World Of Warcraft Plays Surprisingly Well On Xbox Thanks To GeForce Now

I’ve never been much of a World of Warcraft fan, but after watching The Remarkable Life of Ibelin on Netflix recently, I’ve found myself playing it for the time in years (seriously, that film is amazing if you haven’t seen it!).

The problem is, as someone who sits on a desktop PC all day every day for Pure Xbox reasons, it’s not really what I want to do when the evening rolls around – so I’ve been exploring the possibilities of playing World of Warcraft on my TV via an Xbox Series X instead. And, I’ve come to find that it’s a surprisingly great experience thanks to NVIDIA GeForce Now.

As we’ve covered before here at Pure Xbox, you can indeed play World of Warcraft on Xbox by using the Microsoft Edge browser and setting up a (free) GeForce Now account which allows you 60 minutes’ worth of access to the game. You can then just start up a new session after you’re done, or pay a fee if you want improved features and longer session lengths. I’m sticking to the free version for now, but I don’t love the wait times – so might pay up for it eventually!

To find World of Warcraft, you’ll need to connect your Battle.net account to GeForce Now (which is easy to do), and then it should appear in your library with a “Play” button. From there, once you’re into the server, the task is to enter your Battle.net details – and this is where the first hurdle crops up. As things stand, there’s no easy way to enter this with a controller, so plugging in a USB mouse and keyboard was the only obvious solution from what I could see.

And to be honest, I think if you are planning to play World of Warcraft on Xbox, mouse and keyboard is the way to go anyway. It works exactly as you’d expect, and although there is the ability to enable controller support within the game (using the chat command “/Console GamePadEnable 1”), it’s a more finicky and time-consuming process to set up. And again, to enable it in the first place, you’re going to want a mouse and keyboard anyway.

But then you’re in! You’re playing World of Warcraft on an Xbox console! It’s genuinely quite spectacular to experience the game this way, and for me personally, I haven’t noticed any obvious latency issues. You can normally tell immediately when latency is causing a mouse cursor’s movements to feel unnatural, but that’s not been my experience.

Of course, the big thing is that you’ll need a strong and stable internet connection in order to stream World of Warcraft over the cloud, and fortunately I’m running a 500Mbps setup with an ethernet cable in the back of the Series X, which seems to work perfectly in this scenario. Some people are bound to struggle more on a slower connection though.

Apart from that, the only slight issue I’ve noticed is a need to adjust the UI scaling in the settings, but otherwise it’s working pretty much flawlessly. It’s still early days and I’ve only put a few hours into World of Warcraft on Xbox Series X so far, but considering it’s been so good, this might become a regular thing for me. I hope you can find use out of it too – keep in mind that you can try World of Warcraft for free, so it won’t cost you anything to test WoW on your Xbox console through GeForce Now. Give it a go, and let me know how you get on!