World of Warcraft Unlikely to Come to Consoles

This is a topic that seems to come up every now and again, and this time it is up to G4, who asked World of Warcraft lead producer J. Allen Brack about the development of MMOs on the consoles, and whether or not World of Warcraft could make the jump.

“There’s those technical challenges,” he explained, “there’s patching challenges, there’s the quality controls that we have vs. the quality controls that say, a Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo has. All those things sort of raise the bar in terms of the challenges and then specifically in the case of WoW, WoW was designed to be a keyboard game and its control scheme and its camera controls and the number of abilities that you have and the spells and how things work are very keyboard-centric. The idea of translating that to a gamepad is a very, very challenging proposition.”

Even though the concept of a console version of World of Warcraft remains a hot topic even internally at Blizzard, Brack appeared to declare the near-final word on the fate of the idea. Brace yourself!

“I think it’s unlikely that WoW comes to the consoles,” he said, dashing hopes and dreams. “It is something that we talk about on a pretty regular basis, but someone is going to figure out how to make an MMO on a console and they’re going to be wildly successful. I have no doubt about that.”