Don't expect to see World of Warcraft on consoles any time soon

A bit of World of Warcraft news for you this Thursday afternoon. If given the chance, how many of you would play the game on your Xbox 360 or PS3? It doesn’t even matter, as Blizzard’s executive vice-president of game design, Rob Pardo, said that producing a console version of the game would run into a whole host of challenges that would need to be overcome. Chief among them: an input device. Do you go create a specially designed WoW controller, or leave it up to people to bring their own mouse and keyboard?

Then there’s the issue of storage space. A game like WoW can easily take up several gigabytes of hard drive space, something that’s not necessarily guaranteed to be present, either because of the total lack of a hard drive (Arcade model of the 360) or lack of sufficient space. (My Xbox 360, an old school Premium model, only has ~3GB of free space. It makes buying DLC fairly tricky, yes.)

That’s not to say that MMOs can never work on a console. I remember playing Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast when it first came out, and that was lots of fun, no hard drive needed (though I did buy the separate Dreamcast keyboard.) All it takes is clever game design to “make it work.”

In other WoW news, you can now buy really well-crafted figurines of various in-game pets.

The whole set—Speedy the Turtle, Stinker the Skunk, and Rocket Bot—costs $74.95. Or, you can buy ’em separately for $29.95 a pop. These first three are only available till July 31, so you’d better get on it if you’re interested.

via WoW.com