World of Warcraft: Midnight is here, and with it the long-awaited arrival of player housing in Blizzard’s two-decade-old MMORPG. It’s a wildly impressive system that allows for boundless creativity, even if there’s still significant room for improvement.
For my full thoughts on WoW’s 11th expansion, check out GameSpot’s WoW: Midnight review, but as Midnight’s biggest selling point, housing is worth digging into in greater detail. With 20 years’ worth of hopes and dreams attached to housing in WoW, Blizzard finally pulling the trigger on the feature is a big deal, and one that filled many players, myself included, with anxiety regarding whether Blizzard was up to the task.
Thankfully, Blizzard’s vision for housing mostly delivers, avoiding many of the housing pitfalls seen in other contemporary MMOs. You get your house for free. You can put your house anywhere in the game’s designated housing area as long as the plot you want isn’t occupied, and if it is, you can just keep visiting identical instances of the same neighborhood until you find one where it isn’t. You can make a neighborhood of just your friends or guildmates. You don’t have to pay taxes on your home. You can easily move to a new plot or neighborhood. Players with millions of gold (or a higher credit card limit) don’t get to buy a mansion while you can only afford a small shack. Everyone gets the same house, but both the inside and outside can be customized largely how you see fit.
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