EverQuest Online Adventures Interview
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For Worley, the most interesting part of the EQOA is the partnership that has developed between the players and developers.
"The players work pretty closely with the development team," he told us. "There is this kind of vested feeling."
This is, he says, made possible by their decision to concentrate on patches. The lead time is not as large and it enables the developers to more rapidly process and develop content that the players have asked for.
Nonetheless, the fact remains, that they are asking for an expansion pack. One reason for this is that SOE is handcuffed by the lack of internal memory on the Playstation 2. All of their patches must be server-side, which means that they're limited to gameplay elements, like quests. It is near impossible for them to release new art or areas, both of which would require either a new disk or a download.
"[The players] get more free content than we would put out in an expansion by far," Worley insisted. "If we move toward an expansion, that content would stop and it would probably stop from anywhere from 18 to 24 months."