wow-yearly-expansions
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Blizzard talks procedural and player-created content in WoW
In an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Lead Content Designer Cory Stockton spoke about the challenges of producing content fast enough to keep up with the rate at which players consume it. Aside from their desire to move up to yearly expansions, one of the things they have had discussions about is adding procedurally-generated content to the game. "People just burn through our content so fast, if we could build enough content, we would," Stockton said. "Procedural content is totally something we've talked about." However, he was quick to point out that randomized content would not replace any of their handcrafted content. Cory Stockton 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. source Having dungeons or scenarios change up slightly every time you enter them could certainly make re-running them a little more fun. You could speculate all day about what they could do with this -- alternate paths through a dungeon, dynamic events, randomized trash and bosses, environmental gameplay, and much more.
Blizzard wants yearly World of Warcraft expansions
Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, World of Warcraft's Lead Systems Designer, dropped a key hint into the inner workings of Blizzard's mindset concerning the future of WoW. In an interview with DigitalSpy published this morning, Ghostcrawler said: Ghostcrawler We really want to get to a cadence where we can release expansions more quickly. Once a year I think would be a good rate. I think the best thing we can do for new players is to keep coming out with regular content updates. source That's quite the interesting tidbit. Previously Blizzard has produced about one expansion every other year, and it seems that they want to double the rate. Ghostcrawler also reiterates in the article something that he's said before: patches don't bring back players, expansions do. This push for more expansions isn't completely surprising given a few facts:
