Blizzard reportedly preparing World of Warcraft: Forever with native gamepad support for consoles and handhelds

NicoGG October 30, 2026 1 comment 2 min read

Blizzard reportedly developing World of Warcraft: Forever with native gamepad support for consoles and handhelds, targeting an early November release.

What we hear is that Blizzard Entertainment is developing a new project named World of Warcraft: Forever. The objective with it is to bring World of Warcraft to consoles and handheld devices. This is an important change as it moves towards a direction of universal access, as it will allow to play it using controllers (as opposed to keyboard).

Blizzard reportedly preparing World of Warcraft: Forever with native gamepad support for consoles and handhelds

The idea is that you should be able to play the game on anything, even on handheld devices (for example ROG Ally X). This helps make the entry barrier lower, for those players who prefer the classic style of gaming.

World of Warcraft: Forever will be the first version of the game that will support native gamepad input – as announced by the executive producer Holly Longdale. It appears that the team is putting an emphasis on controller support with this particular release. The idea is that they will release this support when the game is launched (early November).

However, it is unclear to what degree this support will be implemented. Details of the support were not given for the main World of Warcraft and WoW Classic.

The development seems to be centered around making the game playable via controllers on different hardware platforms. This includes commonly used handheld PC gaming devices that are becoming quite common in the PC gamer community. This is an important technical change to make the game playable using gamepad input – as it was originally designed for mouse/keyboard. It appears that Blizzard is trying to make this experience feel native for new devices.

The November release date gives us an idea when it will happen. But it is still unclear if this is happening at all, as this has not been confirmed via official Blizzard sources. The name of the project (World of Warcraft: Forever) is not associated with any announced product (at least as far as we know).

It is possible that it is a fabricated name (or rumors that are unverified). So, players should be cautious with this information until we get more clarification from the company.