A World of Warcraft PS4 release has been suggested by code uncovered by dataminers. It looks like World of Warcraft controller support is definitely on the way at the minimum, but there are also hints that we may see the game coming to current-gen consoles, too.
Dataminer Martin Benjamins highlighted a discovery from someone named “grayson” on his Discord. A snippet of game code reportedly shows several new lines that indicate controller support is coming to World of Warcraft.
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This particular aspect of the datamining has been confirmed by Blizzard’s Community Manager Randy “Kaivax” Jordan.
“For a long time, we’ve seen a small number of players turn to 3rd party addons, such as Console Port 17, in order to work through certain accessibility issues,” Kaivax said on the game’s official forums.
“We always want to make WoW more widely accessible, if possible,” he continued, “so in Shadowlands, we’re attempting to add some support for keybinds, camera, and turning a character on controllers such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller.”
The one thing we can be certain of is that World of Warcraft controller support is definitely on the way. Those of you who make use of gamepads will soon not have to worry about using third-party apps to play the game with a controller!
However, that is far from the most interesting bit discovered in the game code; a few lines hint that we may see a World of Warcraft PS4 release in the future:
WTFDefaultGamePadBindings.wtf
PlayStation 4
PlayStation 4 Pro
PlayStation 5
Dataminer Mr. Benjamin cautions that this is not yet a clear indication of a World of Warcraft PS4 release; it’s possible that these lines were simply copy-pasted from some other piece of code used for controller support in another game or from a developer SDK.
That said, leaving something like this is in seems like a strange oversight. Has Blizzard tipped their hand about a future console release or was this simply a copy/paste fail? Modern consoles can certainly run MMORPGs — Final Fantasy XIV seems to work just fine — so getting World of Warcraft on the PS4 and Xbox One isn’t as strange as you might think. Blizzard hasn’t said a word about it yet, so for now, we’ll have to wait and see whether or not it’s true.
Strings found by @bloerwald:
WTFhttps://t.co/SqClitJ6IU
PlayStation 4
PlayStation 4 Pro
PlayStation 5Take with a grain of salt, this does not show usage. Could be part of a https://t.co/01M2rAuxqt SDK import or something but the DefaultGamePadBindings file makes me go 🤔
— Mmarlamin (@Marlamin) April 8, 2020