It's still not as intuitive as the ConsolePort addon, but at least it's official, and it's just a start.
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Official gamepad support is present now in WoW: Shadowlands alpha
- Thread starter texhnolyze
- Start date
Important to say that this is an accesibility option rather than any kind of hint at console support, they even mentioned the xbox adaptive controller specifically when asked about it.
You do realize people on PC play with controllers too right? The game isn't coming to console and never will.
Mostly because Blizzard would screw it up, but it would give the game the shot in the arm it needs.
Tbh I could see a console port in future, code even references PS4, PS4 pro and ps5. Considering pro and base don't have different controller's seems strange to me
Could be because standard controller on pc is the Xbox layout so they just wanted the profiles for the Sony layout as well.
Diablo 4 will have full controller support on PC so that's already a thing.
Is what you would say if you don't actually put any thought into how it would realistically work without angering the current playerbase or comtinuing to let the game be incredibly unfriendly to any potential console playerbase.
Playing on a controller as is is super unintuitive as is, as a non insignificant portion of classes are very much built around tab targeted gameplay. Trying to play destro warlock using console port feels awful.
Combine that with the fact that end game content like raids and M+ will be inaccessible for the vast majority of the playerbase because of the above and that no shortage of PC players won't want anything to do with console players, because of the above.
So either console players get screwed out of content and discriminated against by the PC playerbase and get discouraged from playing the game or you make seperate servers for console and PC where very few people will be playing the end game or there's no community and console players get discouraged from playing.
You could rebalance the game and its gameplay to be more suited to controller play, which would involve fundamentally redesigning the way many classes play and then upset your core playerbase, many of which are already unhappy with recent GCD changes among other things.
The amount of work and risk involved actually bringing WoW to console would not be worth the investment and Blizzard has more to lose doing so than they have to gain.
People bring up FF14 as some sort of counter argument to bringing wow to console, while not realizing that the game and its classes/gameplay/content were built from the ground up to support console and controller play and that adding crossbars to WoW doesn't solve the many other real issues of actually bringing the game over.
If or when theres a WoW2 in another 10 or 15 years and its a consideration from inception is the only time I ever see WoW being on consoles.
The game being poorly optimized also doesn't help. My computer isn't far off from any next gen console and still has huge frame drops below 30, sometimes to single digits when spells from 30+ people start getting thrown around in a raid or at a world boss or in PvP
And the game doesn't really need a shot in the arm beyond Blizzard just giving players what they want rather than what they don't, which Shadowlands seems to be doing incredibly well. What makes or breaks an expansion is how much they bother to listen to the players.
So not to say it should or shouldn't happen
But what is their reasoning for not doing it?
WoW runs on a potato and is actually prety well optimized. If you have drops it means your settings while in raids aren't properly setup. You should change them so that they look minimal while your stuff stands out
You should also check your addons because many of them are ressource hogs on your computer.
The game is aways 60+ fps for me at 3440*1440
That's pretty great. About 6 years ago I used a Steam Controller to play WoW for a few months and it worked pretty decently, but was still awkward. Was just nice to hook it up to my TV and sit back and just grind. Seeing official support is cool for those who are still playing. Is the expectation that this will work with Classic as well?
All I know from the most recent interview with Ion Hazzikostas (Game Director) is that the gamepad support is being added to give players more accessibility options. I'm not sure what Blizz's current reasoning is for not bringing WoW to consoles.
WoW runs on everything but it doesn't run on everything well, which is the issue here.
In most situations it runs at 60fps at 4k for me. But in raids, world bosses and PvP it doesn't, even with settings dropped down and I otherwise run relatively few addons. Running on a 1080ti with a ryzen 1700. Borealus is also constantly under 60. This is a fairly wide spread issue with the game as I know I'm far from the only one to have similar issues regardless of hardware.
I'm on a 1080Ti and a 7700k and I'm not having sub 60fps ever. But I'm also not maxing out everything and using low consumption addons (like recount instead of scala, dbm instead of bigwigs, Bartender instead of NerveUI, etc)
I see your points and agree with most of them, but keep in mind that if it were to make sense financially, there's no reason modern day Blizzard wouldn't do it. I sincerely believe that if there was money to be made, they would find a way. They most likely would have a separate realm for console if anything. But I don't think the game is outside of the realm of possibility and I'm sure one day we will definitely see a Blizzard MMO on console. Whether it's WoW remains to be seen.
They're actually giving a lot of previously-removed abilities back to players in Shadowlands.
I know that intel processors generally handle the game better than AMD ones, especially if you're running at a higher clockspeed as it still favors single core over multi-core CPUs. The game ran worse for me before the multicore update in 8.1(?) but it's still not perfect. Then beyond that even when i didnt use any addons I still had issues. Its a matter of the video above and the game at its core still being built for older styles of machine which is why it runs on potatos but doesn't have the best of performance on stuff like the ryzen 1700. Hopefully the ryzen 9 in the 4000 series has a nice 5+ghz clockspeed to alleviate my issues as that'll be my next upgrade, but it's still going to be an issue for consoles running at half that on similar processors without further updates and optimization.
FF14 has been played on the PS3 which is soon to be 2 generations ago and WoW has been around since 2005. We're now in 2020. Do you really think that Blizzard hasn't weighed the feasability of this? The fact that the game has made it 15 years without so much as a hint of ever coming to console should tell you something, especially when Overwatch, Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 are on console. Theres more to developing games than the money to be made and releasing a console port that ends up with the issues I've outlined above isn't good for your brand image or getting players into your game, not to mention hardware limitations of the game like I've outlined above and the cost of porting and maintaining such a massive game to begin with and with the way they support the current game I doubt they have the manpower or resources to add more platforms to their workload. Things aren't as black and white as money = good.
If Blizz had any interest or intention of releasing the game on console it would've happened already.
Oh good. I haven't played since the start of Legion really, but that was one of the reasons I stopped playing. Everything just felt like different flavours of the same buttons if that makes sense.
I put in quite a bit of time with a Steam controller and was healing Heroic raids with ease. I bet I could have handled Mythic too, but I didn't have the time for clan stuff. At least now the option to use controller will be easier, but I'd imagine you could have a more performant setup if you used Steam input to make it.
WoW heavily relies on single thread performance, even after the big DX12 update which improved multithread utilization, and the first gen Ryzen isn't a strong performer in that department.
28 abilities is pretty doable on controller with the right configuration. Holding 1 of the 4 shoulder buttons and pressing 1 of the 8 face buttons gives immediate access to 32 shift buttons. With Dualshock 4 you can bring the touchpad into play and generate even more combinations.
Sounds hard :D but maybe, sure.
I do however think that current wow is much, much more suited to gamepad. I played my old warr today just to check out AQ in prep for its release in classic, and as a tank I'm really down to 5-6 abilities in total. So incredibly boring.
The game has separate performance settings for raids you can set up
You can have like 48 abilities in FFXIV mapped to a controller, so is more than doable.
That's cool and all, but WoW gameplay is faster than FFXIV and I'm pretty sure the global cooldown is shorter too. I felt inefficient using a gamepad in FFXIV so I can only imagine it being worse here.
Why the sudden urge to implement this now? I wanted this like 15 years ago but it's not like it's gonna bring me back to the game now.
I'd be quite interested to try practicing more with a DS4, since I always fell back to using SC due to experience with it. I'd imagine it could be quite good for dps, although ideally it would be nice to have a setup where you can handle the camera and dps at the same time.
If we can live with keyboard turners, we can live with controller users.
