Could World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 appear on the next Microsoft console? Blizzard's Rob Pardo wouldn't say but he did confirm that the company had talked with Microsoft about the successor to the 360. Quite how far those talks got remains to be seen but that won't stop the speculation. Personally I love the idea of WoW – or, even better, WoW 2 – on a console. Azeroth deserves the big screen, surround sound speaker treatment (and yes, I know you can get this playing on a high-end PC, but you get my point). But the problem has always been the controls. How do you map the relative complexity of WoW – or any MMO controls – onto a pad? Pardo thinks this is still the major stumbling block.
"There are are so many games like we make at Blizzard that we don't take to consoles because they don't support the input device and you end up with crappy ports. That's why RTS games never do well on consoles," he said.
Erm, didn't Halo War just shift a million Rob? But you know what he means. 99% of console RTS games are fiddly and unsatisfying. Pardo thinks new hardware is the only way RTS and MMO games will ever properly work on a console.
"If I was them, I'd be sitting around trying to figure out what's a cool input device that supports all types of new kinds of games."
And with the huge revenue generated by the likes of WoW you can imagine Microsoft are doing just that. Anyway, MMO and RTS games – do you actually want to play them on your console? Or will the PC always be the home for these kinds of games?
