World of Warcraft on your phone? Whaaa?

[Kabob]

An interesting possibility:
From Phandroid.com (includes a YouTube video).

How do you get a World of Warcraft player to leaver their bedroom? By letting them play WoW on their Android smartphone wherever they go. Gamestring is hard at work making it a reality, and they are ready to show off what they have accomplished. A video demo on the HTC Desire shows the implementation of an on-screen virtual joystick and buttons for controlling your character.

The game doesn’t actually live on your phone, though. It must be run from a host server over a wireless network, so while you could potentially form a setup that would allow for gameplay far from home, you might not ever get much further than your backyard. Which is a step in the right direction. A baby step, but at least it will get WoW players up and moving.

 

[RavenSEAL]

I wonder how feature limited the mobile version could be.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Suddenly Android forums everywhere are going to be flooded with "looking for app that automatically ignores calls, text messages, alarms..."

 

[Schadenfroh]

Would not mind being able to use the auction house, check mail, wire money and conduct PMs from my phone.

Going to start this game back up again late this year.

 

[Bateluer]

Suddenly Android forums everywhere are going to be flooded with "looking for app that automatically ignores calls, text messages, alarms..."

And the carriers are going to shit a brick.

Course, there is the issue of battery life. I cannot imagine a detailed 3D game is going to be easy on a smart phone battery.

 

[Soccerman06]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2124550

r

 

[HarvardAce]

And the carriers are going to shit a brick.

Course, there is the issue of battery life. I cannot imagine a detailed 3D game is going to be easy on a smart phone battery.

The OP indicated that the game is not running on your phone -- rather the game is running on a separate PC, and your phone is just acting like a remote desktop/Citrix client -- you're just getting the video/audio back from the host machine that is actually running the game. There's a startup working on a similar thing for PC gaming -- they run the games on their super-fast hardware and you control them remotely from your PC. Bandwidth and latency are obvious issues, and with a phone, being able to control your character well would obviously be another big issue. I doubt you could try to go on a raid with that setup, but something simple like crafting would probably work.

As for doing things like chatting, managing the AH, etc. -- I thought WoW already had an app to do just that?

 

[techforums]

I admit the music is catchy

 

[SirStev0]

you it is pretty much a wireless remote control for the game? That is actually kind of awesome. would love to see this expanded on.

 

[BudAshes]

Someone in the pcgaming forum predicted this and every called him an idiot.