World of Warcraft Forever Officially Brings Gamepad Controls Blizzard’s MMO

“A common theme with the types of features we’ve added is giving players agency,” Valetta added. “We have the SD/HD character model toggle. We have classic mode or a more modernized ‘less friction’ approach that you can select when you first jump into the game. We see gamepad support as one of those things as providing players with another way to interface with the game.”

Valetta explained that, from her own perspective, after working at a computer desk all day (making World of Warcraft), sometimes she just wants to lay on a couch and play WoW to kick back. “It’s a way to provide players with just another way to interface with the game,” she said. “We’ve implemented it such that you can just seamlessly swap between the two. So I could even sit at my desktop if I wanted to and then just plug in my controller, boom, I’m in.”

“We’ve prided ourselves on having more and more accessibility options to let people of all different types of ability, or just playing preference, play our game,” Tim Jones, lead game designer on Forever, told Polygon. “Whether that’s having better colorblindness modes or our screen narrator. So we just see having really amazing controller support as another pillar of that accessibility [push] and an opportunity for people to play the game in a different way.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

World of Warcraft Forever will support Xbox and PlayStation controllers, Valetta said, and the control scheme has undergone “copious amounts of play tests” internally.

Valetta acknowledged that fans have built their own gamepad support for World of Warcraft and that other MMOs have supported gamepad controls for years. “I had previously played Final Fantasy 14 using a PS4 controller for a while,” she said, but noted that the team “didn’t want to wholesale copy what some other implementation was doing. We wanted to approach it with a fresh mind and be like, What feels the most natural? What are our own anxieties and fears over how clunky it may be in certain cases? Will it be too challenging to raid heal?“

The World of Warcraft Forever devs said they received support from other Blizzard teams who have previous experience with implementing controller support. The results feel great. The team has mapped friendly targeting actions to the Xbox controller’s left bumper with enemy targeting on the right bumper. Players can auto-run by pressing in on the left analog stick and ping objects in the environment by clicking in on the right. Most actions, including spells and attacks, are mapped to the d-pad and face buttons, and players can toggle between groups of actions by pulling the left and right triggers, or both simultaneously. It’s all pretty elegant.

World of Warcraft players will get a chance to try gamepad support for themselves when Forever goes into beta on Sept. 17. The wait for the full game won’t be much longer: World of Warcraft Forever officially launches on Nov. 4.