Five years in the making, World of Warcraft's player housing 'the most ambitious expansion feature ever', says Blizzard
"We knew that we couldn't really phone it in."
This week's Warcraft 30th anniversary celebration certainly brought its fair share of news, but if one thing really got fans talking, it was the tease player housing is finally coming to World of Warcraft next year. And now Blizzard has shared a little more about the "most ambitious feature in a WoW expansion ever", promising "years and years" of further growth when it arrives.
"Player housing is something that the team has definitely thought about and discussed for a long, long time, "World of Warcraft game designer Ion Hazzikostas explained during a recent roundtable interview attended by Eurogamer. "It's certainly something the community has been asking for and wondering about for a long time, and that's not lost on us."
Hazzikostas continued that while the team might previously have had some hesitation in introducing player housing, it wasn't a "philosophical" decision; rather, "We, frankly, were looking at what it would take to make it real and make it real at the quality level that our players expect and deserve... the customisation options, the underlying tech required to really have it feel integrated into the world. And in the past, many of those pieces just weren't there... That made us choose between doing housing or doing literally everything else that went into an expansion, and everything else always won out in that balance of resources."
Despite that, Hazzikostas revealed player housing is "something that we seriously began planning a design for and building out probably five years or so ago... We knew at the time this was not a feature that was going to fit within the development time frame of a single expansion, and so we've been kind of planning accordingly."
And while Blizzard isn't yet ready to get into specifics of its new system, Hazzikostas teased its reveal trailer, although not a "100 percent accurate representation of what will be seen... captures the flavour and the spirit" of what the team is aiming for. "Dare I say it's our most ambitious feature in a World of Warcraft expansion ever," he continued elsewhere, "[which is] part of why it's taken such a long time to present it... We knew that we couldn't really phone it in and put out a bare bones foundation, even if we were going to build on it in the future."
"I think anything we do needs to be great," he added, "but especially something with so much expectation and so much history across the MMO genre as housing. We know it needs to be excellent [and] it will be a foundation for years and years of further development and growth."
Player housing comes to World of Warcraft as part of 2025's Midnight expansion, and Hazzikostas says Blizzard will "have a lot more details to share on exactly how it's going to work, what it is, what it isn't, [and] where it's going" over the year ahead. "But really we just wanted to pull back the curtain a little bit, give players a peek at what's coming on the horizon, and I think, a bit selfishly, kick off some conversation across the community about housing, about what they hope it's going to be, about what they want it to not be, so that we can kind of check our instincts, make sure that we're on the right track with our ongoing development."
But while player housing might be the feature currently on fans' lips, Blizzard has plenty more in store for World of Warcraft before its arrival, including the upcoming Siren Isle, a revamped Winter Veil event, plus the return of WoW's battle royale-style Plunderstorm mode. And that's alongside next year's Undermined update, which continues the events of The War Within by taking players to the capital city of the goblin's trade empire, where - among other things - they'll be able to tear around the streets in customisable cars.
Elsewhere in this week's Warcraft's 30th anniversary celebrations, Blizzard's launched its shiny new Warcraft 1 and 2 remasters. Although as Eurogamer's Robert Purchese recently opined, "I love World of Warcraft, but I wish Blizzard would stop looking backwards".