World of Warcraft’s Next Expansion Finally Adding Player Housing After Years of Requests by Fans

Today’s Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct largely focused on updates to games that we’ll see in the next several months to early next year. However, the presentation ended with one big tease that’s farther out – a major feature coming to World of Warcraft’s next expansion that players have been asking about for years: player housing.

The presentation didn’t offer any real details about exactly how player housing would work or what it would entail. All we learned is that the feature is in the works, and that we’ll finally see it in World of Warcraft: Midnight, the game’s next expansion planned for a full reveal in late summer of 2025.

The idea of player housing has been toyed around with in expansions going as far back as the Warlords of Draenor. At the time, the “Garrison” feature was floated as WoW’s answer to player housing, but ultimately fell short of the customizability and more permanent nature of player housing in other MMORPGs, such as Final Fantasy 14.

Garrisons were ultimately abandoned at the end of Warlords of Draenor, serving no real lasting purpose for most players, and Blizzard hasn’t revisited the idea of player housing since. Notably, Guild Wars 2 just implemented player housing earlier this year as well, suggesting the feature is a popular one for MMO players.

For now, we don’t know much else about what World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Midnight, will entail. We did see a content roadmap during the presentation that suggests the expansion will be officially unveiled in late summer of 2025. Midnight will be the second part of what Blizzard is calling “The Worldsoul Saga”, which also encompasses The War Within and the expansion following Midnight, entitled The Last Titan.

You can catch up with everything announced from today’s Warcraft Direct right here, including remasters of Warcraft I and II, the next patch for The War Within, and the next update for World of Warcraft: Classic.

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].