Chris Cocks on Upcoming D&D Video Games and Other Wizards of the Coast Projects

Chris Cocks, the current president and CEO of Wizards of the Coast who was inspired to get into the gaming industry after playing Baldur’s Gate, spoke to Rolling Stone about his future plans for his company’s highly regarded properties. These plans involve expanding the juggernauts like Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, while also trying to get a bunch of smaller new projects off the ground.

For Dungeons & Dragons, a pen and paper roleplaying game that’s currently going through a renaissance of sorts with its 5th Edition, this means possible new TV and movie deals, additional web-based content, and some actual new D&D video games. Four or five of them are set to come out within a year or so, with half a dozen more planned for 2020. Exciting times, eh?

Check out some additional details:

Castles and Boats

While a life-long fan of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, Cocks came to Wizards of the Coast through video games. Before joining the company, he spent eight years with Microsoft working in product management and marketing with Xbox on franchises like Halo and Fable. Before that, he was at Leapfrog as vice president of educational games. But he says he got into the gaming business because of a beloved title that married Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with classic video game role-play. “I was inspired to get into the video game industry based on my girlfriend giving me Baldur’s Gate,” he says. The Bioware game tapped into his love of D&D, formed back when he was a 10-year-old, sitting around a table playing with friends.

He knew coming into Wizards of the Coast, that the company had a lot going for it, but wasn’t aware of what sort of problems he might be facing until shortly after he joined in April 2016. Cocks had an early one-on-one meeting with Aaron Forsythe, the current director of Magic R&D who came up through the company after joining it as a long-time fan of Magic and one-time pro-player. “He said, ‘Wizards of the Coast is really great at continuing games, but we’ve kind of lost our ability to create new games,’” Cocks says. “In the first couple of months, I really discovered that was true.”

So Cocks went about figuring out a new approach for the company as a whole, he landed on something he describes to Glixel as the Castles and Boats approach. “The castles are the big brands with large fan bases, high expectations, lots of history and lore. We spend a lot of resources on those,” he says. “The boat is more of a test. It’s very fast, very flexible. If a boat doesn’t succeed, that’s OK; you can launch a new one. D&D and Magic are both castles for us.” And a game like the upcoming Transformers title is a boat. “With the Transformers trading card game, we can be nimble,” he says.

The game hasn’t been formally announced yet, but Cocks says it’s a title aimed both at young teens and the collector and toy audience. It will come out in September or October. “We think Transformers are cool and the game has interesting, unique mechanics,” he says. “All cards are two-sided, over-sized and feel bigger, weightier in your hand.” Cocks says the game has a relatively light learning curve, but a lot of depth. “It should take one or two times to understand how to play,” he says.

The game, which has a unique rule set, is built around two decks. One of the decks is a hero deck and the other is a powers and abilities deck used to “amp up heroes.” The strategy around play, he says, is to choose the right hero with the right abilities and powers. They’re also considering making a digital version of the game, once it launches, depending on how it is received. “Transformers will be brand new to Wizards.”

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D&D

Dungeons & Dragons, the other castle at Wizards of the Coast, received its latest update – the Fifth Edition – about three and a half years ago after two years of large-scale beta testing. “It really helped us refine the rule set and open up the world of players,” Cocks says. “After three and a half years, we had our best sales in November. It sold out and we’ve been struggling to restock. It’s a great engine of play.”

Cocks’ personal history with D&D echoes the history of a lot of folks who are helping to fuel the game’s resurgence. He started playing when he was 10, in 1983, and recently returned to the game to play it with his son, who is now 10. “Everyone raised in the ‘70s or ‘80s when D&D was a cultural phenomenon, are rediscovering the game with Fifth Edition,” he says. Adding that those same early players also have in many ways taking over a lot of powerful, creative positions in Hollywood. “The sweet spot is 35 to 45,” he says. “They grew up playing D&D and were inspired to be storytellers by it.”

The resurgence is also being helped along by the popularity of tabletop, gameplay streams by folks like Wil Wheaton and others. “They create webisodes based on D&D campaigns,” Cocks says. “They create these dramatic arcs over the course of play. And we see millions of people consume this content. It shows that it’s fun to get a group together and go on this adventure and act silly as you socialize together.” For the first time, he adds, people asked about how they got into D&D, listed watching videos online as a bigger source than recommendations from friends.

And as with Magic, Wizards is starting to plumb the depths of the game’s rich lore and history. “We are looking at TV series or movie deals as well as more web-based content and actively pursuing a larger slate of video games for D&D,” Cocks says. “Right now we have a slate of four to five coming in 12 to 18 months and five or six set for 2020 and beyond across a variety of genres.” While that may sound like a lot, since 1987 there have already been more than 100 games based on the slew of D&D properties, he noted. “At its core, D&D has a couple things going for it: A rich lore and rich history and six or seven different worlds. That’s a rich vein to be able to tap into. Also, the history associated with it means that when you play D&D it feels very authentic because it’s a mature property and has had so many iterations of it. The secret to D&D is that really the rules are just guidelines.”

I do hope that at least some of these new games are actual RPGs with competent developers attached to them. And while a few years ago I would have expected nothing but mobile and action games here, the recent success of Divinity: Original Sin II and other isometric RPGs may have been just what we needed to get us some proper D&D games.