// KOTAKU — GAMING
World Of Warcraft’s Long Awaited Housing Feature Was The Best Thing About This Expansion, So Why Did I Stop Visiting?
That picture up top there? That’s my house. Do you like it?
Here, look, that’s the backyard. I got a little carried away with the garden, as in real life.
The inside’s still a bit of a work in progress, but I’ll show you. Here’s the main room:
I’ve got this nice magic study of sorts in the adjacent room:
Kind of a weird narrow bedroom I’m still working out what to do with:
And then this courtyard thingie, which I guess I use for rituals or something:
Really, it’s not much. I’m not a genius decorator like a lot of the folks I’ve seen on Reddit, people who can make mansions or flying houses or super detailed interiors. I just threw some stuff around. Kind of like my house in real life. But it is mine, and I did put a lot of time into it. Hours, even. Several hours, almost entirely at the very beginning of World of Warcraft’s Midnight expansion. I was so excited for housing! I was convinced it would consume me, would become more WoW for me than the rest of WoW.
Instead, I’ve barely visited it since the expansion launched. Nor has anyone else. In fact, you’re probably the first people to see all this work in several months.
Housing in WoW is genuinely fantastic. It’s a great feature. Blizzard really hit it out of the park with this! The level of detail in customization is astounding, how you can position everything right where you want it, at exactly the right angle. How certain pieces can be recolored with paints, how you can let a pet roam your house now too. And some of the decorations you can get, wow! I love so much of the magic-y furniture, the spinning bookcases and glowing orbs and messy scholar tables. It’s great. They’re constantly adding new decor items and better customization tools. I logged on today to take screenshots for this piece and discovered I had a bunch of sick items from playing the WoW: Forever beta that I wanted to hang up somewhere immediately.
But housing also, to a certain extent, feels…over. Like, I made my house, and it’s done. There’s no reason to go there. No one’s in my neighborhood, ever. I don’t think I’ve seen any of my guildmates running around in there since the expansion launched. There are no vendors, except for housing decor vendors. There’s no bank, no transmog guy, no quest givers except housing quest givers. There aren’t fun NPCs hanging around. No one visits my house. I can’t even use the alchemy table in my living room as an alchemy table, or the pot as a cookpot.