I watched Duke Nukem Forever emerge from its tomb, dripping with amniotic fluid, after an unprecedented 15- year development cycle. I can go play the long-gestating S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and its many spinoffs and expansions, right now on my Steam account. Final Fantasy XV finally left the assembly line at Square Enix, same with Persona 5 at Atlus, and I still go watch the Beyond Good & Evil 2 E3 trailer when I need a lift. (I’m holding out hope, Ubisoft. Always and forever.) But for my money, the greatest remaining white whale in gaming was first speculated about on Blizzard forums in 2004, right as we were getting our feet wet in the arcadia of Azeroth: “Man, do you think they’ll ever port World of Warcraft to consoles?”
Those hopes never came true. The Alliance and Horde have dispatched countless evildoers across eight different expansions — cleansing this universe of all scum and villainy, to the point where players are traveling to the literal afterlife to find someone else to fight. And yet, Blizzard’s flagship MMO remained exclusive to those who wielded a PC. Yes, the company has flirted with cross-platform migration in the past; Hearthstone can live on your phone, Diablo III on your Switch, but Azeroth was never accessible through an Xbox. For whatever reason, that was a third rail in Irvine. But as Blizzard gets profoundly reshuffled with a new set of owners, maybe, for the first time in WoW’s venerable history, all of that is going to change.
We’re all recovering from the news of Microsoft’s planned Activision Blizzard acquisition. The implications of the deal are mind-boggling, and have us all talking in wild theoreticals. Is Master Chief going to be in the next Warzone update? Will Jim Raynor be marauding through Skyrim? Everything is suddenly on the table, which is why the question that seems to be looming the largest in the minds of many gamers is one we’ve been ruminating on for decades. Microsoft, of course, owns the Xbox brand, so this could be the moment where World of Warcraft opens up to our console-bound brethren. The White Whale is within striking distance. On the r/WoW subreddit, the top-upvoted reply reacting to the news reads, plain and simple, “WoW subscription being part of Game Pass incoming.”
These rumors have been swirling forever. In my most fanatical forum-lurking days, a World of Warcraft console port ranked just behind a potential “Worlds of Starcraft” in the wishful thinking strata. I mean, even this past November a WoW Xbox crossover whisper passed over the ever-churning r/GamingLeaksAndRumors subreddit. (Though, in 2020, Blizzard squashed those theories entirely.) What I’m trying to say is that there’s been a lot of smoke for a long time, and now the pieces are finally, theoretically, in place.
But we are still in the primordial stages of this merger, and a lot of dust will need to be cleared before any of us has an idea of what Microsoft’s plans are for the Blizzard properties in its fold. (Which is to say, don’t expect to be trudging through Teldressil with a gamepad anytime soon.) There are so many questions that pop up when porting such an ancient MMO. World of Warcraft is one of the most natively PC games of all time. Case in point, my Dwarf rogue has a set of multi-tiered action bars splayed with abilities, attacks, buffs, and consumables, and I’m constantly sifting through Trade Chat, using my keyboard to bargain my fellow Humans, Gnomes, and Night Elves into a sweet deal for whatever they’re selling. That isn’t easily translated to an Xbox controller, which contains exactly four face buttons and a quartet of triggers.
But that hasn’t stopped the diehards from dreaming. Reddit user Kenna2 uploaded a YouTube video featuring a fabricated user interface for a potential Xbox incarnation of World of Warcraft. Hotkeys are mapped to the D-Pad and X, Y, A, B axis, and honestly, it looks pretty convincing. “My two worlds collided yesterday. I love WoW and Xbox and to see them merge? Crazy!,” says Kenna2, when I reached out to them for an interview. “I believe that WoW could definitely be on Series X/S.” The more I looked at their makeshift HUD, the more it reminded me of The Elder Scrolls Online — another MMO that seamlessly transitioned into an omnivorous, cross-channel platform. Microsoft already owns a studio that knows how to maintain an MMO on both consoles and computers. Perhaps Blizzard could take some notes.
Another user on the World of Warcraft subreddit made a much more sensible pitch for a port. “My PC is terrible,” they wrote. “I can’t hardly play WoW with 20 FPS. So yeah, I pray [it] becomes available on my Series X!” It brings to mind the millions of gamers who’ve never been able to afford a powerful PC due to long standing economic biases, and therefore haven’t had the opportunity to experience an all-time classic in the history of the games industry. Remember in 2007 when Valve put the Orange Box out on consoles, and a whole nation of enthusiasts got a chance to play Half-Life 2 for the first time? A WoW port could be similarly seismic. Azeroth for the people!
After all, it’s not like we’re living through one of WoW’s golden ages. The game’s subscriber base has endured a steady decline for several years — par for the course for any antique MMO — and the general opinion about Shadowlands, the game’s current content suite, has been tepid at best. An Xbox transition could certainly give World of Warcraft the shot in the arm it’s needed since roughly 2016, after the release of Legion. Let me sprawl out on the couch, mouth slacked open, picking Peacebloom petals in Elwynn Forest with an analog stick. I’ve fantasized about this for so long, and now it’s so close I can almost taste it.
Luke Winkie is a contributing writer to IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @luke_winkie.