content or systems. This is a long-term commitment for us as developers and offers players rewards all along the way.

One more important note: even though it’s not an explicit pillar, wide adoption is a primary consideration for us as well. Most players should want a house in Azeroth, and if a player wants a house in Azeroth, they can have a house in Azeroth. Furthermore, Housing is being designed to scale with the player’s interest. If someone wants to spend dozens of hours a week on their house, that’s great! If they’re only interested in coming and going once or twice a month, that’s great, too!

Zoning in on Home

We’ve seen a lot of discussion and speculation from the community on WHERE players will be able to have houses. We decided early on that there would be two Housing zones available at launch, one for Alliance and one for Horde, with more possible places to live in the future. The Alliance zone takes inspiration from Elwynn Forest with touches of Westfall and Duskwood, and the Horde’s is inspired by Durotar, its coastline, and Azshara. There are two main reasons for this decision:

1. Having many housing zones conflicts with the second pillar of designing a feature that is “Deeply Social.” In a world where players can live in many different zones, they become increasingly spread out and even with aggressive sharding, the chance of seeing other players, much less interacting with them, drops quickly.
2. Putting it bluntly, zones are a lot of work. We’d much rather do a great job with a small number of zones than do a passable job on a large number (or come up with solutions that take the player out of the world into their own personal instance of a zone). We chose these as our starting points because of how iconic they are for their respective factions and how much they feel like home to so many players already.

We’re excited for what we’ll be able to accomplish with the two zones, and we’ll be sharing more of what this means in future updates.

Outfitting Your Home

Similarly, there have been discussions in the community on whether Housing will be pay to play/win or not, along with other conversations around real-world money. We’ve been very aligned in our internal conversations that Housing is designed to be primarily player-first and not revenue-first. Housing will offer hundreds and hundreds of decorations and house customizations via in-game rewards but will also offer a smaller number of items in the cash shop as well. This is comparable to how transmogs and pets are currently handled in game versus the shop. We want to allow players to have as many options as possible for creating their perfect home in Azeroth.

A Home for Everyone

As a part of our focus on wide adoption, we wanted to ensure that Housing is available to everyone. If you want a house, you can have a house. No exorbitant requirements or high purchase costs, no lotteries, and no onerous upkeep (and if your subscription lapses, don’t worry, your house doesn’t get repossessed!). Your houses are also shared amongst your Warband with your different characters being able to come and go as you see fit (so your Orc character can hang out in your Alliance house without a problem). Housing rewards are also shared across your Warband, so you’ll be able to use your décor collection no matter which character earns it.

Furthermore, it’s not just Warbands that cross factional lines but friendships as well, so you’ll be able to live in or visit your friends’ or guildmates’ houses and their neighborhoods with minimal restrictions regarding faction. For example, while it’s not possible for your Human character to buy a house in the Horde zone, your Troll character in the same Warband can, and then your Human can use it as if it were their own.

Will You Be My Neighbor?

Before we go, we want to mention the concept of Neighborhoods as a small tease… Houses are organized into roughly fifty plot Neighborhoods, letting players live next to each other, work together, and share in the rewards of being part of the Neighborhood. Neighborhoods are instanced but crucially also persistent so your neighbors can be your neighbors for years to come (or until one of you moves). Neighborhoods also come in two flavors:

1. Public Neighborhoods, which the game servers are responsible for creating as needed and maintaining.
2. Private Neighborhoods created by groups of friends or guilds to inhabit, progress, and customize together.

So, while an individual player can have a house, a community can have a Neighborhood!

This is just an initial look at the blueprint we’ve been working on for Housing. There’s a lot more ground to cover and details to get into, and we look forward to your thoughts and feedback as we share more articles in the future.