World of Warcraft: Forever looks to take players to the simpler days of World of Warcraft “vanilla-era” but reimagined with new quests, new race+class combos, improved atmospheric graphics, and compatibility with Xbox controllers and Xbox Ally handhelds.
That last new gameplay addition has got people speculating if Blizzard Entertainment is preparing to port its iconic MMORPG onto Xbox consoles, especially as rumored classifications of its existence have been appearing lately.
GamesRadar+ set out to answer this question during a lengthy interview with Blizzard Entertainment’s Vice President, Holly Longdale, and its associate production director, Clay Stone, by asking them, “Is World of Warcraft: Forever launching as a PC-exclusive a missed opportunity?”
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Holly Longdale responded to this question by saying, “What you just described is really what we’re after. Play it wherever you want and, at some point, on whatever you want. But the first leg of that journey is getting gamepads working really well with World of Warcraft, and we thought Forever was the perfect place to start. Looking at where things are going when we hear about Project Helix et cetera, I think platforms will be a bit more ubiquitous,” Holly continues, “Honestly, we just want to be able to play it anywhere. We’ve seen people getting it working on the ROG Ally X…”
Holly then finished the interview with, “I think just doing some of the work we’re doing on gamepad [support] is going to give players a lot of flexibility that I think goes beyond consoles.”
Is a console port of World of Warcraft possible this late into it’s lifetime?
Now, this is pure speculation on my part, as nothing about what Blizzard said during the interview confirms the existence of an Xbox port, but I do find Holly’s statement of “Play it wherever you want and, at some point, on whatever you want,” while name-dropping Project Helix and the ROG Ally X, curious.
Could Holly’s quote be a subtle reference to Xbox Play Anywhere? Could it be a cryptic hint that Blizzard Entertainment plans to port World of Warcraft to whatever console Project Helix turns out to be, with Xbox Play Anywhere support so it can be played on handhelds?
Considering that Project Helix is reported to be an Xbox-PC hybrid potentially capable of playing games from other online stores beyond Microsoft’s Windows Store, it might be possible.
Either way, we’ll have to wait a long time to find out. After all, if Final Fantasy 14 managed to get an Xbox port after over a decade, I believe World of Warcraft should be able to do the same.
In the meantime, I’ll be playing World of Warcraft: Forever to see if it can wash the sour taste of World of Warcraft: Midnight’s rushed patch content, weak storytelling, and controversial housing situation out of my mouth.
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