smokescreen/bluff or is he telling the truth? I am leaning towards bluff.
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3148573
Microsoft wants to see more massively multiplayer games on Xbox 360. Blizzard is the company behind the most successful MMO of all time, but despite fan pressure for a port, COO Paul Sams recently chatted with UK website MCV and said World of Warcraft isn't in the cards for Xbox 360 right now.
"We do not have any plans to take WoW to Xbox 360," he says. "WoW is built as a PC gaming experience. Porting PC games to console often compromises games, and we'd never allow the WoW gameplay experience to suffer."
On the other hand, Square Enix seems to have successfully ported Final Fantasy XI onto both PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360, and many would argue the mechanics in that game are more complicated than anything in World of Warcraft. Still, most people would want to play without a keyboard, and that would require interface and gameplay changes.
Another problem is lies within the Xbox 360 architecture itself. Guild Wars developer Arena.Net recently expressed issues with all the power lying in Microsoft's court, a sentiment Blizzard appears to share. "Microsoft's Xbox Live architecture is very protected from all sorts of outside influence, so shared play between 360 and PC owners would be very tough," he says. "We wouldn't even consider WoW for 360 unless we could overcome that hurdle."
Electronic Arts made similar complaints during the early days of Xbox, though, and they managed to find a compromise - if Microsoft wants World of Warcraft bad enough, they'll find a way to make Blizzard happy. And, hey, maybe Blizzard's just throwing up a smoke screen for future console plans. Right now, though, they're keeping quiet. "I wouldn't say we have no console plans. Nothing is in place at the moment, but we may be looking at something along those lines in the future," he says."
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3148573
"We do not have any plans to take WoW to Xbox 360," he says. "WoW is built as a PC gaming experience. Porting PC games to console often compromises games, and we'd never allow the WoW gameplay experience to suffer."
On the other hand, Square Enix seems to have successfully ported Final Fantasy XI onto both PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360, and many would argue the mechanics in that game are more complicated than anything in World of Warcraft. Still, most people would want to play without a keyboard, and that would require interface and gameplay changes.
Another problem is lies within the Xbox 360 architecture itself. Guild Wars developer Arena.Net recently expressed issues with all the power lying in Microsoft's court, a sentiment Blizzard appears to share. "Microsoft's Xbox Live architecture is very protected from all sorts of outside influence, so shared play between 360 and PC owners would be very tough," he says. "We wouldn't even consider WoW for 360 unless we could overcome that hurdle."
Electronic Arts made similar complaints during the early days of Xbox, though, and they managed to find a compromise - if Microsoft wants World of Warcraft bad enough, they'll find a way to make Blizzard happy. And, hey, maybe Blizzard's just throwing up a smoke screen for future console plans. Right now, though, they're keeping quiet. "I wouldn't say we have no console plans. Nothing is in place at the moment, but we may be looking at something along those lines in the future," he says."