When Blizzard appeared on stage during the PlayStation 4 reveal last month, I honestly thought they were going to announce World of Warcraft was coming to PS4. I, like many others, was a bit disappointed when it turned out to be Diablo III.
Blizzard actually making games for consoles is a good start, though, so can we expect a WoW port in the future? Or even the inevitable next game in the series appearing on Sony’s hardware? The answer, according to Blizzard’s lead system designer Greg Street, is no (sort of).
It’s not that Blizzard don’t want to release World of Warcraft on consoles, it’s more that doing so would form too big of a challenge. Street made this clear while talking to NowGamer, pointing to the very large hard drive requirement the game has, coupled with an interface that relies heavily on keyboard and mouse use.
Apparently, the PS4 is only getting Diablo III after the team went back and changed “the very fundamentals of the game.†Doing the same for World of Warcraft looks to be too big of a job to make it worthwhile, so while Blizzard still hasn’t given a definitive yes/no answer, I think we can take this as confirmation: World of Warcraft won’t be coming to consoles.
That shouldn’t kill all hope for a Blizzard MMO on the PS4, though. Street also said an MMO could work on consoles, but if Blizzard did it they’d go “in a different direction.†That at least points to the fact they have thought about it. And with next-gen console hardware expected to be very similar to PC components, it’s surely going to be very tempting to target multiple platforms for future games.
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