Blizzard have spoken again about why we probably won’t see World of Warcraft on consoles, in an interview with Videogamer.
WoW’s J Allen Brack explained some of the difficulties involved in transferring the game over to console:
World of Warcraft is designed as a PC game. It’s designed to have a keyboard and a mouse. So the controls and the control scheme that you have are very PC centric. If you think about mapping those controls and all those different type of buttons that you have to a console without a keyboard for chatting, it’s a very challenging proposition.
Tom Chilton also chipped in:
It’s really not that we have anything against consoles, I mean we love console games also. And I’m sure there will be a successful MMO sometime on a console. So it has nothing to do with that. It’s just more like a square peg round hole thing for our game. It just wasn’t designed with that in mind.
It’s not that RPGs can’t be played on consoles, Oblivion was very successful, but MMOGs prove trickier due to communication - most people chat to each other by typing in WoW - as well as the other issues Brack mentioned above.
But if that’s all it will take for WoW to be available on consoles, why don’t Sony, Microsoft and/or Nintendo just develop a keyboard and mouse that works with their systems? You’d have to be able to connect to the regular internet too, of course.
Is WoW just too big, would it be too much work to make the game compatible for consoles, or are there other issues?
Some consoles have keyboard as add-on. x360 and PS3 have click-on keyboard. But there are no such big keyboards made for consoles. Even the mouse is missing. We know the games on consoles are always somewhat limited compared with same PC games. PC games always bigger, more details and has more graphic effects. Don’t forget Wow has programmable GUI, how do you it on the console? The online games on consoles are always with fixed GUI. The GUI has also very much information but that is not good with television use. You miss many information. Even you make fonts bigger, the GUI is too much busy. The addons are all never designed for console usage, because the many small fonts. And how about teamspeak?
I think Wow stays forever as PC game. It’s too complex, too big and too much information thanks to programmable GUI.