Blizzard seemingly has no current plans to bring World of Warcraft to consoles. In a new interview with the Unlocked Fury podcast, World of Warcraft’s senior game director Ion Hazzikostas has said that the company would have announced that it was working on bringing the MMORPG to consoles if there was already a plan to do so. Rather, he noted that there isn’t any reason to hide things.
“To be fully transparent, there’s no reason for us to hide anything about this,” said Hazzikostas in the interview. “If we were actively working towards bringing WoW to consoles, or a bunch of other platforms, we’d be saying, ‘We’re actively working towards it, we know we have a lot of work to do but it’s a place where we want to land.’”
Rather than working on a console release of World of Warcraft, Hazzikostas noted that the team has been busy working on the new content and changes coming to the MMORPG with the release of its next major expansion – Midnight.
World of Warcraft: Midnight will bring with it quite a bit of new content, and in the process will serve as the second act in a major story arc that was kicked off with the current expansion – The War Within. The story arc is slated to reach its conclusion with the third expansion in the planned trilogy – The Last Titan.
Along with new content like quests, dungeons and raids, Midnight will also bring with it a host of changes to the core gameplay of World of Warcraft. With the expansion, Blizzard is attempting to de-emphasise the use of third-party interface addons for the game. Rather, the game will be getting its own set of built-in tools that will allow players to set up their own alerts for boss fights and abilities.
Interestingly, Blizzard’s attempt to reduce the usefulness of third-party UI addons would put World of Warcraft in a similar trajectory with Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 14 – an MMORPG with challenging endgame content that expressly forbids the use of third-party addons. The fact that the MMORPG is available on consoles along with PC plays a large role in the use of addons being against the game’s rules.
World of Warcraft: Midnight doesn’t yet have a release date aside from a vague 2026 release window. Back in August, Blizzard had released a cinematic trailer for the expansion that laid some of the foundations for its story. It is worth noting that the trailer doesn’t feature any gameplay; rather, it is a story-centric cinematic trailer that revolves around the Sunwell near Silvermoon City, and the threat posed to it and the Blood Elves by primary antagonist Xal’atath.
The War Within was released back in September 2024, and took players to a host of new subterranean zones as they took part in the battle between the forces of light and the machinations of the void. For more details about the expansion, check out our review from back when it launched, where we gave it a score of 9 out of 10.
