I Played World of Warcraft’s Midnight Housing at Gamescom — Beautiful Tools, Plenty of Unanswered Questions
Blizzard demonstrated World of Warcraft’s new player housing feature at Gamescom, showing an early hands-on demo for the Midnight expansion, which is due in 2026. The demo highlighted two modes of housing, item types like furniture and stoves, and a user interface for placing and customizing rooms and objects.
What Blizzard showed
Blizzard confirmed that player housing is a new feature arriving with the Midnight expansion in 2026. During the presentation, developers said they looked to both cozy games and survival games for inspiration, and they emphasized accessibility by offering separate basic and advanced building options.
The demo included examples of placeable items such as furniture, lighting that can be toggled on and off, ovens usable for cooking, and animated diabolical altars intended for warlock-style decoration. Additionally, the presentation noted that players would have plenty of space, and showed multiple rooms that could accommodate alternate characters.
Modes and features
Blizzard demonstrated two distinct modes:
- Basic mode: Provides a menu of room templates and enforces placement rules to prevent odd placements, like putting a painting through a column.
- Advanced mode: Removes most placement restrictions and allows items to be moved freely as well as resized, for example to fit tiny goblins or tall tauren.
The interface shown in the demo uses snapping and presets for quick layout, plus color and pattern options for many items. However, the demo’s wall and floor pattern options appeared more limited compared to other customization tools on display.
Demo setup at Gamescom
Blizzard set up a public demo area on the Gamescom floor that included a stage for streamed presentations and a zone of demo PCs where attendees had roughly 20 minutes to try the housing tools. The demo began with a taped presentation shown inside a small model house on the demo floor.
During the hands-on session, attendees could place rooms, add objects, change colors, snap new rooms into place, and test toggles like lighting and working ovens. The overall control scheme and visual layout were compared by Blizzard to systems used in games such as The Sims and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Open questions Blizzard did not answer in the demo
The demo provided specifics about placement tools and item types, but it left several implementation details unaddressed. For example, the presentation did not explain:
- How housing items will be obtained in live service (crafting, purchase, quest rewards, or other methods).
- Whether every player will start with the same amount of space or will need to unlock or buy additional rooms.
- How housing will be accessed in the wider game world (fast travel, portals, or other systems) and whether homes will be account-wide or per-character in practice.
- Whether neighborhoods shown in promotional material will contain other players from a server or NPC populations for interaction.
- Whether housing will include utility structures beyond stoves (for example, anvil-type crafting stations) or resource-generating systems like previous Blizzard features.
Blizzard’s demo focused on the design and customization systems, and it did not present final answers to those integration questions during the Gamescom hands-on session.
