I guess many players of World of Warcraft are either wondering why there is no version for the consoles, or they - like me - are sick and tired of the question. That didn't stop G4TV from asking lead producer J. Allen Brack about it again, probably since Final Fantasy XIV is looming on the horizon.
"There's not one thing," Brack replied. "One is, it takes a long time to develop an MMO. The lifecycle of consoles being what they are, you have to really time when your console's going to come out, what its projected lifecycle is going to be with when your game is going to be, which is challenging."
Talking a bit about the more obvious technical problems, such as the size of the World of Warcraft client, Brack said "there's patching challenges, there's the quality controls that we have vs. the quality controls that say, a Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo has. All those things sort of raise the bar in terms of the challenges and then specifically in the case of WoW, 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. The idea of translating that to a gamepad is a very, very challenging proposition."
Pssst, Brack. USB-keyboards work with both the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. Just saying.
So don't hold your breath for a World of Warcraft for the consoles. Can we please just let that dog die now?