World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, the upcoming expansion coming in 2020, will add controller support to the hit MMO for the first time. It was the programmer Martin Benjamins to break the news first, just after identifying some code strings that refer to the controller input in a recent patch. The function was subsequently confirmed also by the community manager Randy “Kaivax” Jordan, who spoke about Blizzard's interests in this regard. First of all, it would seem that Blizzard has no intention of making the entire game playable with the controller: in particular, the idea that sees controller support similar to that present in Final Fantasy 14 has been denied. The US company is simply interested in offer a better experience for players with disabilities, or those who simply want to play without keyboard and mouse. Below, Jordan's statements:
For a long time, we've seen a small number of gamers turn to third-party add-ons, such as Console Port, to address certain accessibility issues. We are always willing to make WoW as accessible as possible, so in Shadowlands we are attempting to add some key combination support.
While it's a welcome addition indeed, it's a bit disappointing to see that Blizzard won't feature a full-fledged default configuration for World of Warcraft on controllers. However, we understand that this is by no means an easy task, since the game has a large number of usable commands. We remind all our readers that the eighth expansion of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will be released later this year, and will support Ray Tracing.
