WoW Forever: Brazilian rating briefly listed Xbox and PlayStation

One report says that on 29 September a player noticed something odd on the website of Brazil's Ministry of Justice, the body that gives games their age ratings in that country. World of Warcraft: Forever was listed there as going through classification not only for PC and Mac, but for home consoles as well: Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch. Blizzard has announced no console version and has not commented on the entry, and the only Forever it has shown is the computer game it revealed at BlizzCon.

The console lines did not stay up. In the discussion about the find, another player checked the same entry a short time later and reported that they had already been taken down, a few hours after they were spotted. Why they appeared and why they went is not known, and nobody has explained it: it could be a mistake in the entry, a test, or a record made public earlier than intended. We have not seen the entry ourselves, because it is gone, so all of this rests on that one report.

There is a clear reason to treat the list carefully, and the report makes the same point: it had the PlayStation 3 on it. That is a console Sony is winding down: it is closing the store that served it and the PS Vita, and it has ended new physical releases for PlayStation. A classification entry is not an announcement in any case: it shows that someone asked a ratings body to classify a game, not that the game is coming to those machines. And the report treats a typing mistake on the ministry's own website as by far the likeliest explanation. The only platform Forever is confirmed for is the PC, and what Blizzard has published about the hardware is a list of graphics cards it will not support.

One detail in the report is not about the entry at all: it says Forever already has full Xbox controller support, which is why it calls a console version a distant possibility rather than a flat impossibility. Gamepad work has shown up in the beta too. Blizzard's development notes for the 24 September build added a pop-out menu of forms on the action bar for druids playing with a gamepad, which we noted when it turned out that druids can drink potions in Bear Form. None of it is a console announcement. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever launches at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.