Blizzard is making a push with World of Warcraft controller support for upcoming expansion Shadowlands. But, as executive producer John Hight explained to me, this isn't about fitting the game on a PlayStation or Xbox pad. It's about broadening input options for players with disabilities.
"So what we're doing," John Hight told me, "is enabling a lot of the things required for our add-on community to build add-ons for controller support. And it isn't just controllers: we're looking at a number of different devices. But our focus was not to try and make WoW feel like a console game but rather for players with disabilities to have more accessible input devices.
"The first step for us was, 'Hey, there's a lot of signals these controllers - or these devices - use that people can't get at easily so let's first enable that,' and we're trying to work closely with some add-on builders to let them know it's coming. We feel like what will happen is, as these devices come out - hopefully we're going to see even more innovative devices so everybody can participate, not just in WoW but in the online community in general - that we've provided the sufficient hooks for them to be able to integrate with the game."