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.
The Xbox 360 has support for mice and keyboards. Just plug them into the USB ports on the front or back.
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.
I'm not so sure. If you just bound a few buttons to pasting in "lol", "nub", "wtf", and "hax!", I think it would be sadly difficult to distinguish from most existing players.
I've heard a lot of good things about the Nostromo SpeedPad n52. Seems like a great idea, because I often find that I play with one hand, and I have a hard time reaching the F7 key to trigger Bloodrage while trying to out-manuever a rogue in AV. However, apparently it's not compatible with Intel Macs, so no go yet.
The gamepad is a brain damaged interface for anything except Soul Calibur, Final Fantasy and possibly Mario Tennis. Its pestulence is part of what made Deus Ex 2 so horrible - they replaced a pretty decent drag & drop system with a laughably absurd, static screen where you had about 5 inventory slots total. However, if that had been the only thing wrong with DX2, it would've still been a fine game. The only thing more stupid than porting a PC FPS to console is porting a console FPS to the PC.
d00d, i loled. for realz!!!ELEVEN11
Can you imagine Xbox Live smacktalking 13 year old's combined with Barrens chat? Surely that would be the most offensive place in the whole world.
It would make your ears bleed.
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.
The gamepad is a brain damaged interface for anything except Soul Calibur, Final Fantasy and possibly Mario Tennis.
Yeah, that must be why the PC has lots of different genres, while in consoles the only games that you can find are RTSs, RPGs and FPSs. And, most FPSs are about WW2 or counter terrorism. How boring!
Since when is mindless bashing of a game you just don't like for very little reason insightful?
The UI scales unless your blind or doing something stupid like running it at 4096x3072. The PC and xbox 360 look and work just fine. The FFXI 360 port doesn't use Live at all. You need to have the free version of Live because the hardware requires it. The game attaches to a service completely different from Live, so again why wouldn't the POL viewer?
The only reason that WoW 'couldn't' be ported to the XBox is either Blizzard is too lazy, or they know that it will just further piss of their customers to have to extend the waiting list to get on.
There are valid complaints to be made for every game but you made none of them, instead choosing to treat Blizzard as some sort of god on earth.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
http://voodoopc.blogspot.com/2006/02/blizzard-goin g-crazy-for-opteron.html
that's the link to the article, but here's the relevant quote:
"Blizzard is rumored to have purchased around 1500+ new HP servers all based on AMD Opteron 64 technology. This is most def the first time that Blizzard has purchased AMD based servers in bulk"
You do realize that everyone already knows this, no one really cares, and common usage disagrees with you, right?