That picture up top there? That’s my house. Do you like it?

Wow Housing 6© Blizzard

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:

Wow Housing 2© Blizzard

I’ve got this nice magic study of sorts in the adjacent room:

Wow Housing 3© Blizzard

Kind of a weird narrow bedroom I’m still working out what to do with:

Wow Housing 4© Blizzard

And then this courtyard thingie, which I guess I use for rituals or something:

Wow Housing 5© Blizzard

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.

Cool as housing is and as well-executed as it is, it still feels like a completely separate game from World of Warcraft, to the point where I forget it’s even a thing. Sometimes I’ll get a piece of decor from a dungeon or delve and remember my house exists, and I’ll head back there to place the item somewhere, only to stand there sort of blandly for a few minutes, wondering what to do next, and then just leave because there’s no reason to stick around.

I’ve thought, at times, of just fully remodeling my house. That would be fun, kill some time, and then maybe I’d be more inclined to spend time there. I’ve gotten a lot of decor pieces since I first built it that are too unwieldy to just plop into my kitchen space, but which could be centerpieces I build a whole room around. But whenever I start thinking of this seriously, I pause outside my house. If I’m going to remodel, I want to start with the exterior, which I hate. I’ve hated it since the expansion started.

Wow House© Blizzard

That’s because this house is an orc house. I’m not an orc. The other option for a member of the Horde is a blood elf house. I’m not one of those either. Neither available options fits or excites me. And it’s not just the exterior. This extends to the interiors as well: the doors, the bulk of the basic sets of decor. I don’t mean the cool stuff I got from questing, which is all in there. I mean the basics that form the groundwork for most houses: tables, chairs, beds. You can buy these from vendors, but it’s all either orc or elf, for the most part. If you’re not making an orc house or an elf house, your options are severely limited. And while it’s cheap to get one or two, if you want bulk items like fencing, you have to buy the total number you want to use, which can get expensive quickly.

I’m a tauren. Tauren decor feels a little fraught, I admit, but what I’d really like is a sort of cozy magic cottage aesthetic. I’ve got some of the interior items for that to make sense, but not nearly enough. There are plenty of those available on the Alliance side of things (but Alliance players, in turn, are locked out of making orc houses). Or I could go to the Blizzard store, spend real money to acquire the fictional currency Hearthsteel, then spend that on one of the two most gorgeous sets of housing appearances and furniture Blizzard has made so far: either the Springtime Treehouse or the Grimtide Estate. I adore both of these sets, but not enough to spend real money on them, especially given that the latter set being locked behind a real-money purchase is pretty explicitly against what Blizzard promised when it launched the feature. It’s $25 for the house alone, and $10 more for all the decor. $35 is a lot right now! The treehouse pack is even pricier!

Grimtide© Blizzard

I don’t want to diminish the very hard work being done by some incredible developers over there to make new decor for these things, decor that I can get through gameplay. Most all decor, in fact, is available in-game. Apparently the latest patch added over 200 new items, and I actually think a lot of them (especially some of the garden stuff, though it’s clear by now I’m a sucker for plants) look really nice. I’ll probably try to grab some of them. Housing keeps expanding, too, with the limits on the size of your decor collection rising in the recent patch and the house sizes getting even bigger. All that’s great!

So why am I just totally uninterested in engaging with something I started the expansion so, so excited about? Something I was prepared to pour hours into, that I expected to consume my playtime?

I think it’s just that as an overall feature embedded within an MMO, WoW housing feels extremely dissonant right now. It’s so separated from the rest of the game as to be nigh-forgettable, and the updates it does get are often very nice and cool, but continuously seem to skip over major elements that players have wanted from the beginning, such as literally any reason at all to be in our houses. When I do remember housing exists, it’s usually because Blizzard is trying to sell me some absolutely gorgeous exterior I’ll never be able to acquire in-game unless I pay the equivalent of multiple months’ subscription for it, which makes the whole thing feel weirdly cash grabby. Like all the absolute best stuff is always going to be locked to the cash shop.

I spend more time in the oft-decried Warlords of Draenor garrison than I do in my house, and that’s a damn shame given how genuinely cool all the actual details of this feature are. And I’d love to feel confident that the very cool models Blizzard devs are working on for this very cool feature will be things I can obtain if I put in some video game effort, as opposed to wondering if it’s all even worth bothering with if I’m not willing to spend another $30. With these issues combined, I’m very worried that housing will eventually be left behind as time goes on: a feature relegated to the sidelines, housing-specific guilds, and those aesthetically-minded individuals who are willing to pay good money for cool exteriors while I huddle in my weird orc shack.

I expected housing to be this fun, community-oriented thing that my guild and I would engage in together when we’re not raiding. I should be inviting people over for house parties and activating a bunch of dumb in-game toys, or using housing as a hub where I can take care of necessary activities between adventures and organically meet others as I do. But for right now, at least, nobody’s home.