Tobold's Blog
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
 
WoW on iPhone?

A reader asked me whether I had heard the stories about World of Warcraft coming to the iPhone, reported on iPhone World and WoWInsider. Well, the story sounds extremely dubious, and I don't think a *full* World of Warcraft could be played on any cell phone. Mostly because of a lack of a mouse. Just do the following simple experiment: Try to play World of Warcraft on a laptop without a USB mouse, just using the touchpad. It's horrible. Now if you just had a touch screen and no keyboard, like the iPhone has, directing a character through a 3D world would become an absolute nightmare and totally unplayable.

I mentioned before that I *do* think that MMORPG of the future, but not necessarily WoW, might have a "lite" version for cell phones, which just allows you to do things like sorting your inventory, accessing the mailbox, and buying and selling on the auction house. Or other game elements which you would like to access frequently, but for short periods. I'd call these the "tamagotchi elements", which some MMORPG have, like emptying your harvesters in SWG or paying the upkeep for your house. Being able to access those from your cell phone would probably be attractive for some players, and be a nice source of additional income for the game companies. Nothing empties the wallets of customers as fast as cell phone applications.
Comments:
I'm probably atypical, but I've played WoW for the whole time I've been playing -- 2-ish years -- with just a trackpad. Gotten a character to 70, raided, PvPed, leveled countless alts, and I never missed a mouse. I have plugged mice in a few times to see if they felt better, but honestly it's not worth the trouble to me.

As far as WoW on iPhone, I agree with the consensus that full-WoW could never work, but lite-WoW would be great.
 
i agree completely, firstly i don't think you would be able to run such a large game on a mobile phone. secondly a good stable wow connection on a mobile phone would be hard. dc's would most likey occour alot. and thirdly wow has so many commands you could never use them all on a phone.
 
Just disagreeing with the touchpad claim. My laptop is my sole wow system, simply because it's got much better hardware than my current desktop. As such, while I could use a mouse, it was just easier to learn the touchpad so I could play anywhere, "out of the box", as it were. Everything I use for normal fights fits on the hotbar, and it's perfectly easy to move my thumb off the spacebar and click one of the other bars as needed.
 
I find that playing on a laptop without mouse is like being about two or three levels lower. I can still play, but I can't play nearly as well. Of course, I play a shaman, so I have the max number of bars up and full of totems. I wonder if its any easier for a class that doesn't have so many different moves.
 
"I'd like to see some guild chat and auction house functions available from a website"

That would be good on an iphone. sign in front anywhere just to enjoy a bit of /g chat on your way to work or during a lunch break. that i most definatly pay for!
 
Tibia is a very UO sort of game - I only played it a wee bit, and killed some rats!

..but apparently it has a pretty full-featured cell phone version.

I expect Wii/DS combos to be the norm for Wii-based MMOs.

Otherwise, consider the opposite possibility, too: cell phone games with a PC (web, likely) component.
 
runescape could be played on the iphone, if it had java very easily, expecially if you used a stylus
 
I tend to disagree with you that WoW could not run on the iPhone. After seeing some of the 3D graphics the iPhone is capable of, it seems that WoW would fit right in. After all, WoW doesn't have THAT impressive of graphics. Just my 2 cents...
 
hold up, wow will NEVER run on an Iphone BUT you can still play it on your Iphone, actually i've done it.

get a remote desktop and control your comp with your Iphone. Its really laggy and it looks pretty bad but you can move around and gring easy stuff. I used it to check the auction house for good deals.

WoW uses an extencive ammount of memory and even though you cant rly see the differance between wow and iphone apps, wow uses alot of graphics also.

btw, wow full and wow light would still be the same thing unless you want to make two differant games.
Runescape (or games like it) will definatly be a huge for the iphone that will happen soon.
 
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