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World of Warcraft's newly unveiled housing system seems every bit as ambitious as you'd expect from a legacy MMO tackling player housing for the first time in its 21-year existence, with an in-depth home decorator taking cues from The Sims 4 as much as contemporaries like Final Fantasy 14 and Elder Scrolls Online.
Talking to GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2025, WoW lead UX designer Laura Sardinha said "80% of players" will probably stick to the tools available in the in-game decorator's Basic mode, which is best if you just want a quick, seamless UX that snaps objects into place on a grid to avoid collision with other objects and walls. But if you want more freedom, including the ability to resize and rotate objects, you'll want to switch over to Advanced.
"It feels like a 3d software where you can resize and rotate stuff," said Sardinha. "So that was one of the challenges, for sure, that we never had before. So you can do that. You can just go in that mode, and then you can edit it a little more."
Sardinha also shared that the complexity of Advanced mode's decorator culminated in a system that looked a little too... systemy? Basically, it was clashing with the WoW aesthetic, so the developers had to run a fantasy filter over the UX to make the tools align better with the overall game.
"It was funny, because when we made those, we were like, 'OK, we just make, like, a 3d software, and then you do that," said Sardinha. "But it's not like working, you know, does it look too much like a software? Like, 'how can we make this thing look more WoW-like?' It was part of the game, so we changed the art to feel like magic. So when you are manipulating those objects, it feels like magic for Warcraft."
Sardinha and WoW design lead Toby Ragaini stressed in the same interview how much they want housing to feel like an ambitious, but also "natural extension" of the enduring MMO. "We get one shot at this to impress people," Ragaini said.
"The amount of investment that we put into this feature… It's launching with Midnight, but it is something that we're going to be supporting [with] every major patch, future expansions – it is going to be a core part of the game."
Find out where WoW ranked on our list of the best MMOs to play in 2025.
