I know that in Second Life areas of the world are built and organized/managed by players which presumably provides for much variability. The original Dungeons and Dragons and its manifestations in MUD’s had the same approach.
So how does it work in World of Warcraft? Does Blizzard have an army of level designers continually creating new areas? Or do they just use standardized landscape without uniquely defined “dungeons” and so forth?
I haven’t played in a few years, but when I did there wasn’t any user designed content, it was all done by Blizzard. Every few years they add expansions that add new areas. Some of the dungeons are “instances” so that every group of players sees their own “unique” dungeon, but the dungeon is unique only in that they don’t see any other players there, the layout and design is the same for every player-group.
Dunno how big a group of developers the need to do all the level building. I’d think once you’d build the engine its pretty easy to add more area, but in any case, they certainly have the money to hire an army of developers if thats whats necessary.
This is more suited to The Game Room than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Blizzard makes all of the content. I don’t know how big their army of level designers is, but they continually release new content. In addition to an expansion every few years, they add smaller bits of content in “content patches” every few months.
The current expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, launched with a whole new continent full of solo content, and about ten new 5-man dungeons, but recycled (i.e. retuned the difficulty for level 80 characters) an old raid (large group) dungeon for its first raid (“Tier 7”) to go along with a small (one boss) original raid. A few months after LK launched, a content patch added a new raid dungeon called Ulduar (“Tier 8”), which was then cutting-edge content. A few months after that, the Tier 9 raid was released along with a 5-player dungeon and a new quest hub for solo content. A couple months ago, they released the Tier 10 raid along with three 5-player dungeons. This is keeping most players busy, but they’ve got a new (small-ish) raid in the works. Somewhere in the midst of that they recycled another (small-ish) classic raid, but I don’t remember exactly when that was. There were also two pvp battlegrounds and several new pvp arena maps that made their debut during this expansion.
Meanwhile, they’re also working on the third expansion, which will overhaul the existing “old world” areas and open up a lot of currently inaccessible regions; it will hopefully be released later this year.
Whoa whoa! Does that mean flying in the old world? I thought Blizzard said they weren’t going to overhaul it like that because they’d rather work on new content.
It does. With the upcoming Cataclysm release, it will be new content in the “old world,” as there will be a huge upheaval and most areas that you’re familiar with will change dramatically. For instance, the canyon region of Thousand Needles will be flooded with water, and the Barrens will be split with a lava river and fortifications in places. So it’s not just fixing old areas to hide all of the spots that they never bothered to fill in properly, but a remake.
The Cataclysm announcement trailer sums up the new stuff they’re adding. I think it’s about time they retool the old world zones. They’ve gotten so much better at zone design since Vanilla.
I’m not certain exactly what comes first, and what follows from what, though I suspect it varies from area to area.
What they seem to do is decide upon several familiar areas from the games, books, and previous iterations of WoW and decide they’re going to make an area from there. For instance, Outland is a mish-mash of Warcraft II and III Draenor (primarily Hellfire Peninsula, also see Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley for areas in the same feel) and areas from the books (Nagrand, especially Oshu’gan). New areas are then created to fill in the gaps, or provide variety to players who already feel acquainted with the terrain and want something new. Zangarmarsh is one of these, Un’Goro and Sholazar Basin fill the gap in the other iterations.
From there known locations are placed, sometimes a little off of their “traditional” locations for gameplay purposes (for instance, I think that the Razorfen instances are technically where Mulgore is in WCIII, but I can’t recall).
After that, a lot of the lead designers have spoken at BlizzCon about their design principles. From what I can gather just by searching for text (which is hard), it really is a LOT of level designers pounding stuff out. They have some basic things, like “choice and tradeoff,” and balancing between solo and group play. They also say they want to keep things that are familiar even among the most innovative content. The biggest thing that most summaries of the speeches say they expound on though is prototype and iteration. One summary says that one of them mentioned that he loathes design documents because even if everybody writing the document thinks it will be great, the actual implementation could fail pretty epically.
This means that primarily, among the level designers pounding out a lot of content, most of the content is essentially just thrown together (to be crude, obviously there is a lot of care and logic to it; especially in the story arena), but most of the content is thrown in and removed, gutted, changes, and polished to a mirror shine.
Because, outside of the original development of the game (which took a long time), the process is primarily done through content patches are very sparse major overhauls (expansions), they have a lot of time for their level designers and testers to refine the hell out of it. That is the blessing of not having to release content on a steady schedule outside of “the player base is getting too restless,” and especially the blessing of releasing it in chunks.
So yeah, their level design is run mainly by a lot of level designers and testers working a lot of hours, though the difficulty it is mitigated by large gulfs of time before any given content is “due.”