World of Warcraft is over ten years old. All sorts of industry luminaries, analysts and critics have raved about, targeted or joined the mobile crazy. Heck, even Nintendo is beginning to address the mobile market to take its slice of the new and dramatically growing pie. Yet the mobile app for World of Warcraft remains in the dark ages. The WoW Armory hasn’t seen an all-new feature essentially since release. At which point it was already topped by products from numerous smaller titles, such as the Fallen Earth premium app or the more recent and impressive Neverwinter app.
Early on I didn’t mind that World of Warcraft didn’t have any robust mobile access simply because Blizzard Entertainment had a hard enough time getting content out in an acceptable timeframe and little experience in mobile development. Both of those issues are rather moot now thanks to a handful of expansions offer gobs of development experience and a little game called Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. What’s holding back a fresh look at expanding the feature list for Warlords of Draenor?
The most obvious addition is to enable players to interact with their garrisons, collecting resources and sending followers out on new missions. This can easily be expanded to numerous non-social housekeeping issues that the designers have continued to add to the biggest MMORPG in the world WoD’s feature list aside. Transmogrification, socketing, etc. The list can go on for awhile.
Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever see a returned focus to the mobile app since it became free in late 2012. And yet competitors offer better apps even for F2P titles.