World of WarCraft: Report: Development on mobile offshoot stopped

Evergreen World of WarCraft has been on the PC for many years and should have made the mobile area unsafe in the future in an offshoot. According to a new report, a corresponding project has now been scrapped.

Together with NetEase, Blizzard Entertainment recently also worked on a mobile offshoot of World of WarCraft, but this project is apparently no longer being pursued. Like the renowned magazine Bloomberg now reported, the mobile version of the MMO has been scrapped, although it is said to have been in the works for three years.

The report goes on to say that the hiring will go hand in hand with the layoff of a 100-strong developer team at NetEase. Only a few of them are said to have been offered other positions within the company.

Not too much is known about the background to the setting. Apparently, however, there were different views between Blizzard and NetEase as far as the financial framework was concerned. That ultimately led to the hiring. Codenamed Neptune, the game would have been set in the same universe as big brother WoW, but would have focused on a different time period.

Bloomberg goes one step further and also reports on a second discontinued Warcraft project. An augmented reality game in the style of Pokémon GO, codenamed Orbis, has also been in the works for more than four years and will finally not even appear.

The mobile efforts around the Warcraft franchise seem to initially only focus on Warcraft Arclight Rumble, which was officially announced some time ago. The single player title will feature over 70 missions as well as weekly and monthly challenges in the form of dungeons, raids and more.