Blizzard: WoW for PS3, 360 is a ‘square peg, round hole thing’

Blizzard‘s J. Allen Brack and Tom Chilton are reiterating that World of Warcraft will not be heading for consoles. As if echoing Hideo Kojima‘s words yesterday about a 360 port of MGS4 being impossible, Brack and Chilton say that WoW was just basically not intended for the PS3 nor 360 to begin with. In Chilton’s words, “it’s a square peg round hole thing.”

Apparently, some people are still thinking of the viability of having World of Warcraft on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Well, it’s one of the most successful MMORPGs of all-time, so maybe porting it over to other platforms is a good thing, for financial reasons (if you’re following Square Enix‘s line of thought).

However, running parallel to Hideo Kojima‘s statement yesterday (about MGS4 being impossible for the Xbox 360 because the game wasn’t designed for the 360 in the first place), J. Allen Brack and Tom Chilton of Blizzard both agree that WoW was always intended to be played on the PC.

In a recent interview with Videogamer, they both reiterated the fact that WoW won’t be heading for consoles.

Brack says that WoW was “designed to have a keyboard and a mouse” and that the controls are really – to use Kojima’s word from yesterday – optimized for a PC control scheme. Brack continues: “If you think about mapping those controls and all those different type of buttons that you have to a console without a keyboard for chatting, it’s a very challenging proposition.”

Chilton, likewise, explained that it’s not a worthwhile endeavor to bring WoW to consoles;

It’s really not that we have anything against consoles,” Chilton said. “I mean we love console games also. And I’m sure there will be a successful MMO sometime on a console. So it has nothing to do with that. It’s just more like a square peg round hole thing for our game. It just wasn’t designed with that in mind.

But then… when Videogamer raised the point that Funcom will be bringing their Age of Conan to the Xbox 360 – and that they’ve got some technology to map the keyboard buttons to a 360 controller – Chilton simply replies that he thinks that WoW wouldn’t be “a very good experience playing like that.”

While the PS3 has the upcoming Wireless Keypad, and the 360 its Chatpad, they aren’t all that big, y’know. As Brack said, it’ll be a very challenging experience indeed.

• Blizzard’s take on MMOs for consoles; no WoW for consoles
• Kojima: stop asking for an MGS4 Xbox 360 port already
• Square Enix stock shares rise after FF13 Xbox 360 reveal
• Leipzig: new PS3 Wireless Keypad announced
• Xbox 360 Messenger Kit now going for only US$ 19.99

Via Videogamer