Microsoft has officially announced Keyboard and Mouse Support for Xbox One developers at the platform level. Players who are part of the Xbox Insider Program will be among the first to try this functionality.
“Developers can now build mouse and keyboard support in their games if and how they choose. It’s important to note that mouse and keyboard support for games is added on a title-by-title basis, entirely at developers’ discretion.“
Even better, Microsoft has partnered with Razer to offer the best possible mouse and keyboard experience for this new functionality. Game titles ready to support this new feature will be announced on November 10.
I won’t bet whether Blizzard might announce something at BlizzCon, but the chances of World of Warcraft coming to Xbox One are exponentially good. The main issue would be hard drive space.
Here is something J. Allen Brack (who is currently developing World of Warcraft Vanilla) said to Kotaku in 2010:
”There’s those technical challenges,” he continued, “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.”
Well, now Xbox One will have a keyboard and mouse, and the developers can design how it is used from within the game itself. One less challenge to bring World of Warcraft to Xbox One.
