Early next year, the 21-year-old MMO World of Warcraft is releasing its 11th expansion, Midnight. Alongside new zones in the Blood Elf homelands, player housing, and a wealth of new content, the expansion is also going to see yet another revision of the game’s UI, focused on implementing the features most players currently have to mod in. And this has caused people to suggest such streamlining could be part of preparing WoW for its debut on consoles. However, according to director Ion Hazzikostas, that’s absolutely not happening.
“If we were actively working towards bringing WoW to consoles or a bunch of other platforms,” says the game’s current lead, “we’d be saying, ‘We’re actively working towards it, we know we have a lot of work to do but it’s a place where we want to land.’” Speaking to the Unshackled Fury podcast (thanks GameSpot), Hazzikostas said if it were really in the works, Blizzard would just say so. “To be fully transparent, there’s no reason for us to hide anything about this,” he said.
There was once a time where the MMO’s only feasible home was the PC. While there were exceptions, like the Dreamcast-only Phantasy Star Online, for the majority of massively multiplayer online RPGs lived on home computers. But not any more. However, that’s now all changed. As consoles have become PCs in boxes, and controllers now offer eighty-million buttons, it’s the norm for any new MMO to appear on Xbox and PlayStation alongside PC. Titles like Fallout 76, The Elder Scrolls Online, and Throne and Liberty thrive on consoles, and while the genre is certainly not even a fraction as popular as it once was, it’d be a foolish developer not to release a new one cross-platform. Which all makes it so extraordinary that Blizzard is still not even considering porting World of Warcraft outside of the PC.
It’s even more peculiar when you remember that the consolidation of so much of the games industry in recent years means that Microsoft now owns Blizzard (a fact that’s weirdly easy to forget, given how Blizzard has always operated so independently, for good and for ill). You would think that the megacorp would rather appreciate WoW on Xbox, especially with the potential for a Game Pass version that’s provocatively lacking the very many paid-for expansions.
Still, while Hazzikostas’ frank words seem very final, it’s impossible to believe that the conversation isn’t happening. It would be frankly weird if the follow-up to the Xbox Series couldn’t just directly hook up to Battle.net, and it certainly wouldn’t do any harm of the MMO already had a controller-friendly UI in place. However, what we appear to know for sure is that this isn’t something that’s happening imminently, no matter how much it would appear to make sense.
For PC players, however, the beta test for Midnight begins November 11.
