World of Warcraft might get procedural content

In a discussion with RockPaperShotgun, WoW’s Lead Content designer Cory Stockton talked about the issues with designing content for World of Warcraft and the potential solutions, chief among them procedural content.

 

“People just burn through our content so fast, if we could build enough content, we would. Procedural content is totally something we’ve talked about. The conversation of procedural and how it’d work in WoW is totally a topic that we’ve talked about.”

“I think a good way to look at it is as a supplement. There’s a lot of games that do many things very well, but I don’t think any game can touch our handcrafted content. Our dungeons and narrative, for example. I don’t think there’s remotely any comparison. So I don’t think we’d ever want to replace that and say, ‘Now we can have, like, 20 dungeons!’ But they’re all, like, random.”

“I think what we’d like to do is say we can still have our seven or eight dungeons, but then over here we’ve got some crazy procedural supplement. Maybe the dungeon is random, maybe the boss is randomized with different [abilities] – how ever we could do that. But I think that’d be a cool supplement to the handcrafted stuff. Because I think that’s what sets us apart.”

 

This discussion follows the announcement of World of Warcraft’s latest expansion, Warlords of Draenor, which will see a host of new features, of course, including new cities, new missions, new enemies and a new level-cap of 100.

And, any hope of World of Warcraft becoming a Free-To-Play title is baseless, at the moment.

 

“[Free-to-play] is not really an active discussion, to be honest,” admitted Stockton. “Number one, the subscription model, we’re still happy with the number of players we have. But number two, going free-to-play is a dramatic game design change. At that point, we have to decide what’s available and what’s not. At that point, there’s a lot of terrible examples of how that’s been done. Some are better than others, but you’re still compromising the design of the game to make the actual payment system of the game work. That’s the part that I think is most devastating to World of Warcraft.”