World of Warcraft is a worldwide phenomenon, but there is one area the game has yet to conquer: consoles. Luckily Patrick Klepek of the G4TV staff manages to corner World of Warcraft's lead producer J. Allen Brack and pose him a few questions on the issue.

Here's Brack on the obstacles of transitioning a PC MMO to a console:

"I think there's a lot of reasons," ... "There's not one thing. One is, it takes a long time to develop an MMO. The lifecycle of consoles being what they are, you have to really time when your console's going to come out, what its projected lifecycle is going to be with when your game is going to be, which is challenging."

Brack also mentions how World of Warcraft carries a memory commitment of around 15GB. Many Xbox 360s don't even have a hard drive, or are limited to around 20GB.

"There's those technical challenges," ... "there's patching challenges, there's the quality controls that we have vs. the quality controls that say, a Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo has. All those things sort of raise the bar in terms of the challenges and then specifically in the case of WoW, WoW was designed to be a keyboard game and its control scheme and its camera controls and the number of abilities that you have and the spells and how things work are very keyboard-centric. The idea of translating that to a gamepad is a very, very challenging proposition."

This final quote wraps the whole situation up:

"I think it's unlikely that WoW comes to the consoles," ... "It is something that we talk about on a pretty regular basis, but someone is going to figure out how to make an MMO on a console and they're going to be wildly successful. I have no doubt about that."

There you have it World of Warcraft fans, it's safe to say that if there isn't a console version in development as we speak there isn't likely to ever be one. Perhaps Final Fantasy XIV can jump the divide and build on the success that Final Fantasy XI had on the PlayStation 2. Until then MMO players will remain PC gamers first, console gamers second.

Source: G4TV