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?
Honestly the only point of this entire discussion to me is that this would, as others have mentioned, be yet another system to support which would draw manpower (person-power? lol) away from the "main" user population. Things work quite well as they are now although I occasionally feel Blizz response is rather slow. How much slower would that become if they added an entire new platform (or two or three) to their plate?
From a completely self-serving point of view, I say "no thanks." Let console owners play their games (see other news item on "Pet Vet 2: Paws and Claws" perhaps?) and I’ll keep mine.
Peace.