Rebekah Valentine
Guest
Over a year after its announcement, World of Warcraft's long-awaited housing feature is finally hitting prime time, and we now have a date. Early access for housing will start for players who pre-purchase the new expansion, Midnight, on December 2, 2025.
This news comes directly from Blizzard, who shared it with us alongside an early alpha preview of the game. During this preview, we actually got to mess around with the new housing system a bit: we explored some of the neighborhoods available to build houses in, moved some chairs and tables around, and dyed a couple of tablecloths.
Though we haven't yet had enough time to fully explore the promised wide range of options available, we can confirm there's already a lot one can do to customize the housing space even fresh out of the housing tutorial. And while we didn't get to experiment with some of the more advanced features, in a presentation shown off by Blizzard yesterday, we got a look at how players can add rooms of all sorts of different shapes, tweak item placement at a very granular level, and even decorate the outsides of houses with fancy chimneys and towers, elaborate gardens, and exterior styles themed around humans, orcs, blood elves, or night elves. If we'd had access to the full array of available decor from the get-go, we probably never would have left our house in the alpha.
To start with, players can pick a spot for their house in one of a number of different themed spaces within their neighborhood. For Alliance players, that includes spaces such as a farm, an autumnal forest, a coastal plain, and right next to the local graveyard. For Horde players, options include areas themed after the red rocks of Durotar, the plains of Mulgore, an oasis, and more. Some houses are clustered close to others, while others are spread apart. And you can either join a public neighborhood with strangers, or a private one with members of your guild or in-game community. And all of this is cross-faction, though you do ultimately have to pick either the Alliance- or Horde-themed neighborhood and get locked into one style of architecture or the other. Each player can have two houses per Warband: one in an Alliance neighborhood, and one Horde.
All of that is currently able to be explored by players with access to the game's alpha, so expect to see streamers, content creators, and us sharing more about housing in the coming weeks. But anyone who has pre-purchased World of Warcraft: Midnight will get access to this feature themselves on December 2, 2025, ahead of the actual expansion launch. We don't have a final release date for Midnight just yet, though it's expected in early 2026.
For more on Midnight, check out our initial alpha preview impressions right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].