World of Warcraft and Overwatch developer Blizzard has had a rough time over the last few months. Diablo 4 is still eagerly awaited, but as it still hasn’t been announced the reveal instead of mobile game Diablo Immortal at Blizzcon 2018 didn’t go down very well with fans. So it’s understandable then why we haven’t also had an announcement of another mobile game from Blizzard, this time based on the popular Warcraft brand. If reports are to believed, a Pokémon Go World of Warcraft title for mobile is in development at the studio.
These reports come from Kotaku, who interviewed a number of developers regarding Diablo 4 and the big Diablo Immortal controversy. According to Kotaku, “quite a few people” at Blizzard are big fans of Pokémon Go, so much so that the big Orc statue on the campus is a Pokémon Gym. One of the lead designers of World of Warcraft, Cory Stockton, is apparently a huge fan of Pokémon, and reportedly that lead one of the incubation teams at Blizzard to begin work on its own version of Pokémon Go.
According to people who have actually played the Pokémon Go World of Warcraft mobile game, it’s apparently got a lot more to it than Niantic’s world-popular mobile title. This includes “single-player mechanics” apparently, which makes it sound more like the recently launched Ghostbusters World, which is also a Pokémon Go-like game, except one with a proper story mode.
It’s impossible to tell how much of the Kotaku report is accurate, but it’s certainly a good read. It’s important to note, however, that an “incubation team” does not mean full game development. These teams usually develop basic games from the ideas stage to see if they are worth building on, and many of these ideas do not go beyond the incubation team. It’s entirely possible a Pokémon Go-style Warcraft game would do well, though. However, let’s just hope Blizzard don’t choose to announce it at next year’s Blizzcon…
