World of Warcraft: Forever Adds Controller Support as Players Eye the Steam Deck

Maya Collins14/09/20262 min read

World of Warcraft: Forever is bringing something players have wanted for two decades: official, native controller support. After years of relying on the community ConsolePort addon, Blizzard is building gamepad controls straight into its MMO. The catch, as ever, is in the fine print, and this time it has Steam Deck owners sweating.

Native controller support, finally

As Polygon reports, WoW: Forever will let you play with a gamepad natively, no third-party addons required. For a game built around dozens of hotkeys, that is a genuinely big deal, and the r/wow reaction was instant. The top comments were people begging Blizzard to take the obvious next step: “Please bring to Switch 2 and the other consoles,” “Switch 2 please, FFXIV did it,” and simply “Now bring it to Xbox.” Others just wanted to relax: “I really want to lean back sometimes with a controller,” and, more bluntly, “This is for us old fucks with shot necks and shoulders.”

It is still early. Blizzard’s BlizzCon build only let players test from level 1, so the big question, how gamepad controls handle a max-level healer or a 40-button rotation, is unanswered until the beta lands in mid-October. Some players are cautiously optimistic, pointing to how well Final Fantasy XIV’s soft-targeting system works on a pad. Others are simply asking whether it will beat the ConsolePort addon they already use.

A moment of silence for Steam Deck bros?

Controller support screams “handheld,” so naturally everyone thought of the Steam Deck, and then saw the specs. WoW: Forever’s recommended requirements list a 40-series Nvidia GPU, prompting a wave of “moment of silence for our Steam Deck bros” jokes. But before anyone sells their Deck, the community was quick to add the important word: recommended, not minimum.

The 40-series recommendation is there for Forever’s new high-detail visuals, the updated lighting, shadows, water and ray tracing, which are optional. As one player put it, “WoW Forever needing a 40 series is for jacked-up ray tracing. It will run fine on anything that can run WoW now.” Retail WoW already runs well on the Steam Deck, so Deck owners should still be able to play Forever, just at lower settings rather than with the fancy graphics maxed out. The dream of playing WoW from the couch is very much alive, even if the ray-traced version needs a beefier rig.

Controller support, plus the recent Discord guild-chat integration, has plenty of players convinced a console version is the real endgame here. For everything else revealed this weekend, see our World of Warcraft: Forever announcement.