I Played WoW with a Controller! Officially!

World of Warcraft Forever | Controller Impressions

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Aarsal "SoulBlazerz" Masoodi

3 hours ago

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Blizzard just announced yet another version of World of Warcraft to play, World of Warcraft: Forever, and I was able to get my hands on it over here at BlizzCon. More specifically, I was able to get my hands on their official controller support for the game, something I’ve been wanting for a very, very long time, and so I have my impressions!

So, how was it? Well, keep reading to find out!

I’m Old, But Not That Old

I suppose I should start with a couple of quick disclaimers/explanations. Firstly, what the heck is World of Warcraft: Forever? As someone who started the game with The Burning Crusade and hasn’t played since halfway through Battle for Azeroth, I was a little confused too.

The gist of it is, that WoW Forever is essentially an upgraded and enhanced version of vanilla WoW, where they made sure to keep the core of the game but also didn’t shy away from improving aspects of it. This doesn’t mean that everything is suddenly very easy and streamlined, but it does mean certain unbalanced talents are reworked, and so on. Forever also gives Blizzard the opportunity to play with a little “what if” scenarios that the original game never did, such as the opening of Dalaran, or Forsaken paladins. The devs put it best: think of it as a WoW where the Dark Portal most likely never re-opens, but adventures keep happening.

Whoa, That’s a Lot of Buttons

For a very long time, official controller support was something that’s been asked of Blizzard. Yes, you could play WoW with a controller by using various add-ons, and they worked well, but they required a fair bit of set-up time and were, of course, never quite perfect. With World of Warcraft: Forever, controller support is finally arriving, though in an “alpha” state to start. And, well, they did a damn good job, I’d say.

They had two demos here at BlizzCon for WoW Forever, a dungeon you can play after grouping up with others playing the demo, and the starting area for the new Skyborne race that’s coming with the game. I first hopped into the dungeon demo, which was kinda like jumping straight into the deep end of a pool without knowing how deep it is.

You switch to controller with a simple toggle in the menus, and once you do, all of your interfaces change, and the game recognizes controller input. The menus you know and love are now accessible through a radial selection. As the dungeon demo had me play as a level 38 character, I had a bunch of skills in my spellbook but nothing bound to anything. So my first few minutes were spent figuring out how to do exactly that, and thankfully it was decently intuitive. Basically, you could bind things to your d-pad directions at the highest level, and then your face and d-pad buttons while holding down RT, LT, or both together. So there are over 20 places to bind abilities, and once you get used to where you put what, they feel quick and snappy.

No WoW Dungeon Finder Here

Of course I had to go and recreate a character, as no one wanted a DPS in their group (vanilla, remember). I wanted to challenge myself though, so I switched over to a priest and decided to heal with a controller. After binding like 6 various types of healing spells, I grabbed a couple of people (both dps of course) and jumped into the dungeon. Though I can’t talk more about the dungeon itself, as our tiny group lasted like 5 pulls.

Okay yeah, older WoW started to come back to me as I remembered how important mana and aggro management was for healers. And yet, I pulled it off! At least for several encounters. The number of abilities was never a limiting factor for controllers, what with the various different bindings you can do. Instead, it’s always been the targeting part of the game that had me curious.

In their official controller support, LB and RB are your primary methods of targeting friendlies and enemies, respectively. You can tap LB to switch between different friendly targets in front of you, or you can hold it and use your D-pad to switch directly between party members. As a healer, this was my method of choice, and it worked well.

There were clear visual markers on whoever I had selected, and as I fired off a healing spell, I could see exactly how much they’d heal up. It’s been quite a while since I healed a dungeon, but switching between party members, popping a HOT (heal over time) on one, a quick heal on another, a longer, more mana-efficient heal back on the first, and so on started to feel pretty natural before long. I used just the party window for the most part to know who I was targeting, but I could also tap the button and switch based on my line of sight.

Skill Issue

Now it wasn’t all smooth sailing. We didn’t have a tank, so of course it wasn’t long until I pulled the aggro. In my panic, I wasn’t able to consistently self-target myself and no amount of desperate twirly jumping would save me. I imagine if I had more than about 10 minutes of experience with the controller set-up, this wouldn’t have been an issue, but that’s demos for you! I desperately fought to keep myself alive, but alas, it was not to be.

As I stared at my corpse slowly losing the warmth of life, I had a large smile on my face. It was hectic, it was intense, and most importantly, it was fun. Yes, controller support clearly works better in a more classic setting, without some of the more complicated abilities or mechanics in retail, but as I started up the other demo, playing a level 1 skyborne rogue, I felt like I was seeing my future. A future where I’m sitting on my couch in November, watching my night elf rogue stealth his way through a Furbolg den, and I’m just slowly enjoying my trip down memory lane.

Update: As pointed out by a comment, I didn’t test area spells! Specifically things like Blizzard or Rain of Fire, so I went straight back and gave that a shot. The whole thing still revolves around your target, as in the shards of ice will fall in a circle around whatever you have selected. Meaning I was unable to manually move the circle around, à la games like Smite or others like it. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this, as it does feel more natural just moving the circle around the field with my right thumbstick, but how often would I need to drop an AoE spell in an area without anything I can target? Either way, I can see them working and expanding on this area in the future.

Retail When?

Sure, there were some iffy moments, but I’m not sure how much of that was due to design imperfections and how much of that was due to my lack of time with the play method. A regular player won’t be jumping straight to level 40 with a dozen abilities unlocked; they’ll be playing and levelling bit by bit and slowly adding new skills to their bindings. Hell, just the few minutes I had playing a healer was enough to tell me that, yep, this is totally doable.

Will a controller be the most preferred way to play World of Warcraft? No, I don’t think it ever will, but will it be good enough to carve its own niche in the player base? Yes, I certainly think so, and I also hope once they move on from alpha to beta, to full release, that they’re looking into bringing this playstyle into retail WoW as well, rather than just Forever.

Heck, who knows, maybe this is the first step towards that long-rumoured World of Warcraft console release… Whiiiiich they denied commenting on after I asked, but hey, a fan can hope…

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