WoW Shadowlands patch 9.0 Closed Alpha is now available on Blizzard’s test servers and with it comes controller mapping support to work through certain accessibility issues.

　　Invites for the closed Alpha started going out this week, and yesterday we reported on alleged gamepad support in the latest World of Warcraft expansion, as discovered through datamining.

　　Blizzard has now opened up the World of Warcraft test servers to test out Shadowlands for those invited to the closed alpha, and as revealed by community manager ‘Kaivax’ in a new development update, controller mapping support has indeed been added to the game.

　　The new feature adds mapping support for camera, keybinds and character turning on controllers such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller. On the official World of Warcraft forums, the community manager explained the use of controller mapping in the game.

　　That’s not exactly the intention here.

　　For a long time, we’ve seen a small number of players turn to 3rd party addons, such as Console Port 5, in order to work through certain accessibility issues.

　　We always want to make WoW more widely accessible, if possible, so in Shadowlands, we’re attempting to add some support for keybinds, camera, and turning a character on controllers such as the Xbox Adaptive Controller.

　　We’re glad that the community has felt empowered to make addons tailored to specific needs like this, and we’re going to continue to encourage that as best we can.

　　As it turns out, controller mapping has been added to make World of Warcraft more accessible and is meant to replicate what add-ons have already been doing to work through some accessibility issues.

　　The World of Warcraft Shadowlands Alpha is now live on the test servers. Blizzard has yet to announce the official release date for this year’s expansion.