Blizzard thinking of console WoW all the time

Acclaimed MMO developer Blizzard has stated that a console version of its popular PC title World of Warcraft is getting serious thought-time at the studio, though the challenges of converting the game to work on a joypad means that any official announcement could still be a long way off.

We talk about how would we bring WoW to the console all the time,” the game’s lead producer J. Allen Brack told G4.

There’s those technical challenges, there’s patching challenges, and there’s the quality controls that we have vs the quality controls that Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo has.

The idea of translating that to a gamepad is a very, very challenging proposition. 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.

All those things sort of raise the bar in terms of the challenges and then specifically in the case of WoW.”