While still a ways away from the hands of players, World of Warcraft's player housing system continues to receive good news. New light has been shed on what interior decoration will look like in WoW, and thankfully, it appears that the system is being designed with creative freedom at the forefront. More options will always be better for customization, and Blizzard seems intent on covering as many of those bases as possible.

The latest houdate has shown off the flurry of options for interior decoration. A Basic mode seems nicely crafted for intuitive and simple design, but the real star of the show is the advanced decoration mode. Held within the vaguely named mode is a tool for every job, which will no doubt lead to some truly spectacular designs. The emphasis on breaking common declaration conventions could lead to an outpouring of creativity and expression that has never been seen in World of Warcraft.

WoW Player Housing Introduces An Advanced Decoration Mode

An Encouraging Development For Housing Aficionados

WoW's new Advanced decoration mode, as revealed in a blog post from Blizzard, is best understood in comparison to its basic counterpart. Where basic mode has traditional grid snapping, simple rotations, and conventional logic for decoration placement, Advanced mode chooses to strip away these useful but limiting tools. There's a gimbal for every rotation need, a complete lack of conventional logic, and even the ability to completely resize decorations. At first glance, the system appears robust enough to cater to most needs, even for the hyper-advanced decorator.

The distinction between Advanced and Basic feels like a perfect system to me. Options are never a bad thing, and there's absolutely no reason to bar players from utilizing advanced, hyper-specific options, especially when there's an intuitive and simple fallback for players less keen on intense decoration to engage with. There's a reason that WoW doesn't need a 2025 BlizzCon event to generate hype for its future. Besides the transparent expansion plans, WoW is already on a steady upward trend of decisions and content, with housing being no exception.

Advanced Decoration s Breaking The Rules

Rules Are Meant To Be Broken

One of the greatest benefits of the Advanced mode is the freedom to break the game. While options like resizing objects, floating them in the air, and clipping them through walls may not have immediately obvious uses, the decision to them scales with player creativity. In what feels like another jab from WoW towards FFXIV, this proposed housing system fixes many of the issues that still plague its competitor's system, particularly in the way that players tend to achieve this rule-breaking in the pursuit of decorative excellence.

Decorating the way I want to in FFXIV and many other MMOs, relies on strange glitches, hidden knowledge, and unintuitive controls (plus an immense amount of gil to boot). While creativity still obviously flourishes in FFXIV, acting upon it feels like a test of patience and endurance. Making superbly decorated houses is no easy feat, and while knowing about the clunky controls that had to be tamed to achieve such a perfect house makes the feat much more impressive, it doesn't need to be that way.

Obtaining and maintaining an FFXIV house in the first place can be an absolutely frustrating mess, a problem WoW could also have more success in addressing.

It's a breath of fresh air to see a system that's purposefully crafted to be broken, especially because the system is bound to be broken anyway. There's no point in making that inevitable process tedious and restrictive. These convention-breaking options are often exactly what is needed to craft truly unique designs, and while they won't be used by every player, I'm sure their usage will fundamentally impact the type of designs that will be showcased to friends, guilds, servers, and social platforms.

World Of Warcraft Is Making Player Housing Unique

A Housing System Done Right

While WoW's housing is still in the process of development as a feature-rich and intuitive system, the creations that will be possible in WoW seem poised to eclipse the majority of MMO housing systems. After coming to with WoW's long-term refusal to invest in a player housing system, it almost feels strange to see a system in development that looks like a contender for the best on the MMO market.

The level of freedom shown for both interior decoration and neighborhoods paints a picture of a truly inspiring degree of customization, defined not just in the way a room is decorated, but in the way that players can choose to engage with the system as a whole. I'm more excited than ever to see how exterior decoration plays into this recurring trend. Like everything else revealed for World of Warcraft's housing so far, I have no doubt that it will be better than I initially anticipated.

Source: Blizzard