Utilizing the earlier example I gave players would be pretty much able to jump into the storyline at any point as long as there are some ‘lore’ NPC’s around to talk about what happened in the past. In fact I think you could probably pick just about any point in the storyline above and easily envision as just being the more typical static quests that a zone would have. The difference is that in the case of the static quests the characters would be unable to participate in the back-story leading up to the current state and the current state would never move forward, leading to such storytelling abnormalities as a fiendish plot to poison the Qeynos food stores that is constantly thwarted (or worse, that constantly succeeds but with no visible effect) over and over again for years.

I don’t think the burden on art would be too heavy either, as long as it is properly done. Just like a television series a lot of material is reused from episode to episode. Using the above examples again the only asset that doesn’t currently exist in Everquest II would be the partially constructed war machines. You might also generate a little extra work for your environment artists since they have to build multiple versions of each settlement. Since the artists would know from the beginning what the plan is, however, it probably would not be too much additional work since they could simple lay out the original buildings of the settlement, then add the next set of buildings as the settlement grows.

Probably the largest work increase would be on the part of the quest designers who would have to generate new quests every week as the storyline advances. This might be slightly mitigated by the fact that when normally placing the quests for a zone the quest designers have to place enough content to last for weeks with people rushing through the content at whatever pace they choose. In the case of episodic content the quest designers would only need to provide enough quests to support the storyline until the next episode. People who rush through the storyline would fill the remaining time until the next episode with static quests or other activities.

I’m not saying that the concept is a simple one to pull off. It does involve a great deal more energy that the typical ‘release and move on’ method of content production. Story-lines would need to be blocked out in advanced with elements refined and scripted as their release date draws closer. The ’small’ amounts of extra energy that has to be expended does still add up increasing the overhead. Keeping things on schedule would be even more critical since slipping a release date would have a cascading effect and as mentioned above quests could not be pushed out to test servers four weeks before release to make sure everything is working properly.

However I’ve got a gut feeling that making something like this work could really pay off.

Thinking back, I also recall the “Fragments of Alderran” storyline event in SWG- they wanted to have episodes that lasted for a month, then led on to new content. I loved the idea, but I could see their problems: art and code for limited-time events is content for a small segment of your potential market… not necessarily efficient use of your time.

But, with the technology developed to support it, and a large art asset library to build from, perhaps everything’s in place for a more successful effort.