For years, one of the most highly requested additions to World of Warcraft has been player housing. Late last year, Blizzard finally caved, revealing that a WoW housing system would be coming to the game in late 2025. Even though we're many months away, the studio has just given us a fresh taste of what to expect by providing an early look at interior decorating, which is actually way more detailed and unrestricted than I thought it would be.
Finding your own corner of Azeroth to settle down in has been the ultimate fantasy for many MMORPG's new interior decoration system.
The main thing to note is that once inside your house, you'll be able to switch between two customization modes – Basic and Advanced. Basic allows you to place, reposition, and remove furniture using a fairly standard, snappy grid system. Items will align to the surface that makes contextual sense for it (e.g. paintings on walls, beds on floors) and smaller pieces of decor can snap to and move with larger pieces of furniture if they're already placed on top of them (e.g. a dinner plate moving with a table).
Advanced mode, however, gives you so much freedom – to the point where your furniture can even defy the laws of physics. In Advanced mode, you have full control over every individual item. Not only can you move objects around, but you can tilt and rotate them on a full 360-degree axis, make them bigger or smaller with the scaling tool, and even make them float – things won't snap to your floors, ceilings, and walls like in Basic mode.
Objects can also clip into one another and the actual structure of your home, so you can have a chair that's sunken into the wall or a bed where the mattress is totally flush with the floor level.
Blizzard has also confirmed that while legacy assets will just have the one set appearance, you can change the color of all of the new assets created for the player housing feature. Our dreams of creating a garishly orange PCGamesN-themed house are now a reality. Thanks, Blizzard.
When it comes to the layout of your house, there is again a lot of freedom. You can build walls and partitions to create new rooms and areas, and Blizzard says the external appearance and size of your house will not limit how big the interior is. "If you want a huge mansion outside with just one room inside or a tiny shack on the outside but a dozen rooms inside, you do you," the developer says in today's announcement post.
Overall, this decoration system is way more liberal and detailed than I anticipated. I thought we'd get something like the Basic mode and that's it, but Advanced mode gives you so many possibilities with its surprising amount of freedom. Expect more details on external decoration, how to actually obtain decor items, and everything else housing-related soon. But in the meantime, check out our guide to the fantasy games.
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