World of Warcraft: Shadowland will bring controller support for the first time

The next expansion of World of Warcraft will make it easier to play games on the controller.

Shadow Land World of WarcraftThe upcoming expansion feature is the first to add official controller support to MMO.

Programmer Martin Benjamins When they found a string referencing the controller input in a recent patch, they first released the news. This feature has been confirmed by community manager Randy "Kaivax" Jordan, who talked about Blizzard's intentions on the official Blizzard forum.

On the one hand, Blizzard does not seem to be interested in making the game fully playable on the controller. Jordan specifically rejected the idea that controllers in World of Warcraft support similarities to Final Fantasy 14.

Instead, Blizzard only wants disabled players and those who want to play games without a keyboard and mouse to be interested in binding some of these functions to their favorite input devices.

Jordan wrote: "For a long time, we have seen a small number of players turn to third-party ports (such as Console Port) to solve certain accessibility issues."

"If possible, we always wanted WoW to be more widely accessed, so in Shadowlands, we tried to add support for key bindings, cameras, and enable characters on controllers such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller."

Although this is indeed a welcome addition, it was a bit disappointing to see Blizzard abandon the creation of default settings for World of Warcraft on the controller. Having said that, given the number of abilities a player has, this is no easy task.

Shadowlands is released this year.