Blizzard Watch Weekly: Housing, housing, more housing (and a few other things too)

Player housing continues to dominate our thoughts and dreams, as the entire Blizzard Watch team jumped onto the PTR to playtest housing as a group. It hasn’t always gone well, but at least we’re having fun — and hopefully you are too if you hop on the PTR to play around with housing. The feature is still in development and certainly has its quirks, but it’s a whole lot of fun to decorate a piece of Azeroth that’s all yours. We’re happy to hear the test will be lasting all weekend, even though it was originally scheduled to end on Friday.

But let’s dig into a full rundown of the week’s news (and a look at what’s coming up next).

What happened this week?

• WoW patch 11.2.7 landed on the PTR… eventually. The test went live on Thursday, three days later than scheduled, and lasts through the weekend. This includes an early (but somewhat buggy) peek at player housing for anyone who has the time to log on to the PTR.
• Hallow’s End started today in WoW, with new and old rewards returning for the festive spooky season!
• Overwatch 2 Season 19 began October 14, with another round of Junkenstein’s revenge and a fiendishly fun Haunted Masquerade, in which you can use powers from other heroes depending on which mask you’re wearing.
• Diablo 4 announced a lot of changes coming to Season 11, and I’ll say our enthusiasm is muted. While Tempering and Masterworking changes will make it easier to upgrade (not ruin) gear and leaderboards are finally being added, we’re also losing Renown bonuses and Capstone dungeons are coming back, which feels like taking a step backwards in the game’s accessibility. Plus the Season Journey has turned into Season Perks, which sounds like the Season Journey except more difficult. We’re gathering our thoughts over the weekend: look for an article about what these changes mean next week.
• This week’s Hearthstone Tavern Brawl is Rise of the Zombeasts, which is a little more RNG than I like, but is a fun brawl built around the Zombeast hero power for Rexxar in Knights of the Frozen Throne.

And it’s no surprise that the team here is still all in on player housing. Here’s our latest batch of housing articles to keep you up to date on your future adventures as an interior decorator:

• How to log on to the WoW PTR to check out Player Housing
• Handy addons to help you start your collection of housing decor
• How to buy your very first in-game house
• How to get to your house from anywhere in the game
• A rundown of all of the craftable decor (that we’ve found so far)
• All the plots in Founder’s Point (Alliance)
• All the plots in Razorwind Shores (Horde)

If you’re sticking to the live game, Eric wrote an article for the achievement hunters this week: a rundown of The War Within meta-achievement, Worldsoul-Searching. I’m always slow to work on achievements, so I have some work ahead of me.

What’s happening next week (and beyond)

• October 24 – 28: Diablo 4 patch 2.5.0 (Season 11) PTR runs for a week starting on Friday
• Through October 29: WoW Lil’ Coalee pet Twitch Drop (I am still frightened of this)
• Through November 1: Hallow’s End in WoW
• Through January 19: Legion Remix, and we just wrote a guide to help you find all of the emissaries for quest turnins (and faction-related loot).

Other things we’re playing, watching, and more

• Indie games have some great spooky titles for the Halloween season, and this week we’re talking about the atmospheric adventure game The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, which went right on to my Steam wishlist. (Yeah, I have this problem a lot.)
• Megabonk and other weird new releases were playing this week. Yes, that is an actual game, and no I cannot explain it.
• Steam Next Fest lasts until October 20, and we have a whole pile of demos to play through before it ends: here are 11 of our favorite Steam Next Fest demos so far. And remember, you can check all of them out for free by downloading the demos.
• We also have a spooky game as the Epic Games Store freebie this week with Amnesia: The Bunker. Even if you don’t have time to play it with everything else going on, you might want to add it to your library.
• It’s been a long week, so look at these adorable foster kittens. Look at them.

This week’s podcasts

• Blizzard Watch Podcast: Player Housing wishes and dreams including a throne made entirely of Ashkandis.
• Lore Watch Podcast: Even more stories we’d like to explore through Lorewalking, because we have a lengthy list of ideas.
• Tavern Watch Plays Shadowdark, Episode 2: Never trust strange furniture, because casting magic missile at a chair is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

That’s all I have for you this week, friends. Take care of yourselves, make some cool things in player housing (and share pictures with us!), and I’ll be back with another news rundown for you next week.