I’ll bookmark this thread then.
You’re one of those people who don’t believe any speculation, no matter how logical and obvious it is, unless there is an official announcement I guess.
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Controller support is not a direct causation of a console port. So you’ll have to excuse me for not drawing immediate links.
Anyway, see ya in SL, with $100 still in my bank account.
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It’s not just “controller support.”
It’s a combination of a lot of things. Go watch Bellular’s video on it. The action camera, the improved multicore support which is critical for consoles, the new character creation screen. The relative success of other mmo’s on console. It’s all adding up to an obvious conclusion. I’m not saying it will launch with Shadowlands, or even within a year from now.
But it’s coming.
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“Blizzard will never sell items!”
Blizzard starts selling pets with the Pandaren Monk
“Blizzard will never sell mounts!”
Blizzard sells Celestial Stead
“Blizzard will never sell gold!”
Blizzard sells gold
“Blizzard would never allow people to queue for a raid!”
LFR
“Blizzard would never sell characters!”
Blizzard sells level boosts
“Blizzard will never come out with vanilla servers!”
Blizzard comes out with Classic
“Blizzard would never put WoW on Console!”
…
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Damn son, that’s a bad track record you got there.
Think you’ll might find something here about something at PAX…
At PAX East, videogame site DualShockers spoke with World of Warcraft Producer Daniel Stahl about the chance of the game coming to console, and he was less than reassuring about the idea.
Stahl mentioned to the site that porting World of Warcraft to consoles would mean altering fundamental parts of the game - parts that Blizzard thinks would ruin the experience.
“You know, World of Warcraft is really designed for Personal Computers, I think. There’d have to be so many different changes we’d have to make to make it a console game… We really want to continue making World of Warcraft as it is right now.
"We’d have to do something entirely different if we wanted to do something for consoles.”
Don’t expect World of Warcraft to come to Xbox One, PS4 and especially not Nintendo Switch any time soon.
EDIT: It was an interview with PAX East after Blizcon announcement in 2018.
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Not really.
It does have a longer GCD, but it’s offset by two key details:
- It still retains a large pool of off-GCD abilities for all classes & specs to keep the gameplay active… though admitted it takes quite a while before this starts to take shape (level 50-60 for most classes/jobs).
- There’s absolutely no “empty GCDs”, at least when you’re able to attack. None at all, you’re ALWAYS doing something. You pretty much never run into a resource generation issue as you’re always actively doing something… quite often building up resources for your stronger attacks or building up to your “burst phase” (depends on the job in question). Come to think of it, this is probably why FFXIV uses combos and sequences of abilities as filler rather than single attacks; it’d be pretty damn dull if you were hitting the same one or two abilities all the time.
- FFXIV places more emphasis on movement and survival. WoW likes to abuse mechanics where the entire floor gets covered in goop-of-doom until you run out of space to maneuver. Conversely, FFXIV likes to throw out sequences of AoEs which cover the entire room and you have to stand in the right spot at the right time; often combining this with other typical mechanics which require you stack up, spread out, eliminate adds, and somethings mid-fight minigames (including one boss which makes you do a spot of math). You HAVE to move to survive, especially once you find out there’s this stacking debuff called “vulnerability” which increases all damage taken by 40-50% (I think, it’s not small) for 2 minutes when you fail to dodge something you should have. Then they give melee DPS positional-based bonus damage for half or more of their abilities (mostly the combos which take up the bulk of the rotation), they’re CONSTANTLY moving.
Back to the general point, it’s no secret that Blizz is interested in adding controller support to WoW. The current efforts seem to be more in-line with giving add-on developers better stuff to work with to make controllers work better with WoW.
Are they trying to port the game to consoles? I don’t think that’s currently in the works, one big reason being that they simply don’t have controller support sorted out yet. Are they letting the add-on developers do a lot of the preliminary legwork and ironing out the kinks for them? Maybe.
Another potential issue is the business dynamics. Putting an online-only game onto consoles means they have to put it on the consoles’ established networks – and the owners of those networks (the same owners as the consoles themselves) will want their cut. Also factoring in those online networks may have their own subscriptions as a prerequisite for online play (or did, this may have changed), they may not be able to charge the full subscription fee to attract console players. Oh, and they’d have to ensure ports for multiple console generations would have to be maintained in some way; WoW is already far older than the lifecycle of consoles.
However, I can see Blizz wanting a slice of the console market if they are able to put their foot in the door. It’s a large potential playerbase, there’s no reason for them to avoid it out of principle. It would be misguided for them to heavily modify the game with the sole intent of accessing consoles (especially when they shouldn’t have to… though a case for modifying the game to address some other longstanding issues is a different story)… but Blizz has been nothing but misguided lately, hasn’t it?
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Waiting on Dorchak to jump onto that one.
I remember that very interview at pax, as someone who has been pushing for WoW console when basically zero other people wanted it. A lot can change with design philosophy in a year. Just look at all the back tracking on other changes coming to the game.
Not to mention, the higher ups can be telling them to make it for console, even if the developers don’t agree with it.
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WoW on console?
i thought it was just for people who wanted to use a controller instead of a KBM?
The mountain of code placed on console sounds painful.
Not so bad since they recently greatly improved multicore support for WoW’s engine.
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With Shadowlands coming, yes, there is a few changes in the system in terms of game-play, but I don’t think it is the changes to suggest that World of Warcraft would be made available for any consoles any time toon.
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And you may be right, at least for now and that’s fine. I just don’t understand the vitriol and rage that some are displaying about this issue. It’s like “OMG MY WOWS, DONT PUT IT ON THE CONSOLEZ”
Explain how this helps please.
I would not know anything about that.
It doesn’t.
PC operates on a fundamentally different ways to consoles.
It’s not even the same coding language, so optimizations done for the PC’s engine will be completely different than a console’s OS.
I don’t think there is any rage, and honestly, I am with Blizzard on this one. The changes that have to take place to make it available for the console could make the game worse overall. Ofcourse, I am not fully sure on what the changes would be for it to become available on console, but knowing one thing World of Warcraft has that games such as Final Fantasy and Tera also don’t have is Tab-Targetting.
I could be wrong with Final Fantasy with Tab-Targetting
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I played both games, raided in both games. I play with a controller in FF14 on my PC as a White Mage. It is far quicker for me to cycle between players during frantic fights than any mouse over macro or anything else could be. I have my abilities laid out for quick access to my heals. It works in FF14 since that is what is was designed around. Regardless of the other fight mechanics.
Another thing to remember is that they don’t allow third party support for their game so you have more control over the UI and its functions. The limitations for FF14 were placed because of the PS3 couldn’t handle those interconnected open world zones. Who knows if Xbox Series X and the PS5 could handle in terms of a true MMO.
If they did give true controller support for the ability bar like FF14 I’d honestly give it a shot.
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Yeah, but Diablo 3 plays better on the pc. At least for multiple players.
Actually they’re not too far off anymore, specially since both PC and Console’s are running the same CPU’s basically now (current gen is a modified AMD bulldozer architecture, next gen with be a version of Ryzen) and MS is working to make the xbox as close to a PC as possible.
Just because a PC can run the same CPU as a gaming console, doesn’t mean that a console has the same systems as a PC.
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