It's astonishing that World of Warcraft is still able to surprise and delight, two decades after it first welcomed heroes from around the world to find a home in Azeroth. From the outside looking in, it would be easy to believe that one of the longest-running MMOs would be running on fumes at this point – struggling to find new ways to engage active players, let alone bring lapsed adventurers back into the fold. And then something like World of Warcraft: Midnight comes along.
Blizzard Entertainment is wading into uncharted territory here. Midnight is the second instalment of the Worldsoul Saga, the incoming expansion arriving little over a year after The War Within. What could this team really accomplish with such a speedy shift between expansions? A hell of a lot, is the answer. Silvermoon City, the capital city of the Blood Elves, has been reimagined as a shared social space; there's a new playable race, The Haranir, and a new ranged specialization for Demon Hunters; eight new dungeons and three new raids are planned, so too is a killer new opt-in hunting system called 'Prey' and improvements to the transmog system. There's a lot to love about Midnight.
But what has truly caught my attention is the arrival of player housing. This has been a long time coming – it's the sort of feature set that my guild used to dream about during downtime back in vanilla. The World of Warcraft playerbase has been forced to watch on enviously as just about every other MMO in the land introduced some version of player housing, albeit to mixed results. Now that it's finally here – and that I've had a chance to try it for myself – it really does appear to have been worth the wait.
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Azeroth was always a place millions of players called home, but it never gave us one to call our own. What's stunning about the introduction of Housing in World of Warcraft: Midnight is that the feature-set is exceptionally simple to use without compromising flexibility or expression. It took just five minutes for me to whip together a fairly attractive (and exceptionally cosy) trophy room, complete with an adjoining library. As I started to build out my homestead further, it didn't take long before some sadness started to creep in – with the feature not set to be introduced on live servers until later this year, all my work on this preview build was for nothing.
The Sims is probably the best comparison I could offer here. At its most basic, interior design is as easy as dragging and dropping decor from a menu into your home. Placing, moving, and removing objects is simple, and decor can be rotated at 15 degree increments to ensure some amount of aesthetic alignment. UI aspects are in place to prevent harsh collision detection, while related elements can automatically parent to one another – meaning if you place books on a shelf, for example, you're then able to move the entire group to a different wall rather than replace each piece individually. Changing the style or size of a room is exceptionally easy, so too is altering the overall theme of decorations or the floorplan and layout of your home more generally. It's really intuitive.
Naturally, if you want to get more granular then that's absolutely an option. Advanced interior design options include the ability to enable a gimbal, allowing you full control of orientation and placement of objects on all three axis points. You can also scale objects up and down freely, and clip objects together to create really ostentatious presentations. Player housing in World of Warcraft is as shallow or as deep as you want to make it for yourself, and it's possible to make really impressive or inviting spaces regardless of the amount of effort you want to put into your home.
Blizzard has done a great job of incrementally refreshing World of Warcraft over the years, but it's rare to see something introduced that is so wholly focused on community engagement. Player housing feels like the missing piece of a puzzle, particularly when you factor in how the studio is handling neighborhoods – you can live alongside up-to 50 other players in public and private zones, creating your very own cul-de-sac with your guild or other likeminded heroes. Honestly, as much as I love the concept behind the Worldsoul Saga (a transparent outlining of three expansions with one interconnected storyline and feature-set), it's player housing that has made me more excited for the future of World of Warcraft than I have been in years.
