Blizzard is giving everyone a chance to try out World of Warcraft's new player housing for free next week

One of the biggest features coming to World of Warcraft will be available to try for free next week. Blizzard will unlock player housing for everyone, whether you've preordered the Midnight expansion or not, to test on the PTR starting October 13.

Anything you build on the PTR won't carry over to the live game when early access to player housing launches in December, but you'll have a few days to see if you can create the house of your dreams.

I've played with some of the tools on the Midnight alpha build and they're already surprisingly robust. You can drop tables and paintings and chandeliers just about anywhere, and every object can be rotated and resized easily. Walls and floors can be reskinned with a few clicks and it'll even remember your most recent choices for when you add new preset rooms to your pad.

Housing will require owning Midnight when it fully drops, but this is your opportunity to try it for free. WoW PTRs don't require a subscription; lapsed accounts can download it on the Battle.net launcher as soon as it's live. Completely new players, however, will need to make a PTR account following the steps on Blizzard's website.

In her preview of WoW: Midnight's alpha, Heather Newman said player housing is "almost definitely going to be the collector's dream." All sorts of trophies and items from WoW's history will be available to find or buy when housing arrives, some of which you can start collecting now. I've never been a huge collector in MMOs, but I'm sure the old age of my account alone will give me access to some rare stuff to decorate with.

The housing PTR will run from October 13 to October 16. Blizzard says in the blog post with the announcement to expect the servers to go up and down occasionally throughout the testing period.