You might’ve heard World of Warcraft is finally getting its own housing system with the upcoming Midnight expansion, and it’s been a “challenge” for Blizzard to balance accessibility with depth as well as tackle performance concerns implementing such a massive system.
In an interview with GamesRadar+ for Gamescom 2025, World of Warcraft design lead Toby Ragaini explained how there are “multiple sort of axes we need to be careful about” in designing and implementing housing.
“Performance, for one thing. WoW runs on a ton of different machines, and we have to have a satisfying experience for everyone,” Ragaini said. “The neighborhoods themselves and the houses are a challenge in terms of not being really anything like existing zones and the kinds of content that we’ve had before.
“And then there’s the sort of just pure player accessibility and the desire for someone to approach it as a novice with just very minimal sort of, you know, ‘I want to drag and drop some furniture, and that’s fun for me.’ But I think one of the beauties of what we’re offering players is that it scales to their desires.”
Ragaini was seemingly referring to the two different modes that’ll be available in WoW’s housing system: basic and advanced. In short, basic affords you the sort of interior customization you’d expect from a life or farming sim like Animal Crossing, where there’s a grid system with restrictions in place to avoid collision with other objects and janky placement. Advanced, on the other hand, is all about player freedom, removing many of those restrictions and adding a myriad of customization options. Blizzard has a full breakdown of how that all works right here.
Given that WoW came out in 2004 and is only just now adding housing despite it being such a common feature in its contemporaries for decades, there’s a lot of anticipation leading up to the feature’s release, and that translates to pressure on the devs at Blizzard.
“We get one shot at this to impress people,” Ragaini said. “That one shot is precisely why the studio poured so much effort – and as a result, time – into implementing housing.
“The amount of investment that we put into this feature… It’s launching with Midnight, but it is something that we’re going to be supporting [with] every major patch, future expansions – it is going to be a core part of the game.”
Be sure to follow the Gamescom 2025 schedule for more exciting announcements regarding new games, and check out our recap of the Future Games Show at Gamescom 2025, too.