Warcraft was a PC game. Not because somebody had passed a law, but because the entire experience seemed impossible to imagine any other way.
Twenty-two years later, Blizzard is beginning to reconsider that particular tradition.
With World of Warcraft: Forever launching this week, executive producer Holly Longdale has discussed the possibility of bringing Azeroth to more devices. And in a new interview with GamesRadar+, she specifically mentions Microsoft's Project Helix, the next-generation Xbox initiative.
Does this mean World of Warcraft is finally coming to Xbox? Not yet. But the interesting part is that Blizzard is no longer treating the idea as something entirely outside the conversation.
Blizzard Wants Warcraft to Go Beyond the Keyboard
Longdale described an ambition to let players enjoy Warcraft wherever they prefer, eventually on a wider variety of devices. The immediate priority, she explained, is making gamepad controls work properly, with Forever providing an ideal opportunity to begin.
That might sound like a relatively small technical improvement until you remember what World of Warcraft actually involves.
Moving a Warrior through Elwynn Forest with an analog stick is one thing. Healing forty adventurers while somebody has accidentally introduced Onyxia to the entire raid is quite another.
Warcraft's interface grew up alongside the PC. Action bars multiplied, addons became essential tools for many players, and entire generations of raiders developed muscle memory that would probably confuse a professional pianist.
Yet Blizzard has been taking the problem seriously. As we reported in October, Forever's developers are already testing raid encounters with controllers.
That's important because Blizzard isn't merely replacing keyboard movement with an analog stick. It is attempting to make an old-fashioned MMORPG feel natural with a completely different control scheme.
And the timing is rather interesting.
Final Fantasy XIV has demonstrated for years that a complicated MMORPG can thrive on consoles. Square Enix managed to make extensive ability bars, party management and demanding boss encounters work with controllers without turning the game into something simpler.
Warcraft has never lacked the necessary complexity. What it lacked was an official control system built to accommodate it.
Forever could finally change that.
Could Project Helix Open the Door to Xbox?
The more intriguing part of Longdale's interview concerns the future.
Microsoft now owns Blizzard, and the company has been working toward a gaming ecosystem that increasingly connects PCs, handheld devices and consoles. Project Helix is part of that discussion, and Longdale believes the distinctions between platforms may become less important.
She also pointed to enthusiasts experimenting with Forever on devices ranging from the ROG Ally X to a modified Nintendo DS.
The latter is probably not where Blizzard intends to introduce its next forty-player raid. But it does illustrate something rather wonderful about PC gaming: give people access to a game they love, and somebody will inevitably attempt to make it run on hardware that was never supposed to handle it.
Official Xbox support would be a different proposition entirely.
Blizzard would need to consider targeting, inventory management, addons, communication and the extraordinary number of abilities some classes require. Those problems become particularly interesting when you look at Forever's opening raids, where Blizzard is combining new ten- and twenty-player challenges with the traditional forty-player version of Onyxia's Lair.
There is also the question of whether competitive PvP and high-end raiding could accommodate different input methods without creating unnecessary disadvantages.
These are not questions Blizzard has answered. Longdale has not announced an Xbox version, and there is no confirmed console release date or development roadmap.
But there is a larger point here, one that fits rather neatly with Forever's entire philosophy.
As we discovered during our examination of the Forever beta, Blizzard is trying to preserve the feeling of original Azeroth while removing unnecessary frustrations. The recently announced Classic and Enhanced settings follow a similar principle, allowing players to choose how much of the original presentation they want to retain.
Controller support is another expression of that idea.
The identity of World of Warcraft was never really about the keyboard. It was about the world, the journeys, the friendships, and the peculiar satisfaction of spending an entire evening trying to defeat a boss who appeared entirely unimpressed by everyone's efforts.
With Forever's global launch on November 4 — November 5 in Central Europe — Blizzard has more immediate concerns than a hypothetical Xbox release.
Still, after twenty-two years, it is fascinating to see Warcraft gradually becoming less dependent on the machine that gave it life.
Perhaps one day, a new generation of adventurers really will discover Azeroth from the living-room sofa.
And when that happens, somebody will undoubtedly still stand in the fire and blame the healer.
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