Intro.
This is an in-depth long-read review on Midnight housing as released live into retail this Wednesday.
It is NOT an opinion piece (no personal impressions given, so no “I like/I dislike/I enjoy” statements). That would be subjective and thus completely irrelevant to the topic.
This is also NOT a narrative piece (no youtuber or community narrative included). If you are looking for a debunk on that or this narrative myth surrounding housing, it is included in FAQ, directly following this intro.
The FAQ is included, because these narrative points are something different people keep repeating over and over again, and I want to compartmentalize any and all discussion of these boring fallacies beaten to death we have all heard by now from 100 different youtubers 100 times in that one section. Hearthsteel discussion included.
Following that section, I am unlikely to return to refuting these points again in text or commentary.
The review follows the following structure: this prologue, FAQ on housing narrative (including hearthsteel), and the review itself, describing midnight housing and implications of housing for the big picture.
FAQ.
In this section I will list common misconceptions, that people keep repeating ad nauseam, so unfortunately we have to start by getting them out of the way. If you feel like you know all this, please feel free to skip this section completely.
- “Video-game housing is like real life housing”. Why this is wrong:
Some people view housing from a realtor agency or a secretariat of housing’s perspective. They expect housing to be first and foremost a ‘living’ space, where your character fulfills their basic needs, such as the need for sleep, the need for shelter, the need to store and cook food etc.
But many games do not have the systems in place, that would require your character to be warm, eat, sleep and dfecate. You do sometimes have that (think minecraft, TES, sims etc.).
But most games lack survival elements, and therefore most games don’t include a bed or a toilet, like sims player housing would.
However, there are articles, which they do tend to include, almost always, such as a storage, or a crafting table, or some means of transportation, and that’s one imperfect way to identify video-game housing.
Another imperfect way to identify video-game housing is to look at definitions.
The definitions of player housing generally boil down to player-owned(managed) space, where the player runs individual game loops.
Considering the most common object across all game housing is storage, the dullest most common example possible is porting to your home chest you installed (management/ownership) and offloading loot there (in-house game loop). A very exciting example, I know.
To keep things fresh, to keep ahead of the competition, to finetune the housing system to their game and for a myriad other reasons, developers can come up with all different kinds of unique in-house objects and gameplay loops, that are not just using the chest. So we are not going to list all the possibilities here, to save time.
But if you have played a lot of video-games (and I personally have 30 years of experience and a 1000+ games collection), then you know, video-game housing comes in all shapes and forms.
Sometimes, it can be a ship, sometimes a train, sometimes a spaceship, sometimes player housing can even be an in-game van (think ac syndicate, sea of thieves etc.).
The point is, video-game housing doesn’t even necessarily have a roof or a door, so avoid the confusion 
Real-life housing is one thing, video-game housing is quite another
- “We waited for player housing for 20 years in WOW”. Why this is wrong:
As a person who has played since the WOW european launch, I can absolutely confirm that players were hyping for housing even back in classic and you can even find housing-related questions to devs in game articles of that time. Of course, you can remember that other RPGs such as famously Morrowind, already had housing at that time, so it was natural to expect WOW to have housing too in 2004+.
However, we did receive player housing in WOD and it was an enormous hype in terms of sub upswing and with very positive reception at the beginning. However, WoD housing only lasted for one expansion, or at least has been dismantled over several expansions (got severe blow in legion, further nerfs down the road). So at the very maximum, we are waiting for housing since Legion, that’s only 10 years.
However, due to details discussed in point FAQ1, an argument could be made, that we had some protoforms of player housing in WOW before and after WOD, such as the pandarian farm, the class hall, the covenant hall, the BFA ship and the TWW undermine flat. I am personally unconvinced that these qualify as some housing protoforms, but I leave that to the discretion of the reader.
- “Midnight housing corrects Garrison mistakes”. Why this is wrong:
A lot of people like to emotionally justify the 10 year wait by suggesting Midnight housing corrects garrison “mistakes”. However, here are some of the most popular garrison criticisms of that time (main “mistakes”):
-
No zone choice for your garrison
Midnight house is locked to one zone for alliance, one zone for horde, same as garrison was.
However, garrison was in a gameplay-relevant new zone, where we did not immediately have a portal to at that time. Meanwhile, midnight house is located at a gameplay-irrelevant old zone, that people can easily buy a portal to from an in-game vendor. -
No racial choice for your garrison
Garrison was widely accused of being generically orc/human. Of course, the same is true with midnight, however, blizzard are allegedly planning to correct this for the elves, but there were a lot of plans for garrison too, and nothing so far seem to have been announced about dwarves, undead, pandaren and other races.
At the moment of writing of this, midnight housing remains generically orc/human. -
Garrisons did not have enough building options
Midnight house obviously has only one building, so the problem remains -
Garrison made the game instanced
WoW has been an instanced game long before WOD, and remains an instanced game to this day: Torghast, Mythic, Island expeditions, Mage tower, Arena, Delves, Horror Visions etc. The only thing we can consider uninstanced is world shards, such as where we afk or do wqs. But overwhelmingly, wow is a private instance game.
Garrisons or housing are just another private instance.
However, garrison did some effort to force you to go to open world.For example:
Want to run a barn production? Gather a team to hunt in open world
Want some apex crystals? Choose and complete an event in the open world
Want certain followers for your garrison? You get those in the open world
Want a timed merchant? Too bad, the merchant is at your neighbour’s, go to your neighbour
Want a specific music track? Ooooh, too bad, you have to farm it in the open world
Here is a portal room for you, to get to the open world.
Thus, garrisons pushed you a lot to go do activities in the open world. Endeavours will do a little bit of the same, but to much less effect.
Etc.
So to conclude, every major “mistake” garrison did, the midnight has repeated AND deepened.
So no, Midnight housing does not correct garrison mistakes.
- “Midnight housing is the best video-game housing ever”.
And here is where FAQ1-3 converge.
People like to believe that they have waited for 20 years for WoW housing, but finally it’s here, no garrison mistakes, the best, most innovative housing in gaming; that’s the psychological justification they give ;(
However, here are a few further problems with this statement, we haven’t taken apart yet.
First of all, wow housing is not innovative, multiple copies of the same instanced neighborhoods, small plots, generic buildings, displaying achievement items, it’s basically the same system as Lotro had back in 2000s, just as an example, except with less systems: Lotro houses for example have stable masters (portals), plant growing plots etc.
Second of all, if we look at pc gaming at the end of 2025- beginning of 2026, in every aspect of its housing wow housing is not in any way “the best”. Is WoW housing design tool the most advanced? No, for example, i have to place every fence piece individually, whereas in sims i could just place the whole fence with a couple of clicks. Does WoW have the biggest furniture catalogue? No, ditto. There are like 4 floor material options. Does WoW allow you to build the biggest house? Does WoW allow you to change terrain for your house?
Basically, in every aspect, that wow housing does have, and those are a few, wow housing is substandard for 2025 gaming industry.
There are reasons for that, and we are not going to go right now into whether its “bad” or “good”, but the statement, that wow housing is the best, can not possibly mean “the best” as the most advanced.
One big peculiarity WoW housing DOES have, is it is almost the only housing in video-gaming, where your house does not have any utility. The only item on furniture catalogue that gets close to classifying as utility right now is the cooking pot; unfortunately, it costs you time, as you can plop a cooking fire anywhere else (except water), so technically it’s a disutility.
Thus, WoW is almost the only housing to NOT have any utility, but that’s not an advancement, that’s actually a step back. We are stepping back from video-game housing and into interior design applications territory.
And that’s the third point. Surprisingly, under considerations in FAQ1 midnight housing is actually not player housing. It does not have in-house game loops or usable objects/utilities/systems associated with video-game housing.
Midnight housing is actually an in-game level designer.
It’s something ubisoft did for AC odyssey, and Rockstar did for GTA Online, where players design levels in game for other players.
Usually, those level designers allow players to build in gameplay, but of course we cant do that in wow housing, as we don’t have any scripts, usable items and such other things at our disposal. As such, accidentally and shockingly warcraft 3 designer is actually more advanced than what we have with midnight housing.
Therefore, if you go to a youtube channel and the clickbait on video goes “After 20 years its finally here: best most innovative housing system ever”, you now know, that the sentence has 4 factual mistakes:
- it’s not innovative, it’s retrograde
- it’s not advanced, it’s basic
- it’s not after 20 years, it’s after 10 years
- and it’s not housing, it’s an in-game level designer
I am of course not going to go ahead and debunk every variation on that statement, you can interpolate. If there is something like “Housing is coming to WOW”, the answer is “yes, we had it in 2014, but it’s a big question, if it’s ever coming back”.
- “It’s ok, if wow housing is a design minigame, don’t play it if you don’t like it. Many people enjoy it, it’s the biggest thing in other video games”. Why this is wrong:
Well, yes, it’s the biggest thing in other videogames, in fact, player housing is usually a pillar of a video-game, a basis of gameplay same as combat system, crafting etc. However, we don’t have player housing in WoW. (FAQ4)
You COULD try to compare midnight housing to AC odyssey mission designer or GTA online job designer, but that comparison is incorrect also.
In level designers and this is true for housing too sometimes, you are usually either given the ability to put pre-built gameplay in your space (like put a computer in your sim’s house, or a soldier in your AC mission), or you are given the ability to build your own gameplay in the space (such as putting a player choice moment into warcraft 3 map script or building an automated shooting range in minecraft). And the highest level of course, is something like minecraft, where you can build an in-game computer, that you can then run a primitive game on, that would have in-game housing
But in wow midnight we are at a level, when we are not even given pre-built gameplay in our house. We don’t get scripts, we don’t even get usable items. There is nothing we could put inside that would give the visitors or the dwellers an in-house gameplay loop.
Therefore, the first problem with this statement is that it implies we have some proof of success to draw on. We really don’t, something unique is happening here.
- “It’s ok, if wow housing is a design minigame, don’t play it if you don’t like it. Many people enjoy it, it’s the biggest thing in other video games”. Why this is wrong: PART TWO LET’S GO
The problem with this assumption is that it implies that apartment design applications are a popular hobby, but they are not 
Statistically speaking, this statement is quantifiably wrong. We don’t have data to uphold, that wow players are some unique group of high designer minigame aficionados, that are overrepresented in the game disproportionately more than what we observe in the general population.
Therefore, Blizzard are actually building up a game feature for a small minority inside of the wow community.
The impression permeating the player sphere and probably even some people inside the company, that design is a popular hobby probably comes from the next misconception
- “Housing is just like transmogs”. Why this is wrong:
In real life people spend thousands of hours perfecting their haircut: washing hair, getting hair done at the hairdresser, coating hair, consuming vitamins, brushing hair, fixing it etc. Although, statistically speaking, the numbers differ wildly across different groups: male, female, etc.
In computer games, and by the way different group representation across player bases can vary wildly, most players spend 5 mins on the haircut per 100 hours in-game.
So it’s important to understand that real life trends do not automatically translate into video games.
So even if some people like apartment design applications or apartment design magazines, it does not automatically translate to them enjoying designing 20 year old computer game player houses.
But we covered that partially in previous FAQs, especially FAQ6 and FAQ1.
What i want to focus on in this point and one can not overstate this enough, at the current moment wow transmog provides value to the player, but player house does not provide player value beyond making money off of youtube hype.
Here is what I mean exactly.
If you are doing transmogs, those mogs are always present on your screen in the form of your character. So they are constantly providing you visual aesthetic value. Or at least, and let’s be honest, this is more important, they reduce your fatigue with the appearances of your character, which can grow tiresome after the 1000th hour.
Furthermore, you can go to the trial of style, and essentially get an in-game currency for a good transmog.
However, with housing, all your gameplay loops and activities are far away from your house, except for rare apartment design enjoyers. The only usable items in your house so far are a cooking pot, but its unusable because it doesn’t have a storage nearby, neither does it have a vendor, or an AH access, or a mailbox, that you need to actually cook. You also have a chair that you can sit on, a door that you can close, and the light source that you can turn off. Sitting on chairs, opening and closing the doors - how much gameplay time is that for an average user?
Therefore, your house is not on your screen and it is not providing the aesthetic value.
We also don’t know if there are going to be any trials of homestyle to award us with in-game currencies.
Thus, the core difference between midnight housing and transmog system, is the second provides value and works in a way that the first does not.
Therefore, transmog system or trader tender ARE NOT a proof of success for midnight housing.
That new character appearance option, like a new haircut or a new nose ring people asked for, and then forgot after using for 5 min?
Its going to go much worse for new midnight housing furniture.
- “Housing is for the RP community actually”. Why this is wrong:
I have personally been in several RP guilds, and participated in several pure-RP events, and almost exclusively played on RP servers, since I transitioned from PVE to RP servers at the end of the classic start of TBC.
But even players, who have never engaged in RP, don’t have to act, as if RP is a mystery, all of us have encountered RP at their local medieval fare, or local comiccon-type event, or even just a local playground.
RP means roleplaying, assuming a role of something you are not, using props. For an involved roleplayer it includes crafting historical firearms and reenacting civil war battles, researching etiquette and food cooking habits, for a child it includes less expensive props: a wooden stick for a sword, or maybe a piece of paper and a pair of dice to play pretend being a wizard and casting fireballs.
Now, when we play videogames, the computer or to be more exact usable digital items and in-game systems is our prop.
Some people dont roleplay, they use addons and discord and mash buttons to achieve an in-game objective. Other people do roleplay, and they use alchemy to pretend they are an actual alchemist, or healing to pretend they tend the wounded, or portals to pretend they are a space-time bending wizard.
And if the game is lacking a system or a prop to enact what the players want to enact, then they use chat or program addons, that fill the gap.
For example, some rpg games like crusader kings or baldurs gate do allow your character to have a background, wow does not. So then people install an addon, that allows them to store and show other users the character background information - a sophisticated prop to fill in the gap-, or just convey this information to others in the chat.
So a common misconception of people, is they observe other players in-game writing stuff in the chat like “He clenched his feast” and identify that as RP. RP is just writing things in the chat. No, writing things in the chat is filling the gaps in game systems, grouping for a tool that was not provided.
So when people say, “Housing is a feature for the RP community”, thats blatantly incorrect.
Housing can and will be used by the RP community, to a very limited extent of a backdrop for some scenes. But if it was really tailored for RP community, it would actually allow people to RP.
For example, if a person wants to RP an alchemist, he would build an alchemist lab and make potions there.
Can that person do it in the current version of the game? No. There is no potion table in their house, there is no order table, no storage, no herb patch etc.
Housing is not a feature for RP community, its a feature RP community will find a use for.
Same as they use stormwind as a backdrop for RP, or same they did some raids.
Of course, that is if the neighborhood is closed. In public neighborhoods there are all sorts of un-rp stuff like real-world religious symbols etc.
- “Housing is about creativity and fantasy. Uncreative people can’t understand it. Garrison did not fulfill the house fantasy”. Here is why this is wrong:
Obviously, we have already covered that apartment design is a niche hobby, and that players, who don’t even like fantasy, can still enjoy housing, because housing importance is rooted in its utility objects and gameplay loops, let’s not reiterate that.
What’s important to cover here, is that people, who state that critics of housing do not understand fantasy, are actually the ones who do not understand fantasy and especially warcraft fantasy. Here is why
Fantasy is based on suspense of disbelief. So it does not matter, if you have dragons or affordable housing in your fantasy world, it should be logical and follow the laws of that particular world to appear believable. That’s why world building and having guys in red shirts pays off.
Midnight housing breaks suspense of disbelief in so many structural(!) ways that we don’t really have time to go into even in this long read. In fact, we already accidentally covered one example in QA8, where we touched on the fact an RP alchemist has to cook his potions in the current expansion hub capital, where the alchemist table is, which is the only table available in the whole wow for the duration of this expansion, with the exception of the one you can plop down in Azj’Kahet after completing the appropriate quest (not before). One alchemy table for all alchemy RPers. How is that for suspense of disbelief.
But more important is the warcraft fantasy. Warcraft fantasy is historically a romantic hyperbola fantasy. It’s ancient forces, cosmic enemies, hero figures towering over houses, gigantic trees, medieval castles, fog of war, dark mystery, brutal heroism.
So a generic most commonplace player house of a warcraft character is something like a military camp for orc character or a castle on a hill for a human character. It’s something like garrison.
Huge, spacious, exaggerated, heroic music, crafters working furnaces, soldiers heading out, gryphon master sleeping, spiked walls - garrison is EXACTLY the QUINTESSENCE of what a player home should be in warcraft fantasy.
Player house can of course also be a pig farm, or a flower shop or a tea doll house, those fantasies can take place in warcraft universe, i suppose, but the quintessential form of warcraft housing is a military base, plain and simple.
So if you encounter anyone, who says garrison does not feel like a home, just ask them, if they know what does the game title say
- “At least warcraft housing is free”.
The argument is partially correct. It’s correct, in that you don’t have to stand in line for a month, or win an auction to get a house, so being a house owner in Warcraft is not prestigious as in some other MMOs, same as having a max level in Warcraft is not so prestigious as, say, having a max level in LOTRO or even WOW classic.
However, we should be mindful that warcraft housing is not free. You actually spend around 100k for furniture. I personally have already spent 75k and i am at half furniture limit, and i bought nothing fancy, mind you. But to be general, I have only done preliminary calculations, that it costs about 100k at low level, which is comparable to garrison.
Except that the garrison buildings were an investment, that you could make ROI on, however, you won’t be getting any money from your midnight house, unless you are a youtuber or some influencer.
However, midnight housing has other costs and we will speak about them in the next point.
- “Midnight housing was perfect, and then Blizzard introduced hearthsteel”
Blizzard is a commercial entity. It creates in-game systems to generate income.
There are two ways to generate income continuously with wow systems: either the system ensures player retention, so the player remains subscribed, or the system ensures game shop purchases, so the player keeps buying items on the shop, or both.
For example, level system ensures you buy a new expansion every 2 years, because otherwise your characters are locked at low level, but level system also sells level boosts on the shop - so that’s a system that drives shop purchases.
Another example is gearing system and in particular mythic. You have to continuously keep up with the gear grind, so you remain subscribed. That’s a system that brings recurring income through retention.
Now, the garrison was a retention system, where everything is timed, so you have to keep subscription to keep your investment. Building a building, sending followers on missions, making crafting orders in crafting buildings etc - all done over prolonged time, promoting subscription.
That system was heavily criticized by “the community”, i.e. people in the forum, the youtubers etc. We covered criticisms in QA4.
One of the concerns we did not fully cover was a niche concern for a small minority of people, who in WOD had many max level alts. We are speaking 10+ max level alts in WOD here, so not many people. And specifically, people who concentrate on gold making. So a minority of the minority.
That minority of the minority crowd faced a concern, that blew out of all proportions, because it had 0 impact on general wow population, that THEORETICALLY FOR GOLD MAKING PURPOSES because they had SO MANY ALTS their meta would involve 80% in the garrison 20% outside of the garrison style gameplay, i.e. spending the majority of their game time inside the garrison.
That criticism seems the only garrison criticism Blizzard seems to have addressed, because this is exactly where the pivot from garrison to midnight housing occurs and its the most essential change to understand.
The pivot was limit the house number to one per account, so an above described situation was not theoretically possible. But also to cut any possible gameplay from the house, so that players simply did not have anything to possibly do inside the house.
In other words, Blizzard pivoted in a way that makes housing player retention an impossible way to monetize housing. Some collectionists and design enthusiasts maybe able to squeeze a season of furniture farming from housing. So that’s 3 months of subs for blizzard. But the majority will set up their house for 30 mins, and then forget it even existed.
So if Blizzard are not making money from housing via retention, then their only way is to make money via shop purchases.
And that’s where heartsteel currency comes in.
People think, that “ furniture purchases are just like mount purchases”.
Furniture purchases are NOTHING like mount purchases.
Mounts are something you can realistically expect for a person to buy for 15 eur and then use for hours moving around. It’s a one-off purchase. And even then, we get those mounts included in subscription.
Furniture purchase is a recurring continuous purchase. It’s not realistic to be expecting wow audience to be buying chairs for 5 eur. Conduct a marketing research, and they will probably give you a feasible price of around 5 cents.
Another important consideration, is that WoW already faces accusations of being a P2W game and for all intents and purposes it already is. You buy a boost, then you buy gold, then you buy an in-game carry with gold, you won.
However, it would be much worse, as in much more P2W, if blizzard allowed whales to buy 5 eur infinite chairs. If a whale buys a 5 cent chair that they can place once, that’s way less game power, than buying an infinitely placeable chair.
Think GTA online cars. In GTA online one can buy a whale pack, that gives you infinite amount of a good in-game sports car. You can have 5 different variations of that same sports car in every garage, versus having to work for and buy every car for circa 2mil. That’s insane in-game advantage, its exactly like old-day gta console cheating.
So let’s overview the big picture on this. If Blizzard would sell a chair for 5 eur,
- The average player would feel like a peasant compared to the whale deity, who can spawn infinite items. Btw, what if those items are not chairs, but something extremely cool. Has it never happened that the extreme cool item was on the shop behind the paywall?
- The whale would have to spend 5 eur on an infinity chair instead of 15 cents on 3 chairs they actually need.
- Blizzard would loose money, because of setting a price that is not optimal from the market’s point of view.
Therefore, selling 5 cent chairs is demonstrably better for every party, than selling 5 eur infinity access for every article of furniture.
However, if you sell 5 cent a chair, that’s hundreds of thousands of 5 cent purchases. Those purchases have to be executed in real life.
Because of how real life fin tech works, supporting those purchases with fiat currency is somewhat complicated, because of refunds, fees and other considerations.
The only realistic basis for that kind of purchases is a virtual currency. Hearthsteel.
So it doesn’t matter, how you feel* about hearthsteel, if you look at it from the marketing and financial point of view, hearthsteel is the inevitability of midnight housing not having a retention loop.
If you want gameplay-free retention-free housing, then you have to make peace with hearthsteel. If you want hearthsteel to be gone, then you have to make peace with retention loops. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
- With this, we have covered the main talking points, that unfortunately make the discussion around housing unbearable and we can move to the more interesting material.
Before we do, though, i want to mention again, that i am unlikely to further address these myths again, nor i am likely to address any of the following common points:
-”i like/i dislike/i enjoy” - irrelevant to the conversation and is just spam
-”i am a number one fan of housing, but i dont want the housing to have xyz” - if you were interested in housing being successful, you would implement x and y and z and as many options as possible, to appeal to the broadest base possible, or at least to appeal to the general player base. Trying to lobby housing to only be usable by a minority group, is sabotage. Should absolutely be ignored
-”I want people to do xyz in front of me in the city, not in their private instance” - This position is ethically dubious and commercially counterproductive. If some users want to do xyz in their private instance, give them the ability to, give more of it. Players are not monkeys in a zoo to entertain other players by performing xyz in a city.
Review.
This review is based on having played housing in live retail and before that on PTR. As well as having played WoW previous iteration of player housing during WOD, and WoW classic during launch. As well as having played pc games for over 30 years, with total game count of 1000+ games, from Sims to construction simulators.
After a year of a very slow and loud housing rollout, it came as no surprise this Wednesday, that midnight housing was another exercise in overcorrection, such as Blizzard is wont to do, when there is a 1% problem, and the majority of the playerbase has to play a version of the game, designed to solve that 1% problem.
In this instance, the problem was goldmaking alt owners spending too much time in the garrison during WOD, and lo and behold, here is a version of housing that lets you spend no time on the premises of your house whatsoever.
There are no player-built gameloops, you could activate by scripting or at least by placing usable items inside your house, and there are even no built-in gameloops, not even the traditional dump-your-loot or warcraft-favorite mission table.
In fact, there is no housing gameplay at all. The only gameplay that has not been thrown out with the water, is housing set-up gameplay.
Do the unlock questchain, collect resources, choose your wallpaper colour - all the traditional housing setup gameplay you know from other games is present more or less. The post setup gameplay you know and love from other games such as WOD, the actual housing gameplay - is not.
This makes midnight housing a demoversion of housing, a fishing hook, where you get the taste of what could have been, so then you expect a buy button, but will there actually be a buy button?
A cynical person would say, that it’s a common strategy in the modern game industry, where you sell an almost raw basegame, and then feed users DLCs, until the current installation of your franchise reaches the gameplay level the previous installation provided (e.g. Sims4, CKIII etc).
But I would call this approach in question.
First of all, traditional housing gameplay is non-combat gameplay, and blizzard hardly does that anymore, with the exception of crafting. For the ease of reference, let’s call this the Boralus syndrome.
Back in BFA Blizzard’s art team did a masterful job of creating a large detailed colorful city that was somewhere up there with Suramar. But what did the game design team do with it?
That’s right, put some kill 10 seagulls wqs in. One good decision was to build a 1 vs 1 pvp club there, but that was also about combat gameplay.
So if Blizzard went from garrisons, an in-depth strategy game or stormwind, to sea-gull culling Boralus, the next point on that line is obviously midnight housing.
As beautiful, as empty.
Secondly, midnight demoversion housing or the level designer midnight housing is - whatever you want to call it - falls nicely into blizzard patch cadence without any additional development.
Blizzard loves to invalidate and nuke out of existence everything, that’s last expansion - housing fits into that nicely, in that you actually don’t have to recalibrate any power increasement, it doesn’t give any player power. There are no gear/gold/rep rewards to recalibrate every expansion because of housing. It doesn’t even give you a good teleport, its starting location basically, everyone already has their capital port items.
Housing also allows you to drop a seasonal grind at any time. This season our designated grind could be old achievements, giving furniture access. Next season we will be grinding the housing level through endeavours. The season after that, new achievements could appear, granting more housing furniture access.
Housing is a good tool to introduce a seasonal grind out of the blue, that looks good for the quarterly shareholder report.
However, this is admittedly a weak argument, because housing grind is likely to be extremely niche, and there are some old expansion mats, that bump up old expansions a bit, but all of this is most likely viewed internally as a subject for calibration, so i will keep this discussion point in.
Thirdly, housing has another familiarity to garrisons, beyond copying and deepening every “problem” garrison-critics prescribe to garrisons. And that is mobile game elements.
One of the criticisms of the garrison, that for some reason did not prevent legion from being the “best expansion”, despite the leaked charts showing less subs, was mobile-like mission tables. We in fact temporarily had an app to access that in several expansions.
Now another mobile games element may potentially come into WoW with midnight housing.
Basically, midnight housing relies on you buying a chair and placing a chair. But let’s think about an average player. An average player has limited gold, limited fiat real life money, and limited game time, by the definition of being average. Let’s say they expedite all their gold to buy merchant furniture, and all their time to farm farmable furniture. Let’s say it happens at point in time t.
Beyond that point in time t, the only way this average player can further interact with housing is to expand their last resource - real money. They go to the store, buy a chair, and place a chair.
This is further instigated by the fact, that acquiring the furniture in-game is very time consuming and friction-plagued. Let’s say you need a chair. You have to exit the house (loading screen), go the merchant (1000m+), buy the chair, go back (2nd loading screen), place the chair.
So beyond a certain point in time t, the way an average player can continue to interact with their house, is by making game shop purchases, the friction for which are minimized. And/or acquire tokens to get in-game gold, but thats somewhat more complicated.
It is not out of realm of possibility, therefore, that housing might degenerate into “buy a chair, place a chair” pseudo gameplay-loop, and thats straight out of the genre of the mobile games.
Therefore, garrison and midnight housing do have more in common, than just no zone choice or being instanced.
Point number four is forcing players into no-choice situation is the hallmark of blizzard. Blizzard has a beautiful fantasy world of dozens of locations, but they try to force us to sit in just one - the location of the current patch.
It then makes sense for them to make midnight housing in such a manner, that we couldn’t possibly spend any time there.
For these and other reasons, i am not entirely convinced, that blizzard are planning to give us those missing DLCs and build up midnight housing to its entirety of being at least 2% of what garrison was, because midnight housing fits their current modus operandi too well as is.
They promised housing to be kept evergreen, but that might just mean giving us new furniture every patch, or introducing new endeavours later on. So essentially introducing those seasonal farms we spoke about.
Now, most assuredly, midnight housing will fail.
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It does not have what players expect it to have from other games, so it clashes with expectations. When a person buys a 50 eur preorder and tries housing out, they dont think “Uh, this is not for me. Nvm. Moving on”, they think “what did i give 50 eur for?”. They do their house initial setup, and are bored shortly in. You can observe traces of this all over the youtube comment section and forums already, just 3 days after launch, even under the hype videos/posts. Its out there, if you just care to read. Imagine, what will happen one year in. Imagine, what will happen silently, without any signals
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Midnight housing is dead wrong for player fantasy. If you go out there to player neighborhoods, what players live is a fantasy of living in a shack in the wood of the newbie starter zone. THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE MIDNIGHT HOUSING IS SQUATTING IN AN OVERCROWDED DIRTY CAMPING PARK, WHERE INSTEAD OF A MANLY TENT THEY GIVE YOU A DOLLHOUSE. If anyone at all made it to this point, i really urge you to stop and think about it. Is a peasant shack in the newbie wood really the ultimate warcraft fan fantasy? Are you sure? Especially, that most peasants in Elwynn at least have a field, we don’t even get that. Are we sure, players dont dream of castles, mage towers, suramar mansions, expedition camps on alien planets, its actually a wood backhouse nowifi zone they want?
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Starter zone fatigue. After 20 years, Elwynn and Durotar are beaten to death, even tho the horde neighborhood is a bit fresher, but still, however good the fish, you can’t expect a person to like it breakfast lunch and supper, but we have been eating Elwynn and Durotar for 20 years now.
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Housing launch was a nightmare with people being unable to get their desired plot, again the complaints are there, if you just read the feedback.
By the last titan hardly anyone is going to visit their house, if no changes are made.
So in short, without changes housing is doomed to fail.
But it will probably fail in a quiet off the screen manner.
On youtube it will remain “the best housing system ever”, on the forum every topic criticizing housing will be spawned to oblivion by a few anti-housing enthusiasts, and monetarily housing will be a whale bonanza, so blizzard can mark it down as success, and quietly sunset it 2 years in, explaining internally late stage lack of player participation as feature being no longer new.
So that cynical scenario of 2% of garrison functionality being sold as a separate DLC? That’s the optimistic prognosis.
More realistically, housing is going to hit Blizzard in terms of silent subscription fallout, and the industry prestige of shipping a substandard housing from 2000s, and in all other kinds of places, and eventually down the road result in cutting costs, cutting projects, cutting personal and a couple filler expansions.
Btw, the first of which, if you dont believe me, is already here, its called midnight, and it’s basically a couple of TWW and TBC zones, and a TWW allied race slapped together.
Is it important? No. WoW is a carcass of a magnificent sea giant, long washed up on the beach.
There is still meat, if you have the stomach for it.
Btw, i am pretty sure, noone made it to this point, but i had to write it, because i personally dont have the stomach for what passes for review on housing these days.
Thank you for your patience and good luck in your endeavors.
2025.12.15 EDIT
Edit: A lot of people have pointed out that my review is too long and too boring and too circuitous. So I decided to add a TLDR as a form of alternative review. It’s shorter, less bland and more opinionated, so its in a different format, and a new review de facto. But I hope it’s more readable. Also based on feedback received I add a new FAQ13-14. Finally I add a new small section about the potential of housing
The potential of housing
A lot of people have noted, that housing is a system with potential.
Correct, housing has potential of solving or at least alleviating the most important problem of WoW.
The fact, that the game deletes every expansion every 2 years.
Think of this in terms of AC. There are fans of AC unity, there are fans of AC Odyssey there are fans of AC Brotherhood etc. What would happen, if Ubisoft deleted all those past titles and said to people: you can only play Shadows now?
Thats what blizzard are doing to their fanbase. They have a group of people, who came in because of WOTLK. They have a group of people, who came in because of legion etc.
Every expansion has a “fan group”.
Basically, no matter, how “good” an expansion is, it will still be bad for a lot of people. No matter, how “bad” and expansion is, it will still be good for a lot of people.
Blizzard nerfs down every expansion, making it unplayable.
So now only the TWW fan group is happy. Everyone else is disenfranchised, to more or less extent.
So Blizzard has to launch classic experiences, and remixes to compensate for that.
Essentially, Blizzard “widows” the majority (fans of previous expansions are always numerically superior to fans of current expension for obvious reasons), and then has to fix that problem by a constant and resource-draining process of launching alternative game modes
The obvious fix to that would be chromie time and housing, and both have been botched.
Chromie time would be a fix, if it allowed players to stay in old expansions to max level, and after max level as endgame. Instead, you complete a couple of quests, you get to 70, you are kicked out. Cant even finish the campaign, let alone use the old expansion as your end-game
Housing is more of the same. It could alleviate this problem by allowing disenfranchised players, who dont like the current expansion, to construct an in-game space, that is thematically preferable to them, where they can run their preferred game loops, waiting for the current expansion to be over.
That would boost retention significantly.
Instead, Blizzard made sure, that noone can wait out the current expansion in their house.
So these players, who jsut dont want to play the current expansion (tww), they are forced to 3 choices:
either unsubscribe
or play classic (only actable for the “classic fan group”)
or play pvp
So when you observe tons of AFKers in wintergrasp, some small part of those AFKers are actually jsut people, who liked WOTLK and have nowhere else to go in the game. Thats the only game-relevant location they can stay in, even if they dont like pvp, at least they can afk there and/or chat.
So yes, housing has potential. Its just midnight housing is specifically meticulously designed NOT to realize its potential
And one of the important topics where its very well observable, is waiting out the current expansion in your house potential, which is arguably the most important potential midnight house could have had, but decided to burry
This is a remarkable move, from the commercial point of view. Because Blizzard essentially makes sure, that almost noone likes their current product (because for the majority of people no matter how the current expansion tries, it will never be as good as their favorite one), and then puts down every attempt to alleviate that. (chromie time, housing, remixes and classic servers).
Its absolutely remarkable and most fascinating
its almost as if blizzard hates money
New FAQ POINTS
FAQ 13.
“You only speak about negatives. That indicates you are a hater”. Why this is wrong:
No, i have previously stated that housing system has positive unpopular, but very smart decisions:
-Using old reputations
-Using old professions and mats
-Deciding to make furniture item-based, as opposed to infinite placement-based
Those are very smart redeeming qualities of the system, but not enough to fix the fact the system itself is empty. Moreover, i am just unsure, blizzard won’t walk back on these 3 decisions, even tho its the only thing that was done right.
Those decisions generate a lot of friction and a lot of misplaced hate. I think, blizzard ought to create some steward pet, that can fetch decor items from vendors, you have visited in the past (compare flightpaths). But keep everything else in place: reps, currencies, per-item basis
But realistically, blizzard might just switch to selling everything for timewalking badges
So i just dont want to comment on this, because these singular good decisions probably wont hold.
FAQ 14.
“The housing drama takes root in the fact uncreative people can’t understand the creative value of housing”.
Correct, uncreative people can’t understand the creative value of housing, which is 0.
Thats because uncreative people think, that creativity is about choosing the color of your handbag. Incorrect
Creativity is about creating meaning and depth.
Changing your wallpaper is not creative
Designing a unique gaming space, or a new housing-based gamestyle, that only your house has, - that’s creative.
So for example, when a group of players build barns in their garrison, then they organize a hunting guild, than that guild organizes hunts together and has reunions - that is creative. One could say its almost something blizzard would do, considering later in DF blizzard created the centaur hunt activity.
But what lies in the basis of this creativity? the ability to build a barn
Changing the colour of your wallpaper is not creative.
But the people who are not themselves creative, can sometimes mistake coloring the wallpaper with creativity, and thus dont understand, how midnight housing is terribly and needlessly limiting for the creative players.
Because it does not let us build meaning or depth, only Instagram filters for our characters
—-------------------------------------------------------
TLDR
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aka publicistic short read
Blizzard have created an evergreen shop shelf, which does not require calibration or development, beyond and occasional new furniture item, and the secret of why this monetisation of housing will go easier with the fanbase than level boosts, shop mounts and shop transmogs, is because it’s precisely a hollowed out empty useless form of housing, people won’t care about or get attached to, and that can be discontinued at any moment without any consequence.
If you think about it carefully, housing is not evergreen, which specifically allows it to be evergreen.
Something i find highly ironic, is the fact garrison used to spawn premade groups in the group finder, for people, who needed a trader or some utility, that they did not have in their garrison, or for people who wanted to do a garrison pve event together. Meanwhile, not only midnight housing NOT producing the same looking for group garrison exchange effect, it in fact already possesses the problem of abandoned neighborhoods (check the topic cited in the post below). So much for social cohesion of neighborhoods.
Now for the topic of player reception.
Unfortunately, a wild clash of expectations people have from other games, including WOD, with the reality of what midnight housing really is, will have long-term consequences.
There is also the housing-first gameplay enthusiasts crowd that will no doubt feel betrayed by the feature. Its designed with housing-second or housing hating mindset that doesn’t understand housing first mindset.
Additionally, there is a large crowd of people, who enjoyed expansion N, but that expansion has been nerfed down, so this crowd haven’t had anything to do inside the game for years now, and so housing was their last hope of getting creative freedom from blizzard of crafting their own gameplay/gamespace:
Be that with ability to script, place NPCs, place usable items or something else.
Those housing tools could give people without gameplay/gamespace an ability to create their own gameplay/gamespace.
Their expectations of being able to unleash their system/gameplay creativity won’t be met either.
Blizzard won’t allow people to play the game on their own terms their own way.
Go farm crests.
My condolences also go out to the crowd of people, who hate expansion hubs. If you find Dornogal tiresome, lags powerful and colorful player mount zoo immersion breaking, and that’s the reason you had to completely abandon crafting this expansion as i have, be assured: housing won’t help you, its hub or die.
You are supposed to please the eye of the onlooker in the expansion hub, not craft in your private space. It breaks the open world of the game, when there is not 10 people hugging one crafting table in the hub. We hope, you understand.
Finally and most importantly, and that’s probably the biggest blow Blizzard is dealing to their fanbase relationship.
People, who wanted a house to live inside the warcraft universe, its time to bid that idea goodbye. You won’t be able to spend any time inside your house, there is literally nothing to do inside, Blizzard and antihousers made sure of that.
If you want a place, where you can live inside warcraft, that’s mythic, not your wow house, you silly
Don’t mix them up
2025.12.21 EDIT
P.S. This is anecdotal experience, not important generally, and i have already said it below, but i will underscore it again, in my subjective not-universal unimportant experience every person i have personally talked to, who was fighting for making housing decor-only, i have found evidence to be a mythic enjoyer. They were saying “i love housing, but it shouldnt scope creep”, which is a euphemism for “I dont want housing to be in the game. I want the resources to go into mythic” [be that keys or raids]. But then i know keys and raids are not widely popular.
So this whole midnight housing is to an extent a compromise, of not introducing housing to the game, but providing further bragging rights for mythic achievements, which satisfies a group within the mythic community, but also giving wow another shop shelf, which satisfies the finance team, one should think.
So it seems as a compromise between two groups, that all due respect dont have anything to do with the general wow population
And so then the Occam’s razor would say its finance team and mythic community inside the studio coming to a better version of the game for both.
This is absolutely consistent with cutting levelling from the game, and trying to make keys and raids the main activity within the game; and with many other developments over the years.
Its then would be especially funny to claim housing is a casual feature in wow, and i hope you appreciate, how beautiful similar marketing points are.
Accidentally, this form of housing is also good for apartment design enjoyers. People who like to design levels. People who like to get inspired or borrow others work in designing levels.
And collectionists, so people who obsesively-compulsively hoard. So if there is a chair to be collected to stand in a dark corner, they NEED that chair. Many of those people will be whales ofc. and spend lavishly on the shop. Especially since u can never get enough of one chair 
So housing is really a good nice cometogether from the finance team, the mythic enjoyers and the designers. Beautiful
I suppose the moral of the story matches the temper of the man telling it
so the moral of this post i guess is like wow is for xyz so is housing, so if you are looking for housing, maybe you are not looking for wow
interesting! maybe thats why the housing team is somewhat external
but yes, how should i put it? housing feels as a product that satisfies XYZ within the company. And then if the marketing team can, it sells it to you.
2025.12.22 edit
Adding to P.S. blizzard reaction to failure launch was to add mailbox and (b)elf exterior xD
Ok, folks, at this point, its official. Our favorite once-upon-a-time MMORPG, now mythic lobby simulator has decided it had enough and is now heading for the rocks.
Some people like me, hoped DF meant Blizz were trying to save the game. Then TWW came out and it became obvious, that the progress wont be linear.
But now that the housing is out,
The strategic direction has finally locked in
Might as well remove warcraft and rpg from the description.
yes, the last 10 years have been on life support.
but now there is no pretense possible.
this housing release is really pulling the plug
30 years collapsing in 1
epic
