The feature parity part is correct. The irony here is that by going to DX12 instead of Vulkan, Windows lost exclusive fullscreen support, and even though Metal does support it, getting it working with Apple’s “Retina” scaling tech is apparently just too much hassle for no real return on investment (time).
What this means is that I’m probably locked out of WoW forever at this point due to both sides doing their best to kill EFS mode. It’s doubly ironic on the Microsoft side because they advertise and even sell an accessibility controller, yet they removed proper accessibility across the board for disabled players that might not be able to fix being booted out of a game because borderless windowed (fullscreen windowed in WoW) mode does not protect against something interrupting an app’s focus.
It could be a Skype notification, Windows Defender trying to get your attention, or just some random badge appearing in the system tray - you’ll get booted out of a non-EFS game instantly. I had that happen with Star Ocean 4 in Windows. The moment the game was interrupted and knocked into regular windowed mode (which is what happens when borderless windowed mode is interrupted), the controller stopped responding and wouldn’t reconnect at all until the game was closed down and restarted. At that point only the mouse worked, which meant getting into combat was guaranteed death due to lack of controls. You think disabled folks that have a game set up for them are going to be able to fix things like that? Nope.
WoW is putting in controller support in 9.0/Shadowlands, but in yet another grand twist of irony, I don’t need that. I already had controller support working. That never stopped working. It was being booted out of the game by the Dock or some random notification or even just the OS farting at me that did the game in for me. Once I’m booted out or if I tab out of the game, the game no longer has focus, and thus my mouse acceleration curve gets broken. It doesn’t return properly when I go back into the game, so just like in Windows I have to restart WoW to get it back. It happened often enough that the game became unplayable for me since that curve was tailored specifically for my deformed arm and its lack of fine motor control.
I’ve lost out on all of BfA and will lose out on Shadowlands as well because of a singular feature being removed. Sad part is, if Blizzard had gone with Vulkan instead of DX12, at least I’d have a path to play in Windows, if not OS X. With built in controller support and Vulkan I’d have my EFS mode back, just like I get in Path of Exile, which now has a very good Vulkan renderer.
Unfortunately I can’t expect Rommax to be able to do all that on top of everything else he’s got to do. Even if I could play WoW with just a controller (once I set it up), it’d be an absolute minimalistic gameplay experience because once you factor in strafe left/right, jump, crouch (which is also swim down), left stick movement, right stick mouselook, you’re not left with a hell of a lot to use for keybinds or opening bags with, even if you’re using something like a Razer Raiju Ultimate.
Disabled gamers just really aren’t a concern with Blizzard on the whole. If they were, Overwatch would have both XInput and DirectInput support, as well as full controller customizability instead of hard-mapped controls like strafe being tied to the left analog stick and no way to remap it.
I guess disabled players’ money has cooties and Blizzard just doesn’t want to touch it. Who knows. Either way, players like me lose.
and other developers aren’t as willing to deal with it.