Housing In WoW Will Be "Available To Everyone," Won't Come With "Exorbitant Requirements"

World of Warcraft will finally receive player housing alongside its Midnight expansion, and Blizzard has now revealed the first real details on what players can expect from the highly anticipated feature more than 20 years in the making.

For starters, Blizzard made clear in a blog post diving into the feature that everyone who wants a house in Azeroth will be able to obtain one. There won't be hefty gold requirements, limited plots of land for which players compete via a lottery system, or taxes to pay. Players who let their subscription lapse or skip an expansion or two won't log on one day to find someone else living in their former home.

"As part of our focus on wide adoption, we wanted to ensure that housing is available to everyone," Blizzard said. "If you want a house, you can have a house."

As for where players will be able to build their homes, at launch it will be in two designated housing zones--one for the Alliance and one for the Horde. The Alliance housing zone will be inspired by early-level questing zones like Elwynn Forest, Duskwood, and Westfall, while the Horde's will be inspired by Durotar and Azshara. Houses will be shared among all the characters in the same Warband, so while an Alliance character can't purchase a Horde house, if a Horde character in the Warband has a home, the Alliance character would be able to use it as if it were their own. There won't be faction restrictions when it comes to visiting the house of a friend on the opposite faction, and all housing rewards will be account-wide and usable by any character regardless of faction.

Anticipating player questions about why there will only be two housing zones when the feature launches, Blizzard wrote that having too many housing zones would conflict with the team's goal of player housing being a "deeply social" feature. Blizzard wants players to be socializing and meeting new people, and having multiple zones spread out all around the world would hinder that. Crafting new zones is also a ton of work, Blizzard said. It would rather do a great job on a smaller number of housing zones than do a passable one on a larger number. However, Blizzard said that there will be "more possible places to live in the future."

When it comes to outfitting new homes, Blizzard said it wants the feature to be "player-first" and not "revenue-first." There will be "hundreds and hundreds" of home-customization options found in-game as rewards, though Blizzard said some items for housing will be for sale on the in-game microtransaction shop.

A newly announced feature coming alongside housing will be neighborhoods. These neighborhoods will consist of 50 homes and be instanced but "persistent," so that "your neighbors can be your neighbors for years to come (or until one of you moves)," Blizzard said. There will be both public neighborhoods and private ones that groups of friends or guilds can create and customize together.

Blizzard did not state when exactly players could expect player housing to arrive, but said it will have plenty more details to share in the future. It also emphasized the feature will be an "evergreen addition" to the game, and one that will have its own roadmap and patches reaching into future expansions. As such, Blizzard said housing isn't something players should expect to be finished when it releases, but one that will instead continually be updated with new content and systems for years to come.

The approach Blizzard is taking for player housing in WoW is already quite different from some other modern MMOs. Final Fantasy 14 Online somewhat infamously had its own in-game housing crisis due to houses being in limited supply, with the developers creating a lottery system to determine who would be eligible to acquire a home. Houses that sit unused are reclaimed and put up for sale--something that won't be the case in WoW. In Amazon's New World, houses cost a hefty sum of gold. Players must then continually pay taxes on their properties lest they be unable to use them (though those who don't pay their taxes never lose the home permanently).

WoW's current The War Within expansion is currently in full swing, and its next update will be going full goblin-mode, taking players to the goblin city of Undermine and handing out keys to customizable goblin hot rods for players to drift through the city streets with. The update is expected to release sometime in February or March, though Blizzard has not officially announced a release date.