It’s the shear ”technical challenges” that stop it from happening like lack of HDD space for content and no keyboard; a ”very challenging proposition.”
World of Warcraft’s lead producer J. Allen Brack was speaking with G4TV, when he revealed Blizzard never stop thinking about the challenge: ”The lifecycle of consoles being what they are, you have to really time when your console’s going to come out, what its projected lifecycle is going to be with when your game is going to be, which is challenging.”
”In the case of WoW, we talk about it all the time,” he said. ”How would we bring WoW to the console?” How indeed. The enormous size of the game is the first obstacle.
”There’s those technical challenges,” Brack 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.” Platform holders have strict policies in regards to quality control.
”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.” So is Blizz ready to tackle the notion of WoW on consoles head on? Not so much…
”I think it’s unlikely that WoW comes to the consoles,” he said.
”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.” MMO Age of Conan is said to be still in console development.
Is it best to keep the MMORPG off the home console? It’s more a place of fast and furious action isn’t it, not hours spent plotting what talent point to spend? Later this year Blizz will be releasing World of Warcraft: Cataclysm - the latest content expansion.
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