Ever since Blizzard announced the advanced housing mode, clipping errors have been making my heart beat faster. And those are exactly what I went looking for in the new Housing Virtual Tour shown during gamescom.
During gamescom Opening Night, Blizzard didn’t just reveal the Midnight cinematic and open pre-orders for the upcoming expansion and they also released a virtual tour of one of the houses from the new housing feature. In a full 360° view, you can wander through multiple floors, explore rooms, and discover tons of objects.
I was more excited about this tour than anything else Blizzard has shown at gamescom so far. Ever since Blizzard announced an advanced housing mode, I’ve been scanning screenshots and videos looking for those clever creations that come from sliding objects into each other. That’s what excites me the most: building things that don’t exist in the game as default objects, but come to life through player creativity.
My Guilty Influences: Animal Crossing and Satisfactory
There are two games I have to blame for this obsession: Animal Crossing and Satisfactory.
I ended up playing a lot of Animal Crossing during the pandemic. I decorated houses in every tiny detail, landscaped towns, experimented with perspective, and combined objects until I had spaces that felt unique and my own. But the game didn’t have an advanced placement mode. You could stack small objects on furniture, but true object clipping wasn’t possible. If it had been, my already outrageous playtime would have doubled.
Satisfactory, on the other hand, has exactly the kind of building mode I always wished Animal Crossing had. You can nudge objects into place with small adjustments, even sliding them into each other until you get the perfect look. Sure, it’s tedious, but the result is some incredible, unique factories and not just endless square warehouses.
That’s why I’m so thrilled about WoW’s advanced building mode. Since the announcement, I’ve been glad to see that it actually offers more freedom than Satisfactory. Completely free placement means a lot of silly experiments and with object clipping, I’m convinced players will create beautiful, breathtaking things with almost no limits. Those are exactly the screenshots, tours, videos, and community showcases I’m most excited for when I think about WoW Midnight: the chance to marvel at other players’ creations and ask, how on earth did they make that?
Small Discoveries and the Hope for More
I did find a few little things in the virtual tour, though I’m not entirely satisfied yet. Behind the counter in the first big room after the entrance, you can see a pool of water clipping slightly into the bar, and in the background there’s a round structure made up of (what looks like) several different objects. Not exactly the jackpot, but it gives me hope that I just haven’t looked closely enough yet and that the real treasures are still waiting to be found.
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Note: This article was first published in German and has been translated into English with the help of AI. I’ve done my best to capture the original meaning and tone, but a few nuances may differ from the original text.