World of Warcraft players are able to use the game's auction house and chat features through a mobile app. Will they ever be able to play the actual game through their phone, though? Well, Blizzard would love to figure out how.
"We won't do it until we think it's decent," senior producer John Lagrave told Eurogamer. "But it's interesting and the world is evolving towards that little handheld device - I'd have fun on it, that's absolutely the case. It would be foolish for any game developer to not be looking at that and we're not - we don't think - we're foolish!"
"Maybe we'll stumble on the great way to put WOW on the phone - maybe we won't, but we're certainly looking into it."
Putting the full game itself on an iPhone might be too daunting of a task. LaGrave pointed out that the interface for the game is very complex - after all, how do you adapt a game with dozens of hotkeys to a touchscreen?. Still, putting some limited part of the game on a mobile device might be possible.
"You can look at fishing and say, 'Is fishing tailored to being on a table or on a mobile?' That would be awesome, right? You're sitting at the airport and think 'I'll just go fishing'. We certainly look at pet battles too, but right now we're focused on PC - that's our bread-and-butter, PC and Mac."
Fellow MMO Rift offers players a free mobile app with minigames. These minigames allow you to win in-game rewards that are then mailed to your character. I could see something like that working in WoW. Fishing in the game is boring as hell but might seem more fun if I was doing it while sitting in a dentist's waiting room. It'd be a nice way to stay connected to the game and earn rewards in the process.
