14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard, right after it released the much-awaited Cataclysm expansion to World of Warcraft yesterday, talked about the possibility to launch a massively multiplayer online game for consoles like the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3.
According to Blizzard executives Greg Street and David Kosak, making and launching MMOs on consoles is a very tough job, largely due to the online services inherent to the platform, specifically Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network.
Talking about the demands of a console MMO, Street revealed that the closed nature of Xbox Live would pose a problem for Blizzard.
"Yes, I think certainly that we would place really heavy demand on the technical structure of those things before it was something Blizzard would want to get into."
The two Blizzard team members also talked about other problems that need to be solved in order to make MMOs playable on consoles.
"I think the control scheme is a part of it, the traditional MMO has always had a lot of typing and is dependent on the mouse and keyboard paradigm. "
"A few years ago everyone said the FPS couldn't be done on consoles and clearly Microsoft has been able to pull that off with Halo and other games. Hopefully someone will be able to do the same for an MMO on a console."
Kosak added, "It's a real design challenge because you have to throw out a lot of what you've learned on a PC.
"On PC you're sitting right in front of a screen, you can have a lot of dense information displayed and very complex control schemes. If you're playing on a couch from a distance with a controller, it requires very different design."
Blizzard is still focusing on the PC as its single platform for its games, including World of Warcraft or StarCraft II, but it hasn't completely ruled out consoles for other games, like for the upcoming Diablo III.