At BlizzCon, the developers of World of Warcraft: Forever — Blizzard’s new, remixed and updated version of classic WoW — told Polygon that although Forever finally brings official gamepad support to WoW, that doesn’t mean the MMO is coming to consoles. Which, on the face of it, is a bit odd. WoW either works to Blizzard’s satisfaction on a gamepad, or it doesn’t. If it does, why wouldn’t Blizzard take the opportunity to bring one of the most-played games of all time to a whole new audience?
After playing the Forever beta using a gamepad, I think I know why. It’s not that the gamepad support is bad — it’s actually very good. It’s a totally viable way to play the game. But you would never mistake it for a game that was meant to be played this way.
When it comes to playing WoW on a gamepad, I have biases that cut both ways. I generally prefer to play games with a controller and not at my desk. But World of Warcraft is the exception. I have been playing for 21 years and counting, and the mouse-and-keyboard controls are hardwired into my muscle memory. I can’t even deal with switching away from the old-school WASD map — where A and D turn your character, rather than strafe — to the modern setup. I have autorun and movement skills mapped just where I want them on my mouse buttons. It’s so comfortable. After so many hundreds — thousands? — of hours, why would I change?
Well, because I’d like to be able to sit on my sofa with my cat and talk to my wife while I’m playing. There have been good community-made controller mods for WoW for years, but I’m allergic to that kind of tinkering, and a bit of a purist about playing games as their creators intend. So despite some curiosity, I never bothered. But I had to give Forever‘s gamepad support a go.
Blizzard had to solve several problems with this gamepad support. The most obvious is the sheer number of skills and usable items a player needs to have at their fingertips. With mouse and keyboard, these are handled by onscreen grids of icons and a ton of keybinds.
This turns out to be the problem with the easiest and most elegant solution. Skills are mapped to the d-pad and face buttons, with alternate sets of skills accessed by holding down the left trigger, right trigger, or both triggers together. This gives you access to 32 skills or consumables off the bat, and they can be mapped as you please. That’s enough for the vast majority of situations, and it soon becomes second nature. It’s swift, too — just as swift as mouse and keys, arguably more so.
Targeting works fine, too; rather than selecting targets with the mouse pointer, you cycle through them with the bumpers (left for friendly targets, right for enemies), or hold down the bumper and point with the right stick. Overall, combat is slick, while character and camera movement is second nature. I don’t even think gamepad players will be at a disadvantage in the most high-pressure situations, like battlegrounds or raiding.
The much bigger problem is… well, it’s WoW‘s whole UI, which is entwined at the deepest level with the entirety of its game design. This is a game of windows. There’s no getting away from it. And gamepads suck at manipulating a point-and-click windows interface.
Blizzard has made a good fist of making navigating the UI workable. The options button brings up a selector wheel for windows and sub menus like the map, quest log, character sheet, bag, spellbook, crafting, and so on. A quick flick of the right stick gets you what you want.
It’s pretty key to WoW that you should be able to have multiple windows open at the same time — say, a crafting vendor’s wares in one, your crafting menu in another, and your bag in a third. Blizzard gets around this by making it possible to change focus between the windows using the triggers, and select tabs with the bumpers. You click around with the d-pad and common actions are mapped to face buttons. The problem is that WoW relies pretty heavily on contextual right-clicking; often, the gamepad interface runs out of buttons and has to lean on a sub-menu of options accessed by pressing Y.
I’ve stumbled navigating the UI a few times, but usually found my way through, and only very rarely became stumped. (I couldn’t figure out how to make the map full-screen, for example.) It is completely functional. But it is also fussy and inelegant. It is very obviously a fix — a good fix, but a fix all the same — for a game that was not built to be operated in this way and couldn’t really be optimized for it without a complete redesign.
While it’s not dramatically different from, say, Final Fantasy 14, it’s clear that one of these games was designed from the ground up with a console version in mind, and one wasn’t.
I’m very glad that Blizzard has gone to the effort of creating its own gamepad support — which, by all accounts, is equal to or better than the best community mods. I’ll use it from time to time, although I can already hear the ingrained comfort of my mouse-and-keys setup calling to me. It’s a great option for players to have, and a fantastic accessibility tool.
But that’s just it — it’s an option. I can’t imagine Blizzard putting its name to this interface as the primary, or indeed only, way to play WoW, which it would have to be on a console. It’s nowhere near polished enough. Gamepad support is still in alpha, and doubtless Blizzard has many improvements left to make. But I don’t think it will ever be a comfortable enough fit — which, after all, makes sense. If a console version of WoW had ever been truly feasible, we would have been playing it years ago.