World of Warcraft's housing is one of the game's biggest swings yet

Next expansion Midnight is overshadowed by a feature that’s already in the game

It’s not often that a World of Warcraft expansion includes a feature so seismic to the 21-year-old massively multiplayer game that it gets top billing — above the storyline, the new questing zones, the raids, the other new gameplay systems and updates, everything. It’s not often that the feature gets revealed separately and even launched separately, coming out three months before the expansion release date and six weeks before the pre-patch that will add all the other tweaks and features that aren’t specific to the new content.

But that’s how it is with WoW’s new housing feature. Housing is technically part of the 11th expansion Midnight; you will need to own the expansion to purchase and customize a house, although not to experience housing in holistic ways like visiting friends’ houses or collecting décor items on your travels. But it stands apart from Midnight as a freestanding feature that reaches deep into every area and era of the game. It’s more like the mount collecting, or the crafting professions, or the Pokémon-style pet battling, but even these comparisons don’t really cover it. It’s a whole new playstyle — maybe a whole new lifestyle.

Housing is WoW as a cozy game, like Animal Crossing, or maybe as a gently structured version of Minecraft’s Creative Mode. It’s also, true to WoW’s own spirit, a collectathon of quite staggering proportions.

Housing is in the game now; it was added back in December for players who preordered Midnight. It has its own development roadmap stretching years into the future. In its current form, it’s pretty robust, although missing a major community progression system that will be added in next week’s Midnight pre-patch.

A smooth questline walks you through your first (free) acquisition of a plot of land in a Neighborhood of a few dozen random players. (You can also form neighborhoods with your guild or, in the future, with ad hoc groups of friends.) There’s no lottery or extortionate real-estate market; everyone can have a plot in the endlessly instanced neighborhoods. The Horde neighborhood is a gorgeous, gently themed example of the WoW environment team’s artistry. The landscape tumbles from a breezy mountainside pine forest, down rocky bluffs, into humid oases and sandy tropical beaches. There are tempting plots everywhere, some secluded, some commanding.

Construction of a basic house is simple and immediate, but then the real work begins. The houses work on a bigger-on-the-inside principle, like Doctor Who’s TARDIS. You can expand their interiors, crafting your own floorplan and adding floors, and decorate them with objects referencing the many, many civilizations, locations, and themes from the game’s two-decade history. There are limits on floorplan size, room options, and the amount of décor you can use; these expand as you level up your house by accumulating House XP. Your house’s exterior is a similar but slightly more limited story. Here you can expand and embellish your building and clutter your yard with all sorts of bizarre WoW ephemera: magical wells, Goblin contraptions, temple gongs, and so on.

House XP is gathered by collecting rare décor items and completing Endeavors — a kind of neighborhood-wide collective questing and advancement system that will be added in the next patch. These will hopefully add some social glue and some structural guidance to what is currently a fairly solo activity, and a bewilderingly sprawling one.

Rare décor items — to be precise, décor items of uncommon or better quality — are earned through all sorts of sources: achievements covering every era of the game, quest rewards, reputation grinds, crafting professions, and vendors. You’ll buy them, make them, trade for them, hunt for them, grind for them. You’ll probably find you have quite a few already, garnered from previous adventures, when you start WoW Housing.

Decorating your house is fluid, intuitive, and very freeform; there’s a simple Basic mode and an Advanced setting that removes restrictions and lets you do things like dye or resize décor items. In itself, it’s completely unstructured, creative play, and very casual. You can do it to your heart’s content, as long as you have gold to buy basic items from vendors.

But Blizzard has made the decision to tie progression in Housing, and the ability to upgrade and expand your house, directly into your collection of décor items, which themselves are seeded throughout almost every conceivable activity in World of Warcraft. The idea is that your house will reflect the kind of player you are, I suppose, but it’s equally true — and probably not accidental — that Housing is designed to lead players focused on this gameplay style out into the rest of the game to sample its many, many wares.

It’s a somewhat risky strategy. Players who just want to make a lovely home may get frustrated that they can’t expand it without engaging in achievement-hunting, crafting, questing, or browsing the auction house. But it also displays a clear ambition to expand what WoW is, and the kind of players it can attract, even this far into its lifespan; and not just that, but to then convert those players into generalized WoW fans, plugged into many of the game’s other playstyles and sub-communities.

So yes, WoW’s housing is at least as big a deal as the Midnight expansion it forms part of, if not a bigger one. As well-crafted as it is, it’s far from guaranteed to succeed. But it’s impressive that Blizzard is making this big an investment in the long-term future of a 20-year-old game.