WoW on iPhone? Blizzard still studying possibility
With the success of the World of Warcraft's mobile armory, you would think Blizzard would look at making the game for mobile. But the process has its challenges.
With the the advances in mobile gaming development, how long will it be before a huge franchise gets a conversion to the little screen? Blizzard has already given it some thought for World of Warcraft.
At the recent media day at Blizzard headquarters (where we got our hands on the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion), Senior Producer John Lagrave said in a Eurogamer interview while holding an iPhone: "Here's your platform, you've got to put an interface, what do you do? So yes, we have [looked into mobile] and we always are. Maybe we'll stumble on the great way to put WOW on the phone - maybe we won't, but we're certainly looking into it."
Lagrave added that Blizzard has already used the platform for its Mobile Armory, but they have kept things simplistic. He also explained that there may be certain aspects of WoW that could translate better to mobile than the whole game, such as fishing or the newly announced pet battles in Mists of Pandaria.
"When we have an epiphany, everyone will know," he added. "But for now, no epiphany."
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replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, WoW on iPhone? Blizzard still studying possibility.
With the success of the World of Warcraft's mobile armory, you would think Blizzard would look at making the game for mobile. But the process has its challenges.-
I wonder how they will try compress a 12+GB game to fit on mobile device that has at best 2-8GB of storage. Then not totally kill your data trying to download install it. I am sure it is probably just social aspects and goofy minigames.
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remove the graphics, all you need is chat and mods that do all the database mining work for you.
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The game engine already supports streaming in assets as you play so it would probably be pretty easy
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This plus significant quality reductions in models, textures and sound which would probably be necessary anyway.
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(easy being a very relative term here. It would still be a very expensive project.)
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Streaming large amounts of data is still impractical on a mobile device because of the data plans. Most games that require more than 50MB require to you to be at a Wifi hotspot to download. It might be possible to stream content like you can with netflix but it will end being expensive and impractical over the long term on 3/4g.
My guess is it would be would be greatly reduce to the point where its not the same game or just a collection of minigames.
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I can't imagine it would be that tough, just put more of the data server-side. Think of it more as an interface.
You probably wouldn't want to raid on it, but if they implemented a click-to-move for movements, and to initially attack, the default ui wouldn't be too bad to just touch click the keys... -
WoW was compiled for arm years ago and is one of our standard benchmarks for iOS performance
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Maybe not WoW in the conventional sense, but that infernal "pet battle" thing they're working on for the next expansion seems like a perfect fit for phone gameplay
