Over the near-twenty years that World of Warcraft has been on the market, the topic of a console port has come up again and again, only to never materialize. By now, most fans might have given up on the concept, but Blizzard is actually still keen on the possibility.
At BlizzCon 2023, Gamesradar spoke to Holly Longdale, formerly designer and executive producer on the EverQuest franchise and now vice president and executive producer of World of Warcraft at Blizzard, about porting the long-standing MMORPG to console platforms. While Longdale didn’t make any promises, she expressed genuine interest and pointed out that Blizzard is now a subsidiary of Microsoft, the platform holder of Xbox.
Of course! Yeah, we talk about it all the time. I think we’re pretty well positioned, which is kind of why we talk about it.
To your earlier point, for a console audience, the approachability is likely going to be different. Right now, we’re focused on the Worldsoul Saga. But if that comes up, then we’ll reexamine things, but, man, we’ve got enough to deal with right now.
We’ve got these three expansions, and we are so excited about them. But, yeah, of course. It would be very insincere to say that we’re not, like… of course we’re talking about that. We are Microsoft now.
Blizzard added native keybind, camera, cursor control, and movement support for Gamepad controllers to World of Warcraft with the Shadowlands systems patch. However, users wishing to play the MMORPG with a controller still need to use the ConsolePort addon since the game features no native gamepad UI.
That would be the first order of business when preparing a console port, alongside further accessibility improvements. We’ll see if that comes to pass; meanwhile, fans are wondering whether the Xbox Game Pass subscription will provide any perks for active World of Warcraft players, but that’s not a conversation Blizzard had with Microsoft yet, said Longdale.
At BlizzCon 2023, Blizzard announced the ambitious Worldsoul Saga, scheduled to unfold over three expansions. We’ve interviewed Lead World Artist Kristy Moret and Associate Design Director Maria Hamilton to learn more about the first one, The War Within.
