Slashdot Mirror
No WoW for the 360
Next Generation reports that Blizzard COO Paul Sims has dispelled any ideas that their hit MMOG would appear on the Xbox 360. From the article: "WoW is built as a PC gaming experience. Porting PC games to console often compromises games, and we'd never allow the WoW gameplay experience to suffer ... Also, it's important to us that the entire player base is able to play together. Microsoft's Xbox Live architecture is very protected from all sorts of outside influence, so shared play between 360 and PC owners would be very tough. We wouldn't even consider WoW for 360 unless we could overcome that hurdle."
Considering the server problems they've been having - http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/01/ 1519225 - I don't think World of Queuecraft could handle the millions of Xbox 360 players.
as told here, is there any doubt that porting WoW to the 360 would be a waste of time? When you have 6 million paying subscribers, you're already exceeded your goals by your wildest imaginations and it probably wouldn't be a sound financial investment given the technical hurdles and (relatively) small install-base for the 360.
And, yes, you can use a keyboard with the 360, so this is not one of them.
The 360 supports USB keyboards. I used one myself while trying out the FFXI beta. As horrible the install scenario was (thanks PlayOnline!), it would have been 10x worse if I didn't have the keyboard.
I also saw lots of people doing lots of chatting in the game. It's obviously a lot easier to chat using a regular keyboard than the on-screen one.
-- jchenx
Anyone who has used mods/addons will tell you that playing WoW on a console would be stupid. There's no way the Blizzard nor Microsoft would set something up to let users download and install fan-created mods/addons either. It just wouldn't happen.
Plus, just because you CAN plug in a keyboard and/or mouse doesn't mean that they can expect it of everyone who wants to play. Thus, they'd again need to cripple the game's interface in order to make it playable with a controller.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Yes, FFXI has both a PC port and an XBox 360 port.
However, both of them are shitty ports of the original PS2 version. It was designed to run on a console from the start. It doesn't have the same problems that WoW has (like too many subscribers...) because it was originally intended for a console.
Plus the PC and XBox360 ports are some of the most half-assed ports you're ever likely to see. The UI is designed to be viewed at 640x480 and doesn't scale as you increase the resolution, making UI elements absolutely miniscule at a decent resolution for a PC, and the same problems occur when using HDTV with the XBox360. The PlayOnline interface won't scale above 640x480 at all (and should be totally pointless on the XBox 360 what with Live and all, but's required anyway), and causes a good extra minute or more before being able to actually play the game.
Blizzard would want to do a good port to the XBox360. FFXI isn't a good port (apparently it'll support HDTV resolutions - using the same models and textures the PS2 client uses, which already look like ass on a modern PC), and is actually a fairly good demo of why it isn't feasible for WoW to be ported to the 360.
Trivial you say? So you are a programmer? Am I? No I am not. I'm just going to go off on a limb here and guess that the type of CPU being similar is less important than the fact that the 360 is a much more paralell system then a Macintosh is. Meaning WoW on the Mac depends mostly on the video card, not the CPU.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Here's the potential market -- people who:
That's a pretty small market, considering there are only 1.75 million XBOX 360s sold, and the original XBOX sold 25 million units. Knock off the vast majority of that already slim market if the expectation is that they will pay for XBOX 360 Live and Blizzard's monthly fee (I'm sure they wouldn't do this, but how else would it work?). Complete waste of Blizzard's resources.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
If Blizzard really wanted to keep folks hooked, they'd just build an IM client for subscribers. For those of us with jobs, it be a great way to stay unproductive at work. I'd wager it's the social aspects of guilds that keep folks subscribing over the years.