Blizzard Entertainment, developers of its widely successful MMORPG, have quite the stable to games that would make an absolute killing on platforms outside of PC. Its Diablo series, Starcraft series, and Warcraft series are all games I feel would do substantially well as fans of these classic games would gladly throw money at Blizzard for mobile version of these games and will introduce a whole new generation of gamers to these fantastic games. It looks like we may be one step closer to Blizzard finally developing for mobile platforms.
According to an interview Eurogamer had with Senior World of Warcraft Producer, John Lagrave, it looks like Blizzard has been looking in to offering a port of its popular MMORPG onto the iOS platform.
“It’s hard! This is hard!” Lagrave said, taking out something – an iPhone – from his pocket.
“Here’s your platform, you’ve got to put an interface, what do you do? So yes we have [looked into mobile] and we always are. Maybe we’ll stumble on the great way to put WOW on the phone – maybe we won’t, but we’re certainly looking into it.
Creating an MMORPG experience like World of Warcraft on mobile devices has already been successfully done with Gameloft’s Order & Chaos Online. The problem is that World of Warcraft at this point has become so bloated with its interface as the developers have allowed users the ability to map nearly everything in the game onto their screen, that it would pose a serious unfair advantage if mobile players were to attempt to take on any PC player in battle.
In order for Blizzard to deliver a worthwhile mobile experience for World of Warcraft, they would first need to nerf much of the GUI for PC players to allow for an equal playing field for both PC & mobile players to co-exist. This would take some serious work on Blizzard’s part, which I don’t think they’re willing to do seeing as WoW subscriptions have been declining at a rapid rate lately. Alternatively, this could very well be the spark Blizzard needs in order to gain back some of its subscriptions as I’m sure many people who cancelled their subs will certainly sign back up to play WoW on their iOS device.
