Setting Down Roots: Housing in World of Warcraft

Lots of games have housing. It’s a popular feature, as people like getting to set down digital roots in their favorite game. On the face of it, that fact that World of Warcraft: Midnight, which launched earlier this month, added a housing system to the game might not seem remarkable. However, one needs to keep in mind that this is the eleventh expansion to a twenty-two-year-old game. World of Warcraft has a long and strange history with player housing, with developers resisting it for years, and making one famously failed attempt. Since World of Warcraft housing just got its full release, it’s worth looking back at everything that led up to this moment.

To understand housing in World of Warcraft, we first need to understand garrisons. Garrisons were one of the features announced with the Warlords of Draenor expansion, the sixth expansion and was announced at BlizzCon 2013. It was pitched as being like a base in an RTS game, a command center where the player would gather resources, command troops, and make their stand against the expansion’s bad guys. Garrisons were specifically called World of Warcraft’s answer to housing.

Reading interviews and social media posts from the time, one can see a conflict between what many players wanted garrisons to be and what the developers wanted to make. The developers emphasized that the main focus of garrisons was to provide benefits to ordinary gameplay, and belittled the idea of housing as a purely creative activity. They promised some customization options, but it was never a focus. Garrisons were going to be an important gameplay feature first and foremost. An orc does not go home after a battle and decorate.

Garrisons were World of Warcraft’s first true attempt at a housing-like system.

Garrisons might sound interesting on paper, but the execution was lacking and Warlords is not well regarded among the playerbase. The expansion had many problems, and garrisons were a major victim. The focus on gameplay is one of the reasons garrisons didn’t turn out as anyone hoped. Once the novelty wore off, managing a garrison became a chore instead of a fun system to play with. Once it’s set up to the player’s satisfaction, there’s very little reason to interact with it. It can be left alone to generate the gold or materials the player needs, they swing by to pick it up, then leave again.

The second major problem was isolation. Unlike other expansions, there was no major hub city in the expansion for players to gather. The places outside a garrison players could congregate was far removed from the rest of the expansion’s content, making it a difficult and inconvenient place to gather. Since one of the primary functions of a city hub is to facilitate the creation of groups to tackle group content, not having one hindered the player’s ability to find other people to play with. Garrisons were isolated from the rest of the world and from each other, and could not fulfill the same function.

The last major issue is a lack of customization. While some customization options were initially promised, only a handful were ever added to the game. Once again, this meant there was little reason to continue interacting with garrisons once the initial setup was done. There was a lack of emotional investment in the garrison as a place, as a player could not make it truly theirs.

So garrisons were a bust, and when the next expansion — Legion — launched, the concept was left behind to gather dust with the rest of Warlord’s content. Interestingly, Legion introduced a feature called class halls, which were also a kind of home base players were meant to be invested in. However, they had even fewer housing-like features than garrisons, and many of those systems were shed in later expansions. The further the game went from Warlords, the more distant the possibility of housing seemed.

For years, when talking about housing in World of Warcraft, there’s always been this stain garrisons left behind; housing has been tried before and it sucked, so why do some people still want housing? Many were looking at other MMOPRGs with housing, and wished World of Warcraft had a system like that. Even after the failure of garrisons there were still players who wanted a way to set down roots in their favorite game. People wanted to see what a housing system in World of Warcraft could look like.

Twelve years after Warlords was announced, World of Warcraft: Midnight was announced in August 2025, and included information on a new housing system. From the outside, it is impossible to know how much garrisons impacted the development of true housing. They certainly did take at least some of the lessons learned from Warlords to improve. Perhaps the single most important change is that housing provides no benefit to player power or wealth. Housing is an entirely optional part of the game. A player only interested in high-end raiding doesn’t have to engage with it at all if they don’t want to.

The author’s house in the Alliance neighborhood, Founder’s Point

This is a good thing because, as garrisons showed, forcing everyone to engage with a complicated system isn’t beneficial in the long run. A person who’s collecting decor and working on their house in Azeroth is doing it because they want to, but because it’s fun. A player can allocate as many or as few hours to housing as they want.

The development team also found a solution to the isolation of garrisons. The way housing works is that there are two maps, called neighborhoods, that are dedicated to housing. There is one for each player faction, both with multiple available plots for players to choose from. Once a player picks a plot, they get a house, and from there they’re free to do what they want with the space. All neighborhoods are shared spaces, but not all neighborhoods are public. It’s possible for a guild, or even an informal group of friends, to have an instanced neighborhood.

Customization is, of course, a major element of housing. There are hundreds of decor items to collect, and each type of house exterior has multiple options for things like the type of door, windows, or roof it can have. When housing became available to a wider audience, communities immediately formed around it. Major fan websites launched their own housing guides and decor catalogs. Groups of players gathered together to share their creations. A great example is “wowkea” on YouTube and Discord; this is a good place to look if you’re interested in seeing what dedicated players are able to build. Housing has quickly became a major pillar of the game, before it was even fully launched.

Early access to housing was made available to anyone who pre-purchased any edition of Midnight, including myself. Barring some bugs, I felt the housing system was a solid one, even in its early access state. It’s a solid, well designed foundation to build on. I wasn’t sure at first how I would feel sharing a space with other players, but in reality it worked out just fine. The housing plots have enough space between them that it doesn’t feel crowded, and the permission options for your house are robust, making it easy to keep out strangers and allow friends in at your discretion. I was in charge of setting up a private neighborhood for my World of Warcraft friend group, and once it was launched the process was pretty much painless. We now have our own space where we can show off our houses to each other and collaborate to earn more goodies.

An orc-themed housing interior.

Turns out, after a battle, an orc does go home and decorate! He’s got new trophies to mount on the walls. He has to find the right kind of weapon racks to display his growing collection of battle axes. He has to eat and sleep somewhere. None of that detracts from everything else World of Warcraft is, instead it made Azeroth a richer world. While Midnight introduced housing, developers have already stated that it’s something that will be developed alongside other evergreen content going forward. This system is still extremely young, so we have yet to see what kind of longevity it will have, or what possible updates could be planned for the future.