Blizzard has confirmed in a new interview that they are still talking about bringing World of Warcraft to consoles. But we have some bad news for you on this front too.
Speaking to Video Games Chronicle, World of Warcraft’s vice president and executive producer Holly Longdale had this to say:
“Of course we still talk about it. We’re gamers, I don’t think anything is out of the realm of possibility, but we don’t have anything to talk about right now.”
Holly also addressed this very same question last November, which was only a few weeks after they were finally acquired by Microsoft. Back then, Holly said that they would naturally be thinking about it, as, in her words, “we are Microsoft now.”
Maybe it’s too much to ask that Blizzard’s team already have a solution for porting World of Warcraft to console so soon after the acquisition. We shouldn’t forget that in the years before the Microsoft deal, Blizzard has consistently stated that they had no interest in bringing the game to console.
To be clear, the reason that Blizzard is changing their tune isn’t only because Microsoft owns Xbox, so they have to support Xbox as well as Windows. On paper, it would be prohibitively expensive to make such a port, since they would need to work on those ports with limited assistance from either Sony, or Microsoft, or hypothetically Nintendo or even Valve, for their Steam Deck.
As a Microsoft company, they would now get significantly more support to get World of Warcraft running, not only on Xbox, but on Game Pass, which also opens up making it playable on the cloud. So it isn’t like there’s no reason for them to work on this, but it’s clear that they still have a lot of hurdles to pass through.
The most obvious one, but perhaps not really the biggest problem, is that of the controls. World of Warcraft is not like Final Fantasy XIV – it’s systems were not built from the start with console controllers in mind. But it wouldn’t be the first game to have needed to make changes to be playable on console.
What could be the bigger problem, however, is just how big World of Warcraft is. 20 years’ worth of content, including expansions and potentially thousands of items, may not be worth porting completely over to consoles. There’s also the question, once again, that it wasn’t built to work with consoles from the start, so that original build may not be usable on console.
But then, I’m not the first to hypothesize that Blizzard may ultimately have to make a different World of Warcraft for consoles, possibly a remake. Such an undertaking would take years to produce, but would also be easier than to try to force the old PC title on console. Perhaps someday, we will be talking about that console World of Warcraft, and how it has become a lynchpin on Game Pass alongside Halo, Forza, and Call of Duty.
