That photo up there? This is my house. Do you like it?
Hey, look, this is the courtyard. I got a little carried away by the garden, like in real life.
The interior is still under construction, but I’ll show it to you. Here is the main piece:
I have this beautiful magical study in the adjacent room:
A sort of strange and narrow room that I’m still trying to figure out what to do with:
And then this yard thing, which I guess I use for rituals or something:
Really, it’s not much. I’m not a genius decorator like a lot of people I’ve seen on Reddit, people who can create mansions, flying houses, or highly detailed interiors. I just threw stuff away. A bit like my house in real life. But it’s mine and I’ve spent a lot of time on it. Hours, even. Several hours, almost entirely at the very beginning of World of Warcraft Midnight expansion. I was so excited about the accommodation! I was convinced it would consume me, become even more Wow for me and for the rest Wow.
Instead, I’ve barely visited it since the expansion launched. No one else either. In fact, you are probably the first to see all this work in several months.
Accommodation in Wow is truly fantastic. This is a nice feature. Blizzard really hit it out of the park with this! The level of customization detail is astounding: you can position everything where you want it, at exactly the right angle. How some rooms can be recolored with paint, how you can also let a pet wander around your house. And some of the decorations you can get, wow! I love magical furniture, rotating bookcases, glowing orbs, and messy scholar tables so much. It’s great. They are constantly adding new decoration elements and better customization tools. I logged in today to take screenshots of this room and discovered I had a bunch of sick items while playing the WoW: forever beta that I wanted to hang up somewhere immediately.
But housing also, to a certain extent, seems… finished. Like, I built my house, and it’s done. There’s no reason to go there. There is never anyone in my neighborhood. I don’t think I’ve seen any of my guildmates running there since the expansion launched. There are no sellers, except for home decoration sellers. There is no banking, no transmog, no quest givers besides housing quest givers. There are no fun NPCs hanging around. Nobody comes to my house. I can’t even use the alchemy table in my living room as an alchemy table, or the pot as a cooking pot.
As cool as the housing is and as well executed as it is, it still feels like a completely separate game from World of Warcraftto the point where I forget it’s even a thing. Sometimes I’ll pick up a piece of scenery from a dungeon or delve and remember that my house exists, and I go back to place the item somewhere, only to stand there looking bland for a few minutes, wondering what to do next, and then I leave because there’s no reason to stick around.
I have sometimes thought about completely renovating my house. It would be fun, it would waste time, and then maybe I would be more inclined to spend time there. Since I built it, I’ve received a lot of decor pieces that are too bulky to just place in my kitchen space, but could be centerpieces that I build an entire room around. But every time I start thinking about it seriously, I stop in front of my house. If I’m going to renovate, I want to start with the exterior, which I hate. I’ve hated this since the beginning of the expansion.
That’s because this house is an orc house. I’m not an orc. The other option for a Horde member is a blood elf house. I’m not one of them either. None of the options available suit me or excite me. And it’s not just the exterior. This also extends to the interiors: the doors, the essentials of the basic decoration packages. I’m not talking about the cool stuff I got from quests, which is all in there. I mean the basics that form the basis of most homes: tables, chairs, beds. You can buy them from vendors, but they are mostly orcs or elves. If you don’t create an orc or elf house, your options are very limited. And while it’s cheap to get one or two, if you want bulk items like a fence, you have to buy the entire number you want to use, which can get expensive quickly.
I am a tauren. The Tauren setting seems a bit busy, I admit, but what I’d really like is a sort of magical, cozy cottage aesthetic. I have some interior elements to make it make sense, but not enough. There are plenty of them available on the Alliance side (but Alliance players, in turn, cannot build orc houses). Or I could go to the Blizzard store, spend real money to acquire the fictional currency Hearthsteel, then spend that on one of the two finest sets of housing skins and furniture Blizzard has created so far: either the Springtime Treehouse or the Grimtide Estate. I love both of these sets, but not enough to spend real money on them, especially since the latter being locked behind a real money purchase is pretty explicitly contrary to what Blizzard promised when the feature launched. It’s $25 for the house alone and another $10 for all the decor. $35 is a lot right now! The treehouse pack is even more expensive!
I don’t want to downplay the hard work done by incredible developers out there to create a new setting for these things, one that I can get through gameplay. In fact, almost every setting is available in the game. Apparently the last patch added over 200 new items, and I actually think a lot of them (especially some of the gardening items, although it’s clear now that I’m a plant lover) are really cool. I’ll probably try to collect a few. Housing also continues to expand, with the limits on the size of your decoration collection increasing in the recent patch and the size of houses becoming even larger. This is all great!
So why am I completely uninterested in engaging in something that I was so excited about at the start of the expansion? Something I was willing to put hours into, and expected to consume my gaming time in?
I think it’s fair that as an overall feature built into an MMO, Wow housing seems extremely dissonant right now. It’s so separated from the rest of the game that it’s almost forgettable, and the updates it receives are often very nice and cool, but continually seem to ignore major elements that players have wanted all along, such as literally no reason to be in our homes. When I remember housing exists, it’s usually because Blizzard is trying to sell me an absolutely gorgeous exterior that I’ll never be able to acquire in-game unless I pay the equivalent of several months’ subscription, which makes the whole thing feel strangely cluttered with money. As if all the best things will always be locked in the cash shop.
I spend more time in the oft-maligned world Warlords of Draenor garrison than my home, and that’s a shame considering how cool all the details of this feature really are. And I’d like to make sure that the very interesting models that Blizzard developers are working on for this very interesting feature will be things that I can get if I put effort into gaming, instead of wondering if it’s worth bothering if I’m not willing to spend an extra $30. With these issues combined, I’m very worried that housing will end up being left behind over time: functionality relegated to the back burner, housing-specific guilds, and those aesthetically-minded individuals who are willing to pay big bucks for cool exteriors while I huddle in my weird orc hut.
I expected housing to be a fun, community activity that my guild and I engage in together when we’re not raiding. I should invite people to house parties and activate a bunch of silly toys in the game, or use housing as a hub where I can take care of necessary activities between adventures and meet others organically as I do. But for now, at least, no one is home.
Gn tech
