As far as the game content goes, why have every player experience the same things? Why not have a game have an actual living history? Expansions wouldn't have to be released commercially. You could update the game via a patching system. You could make the game a digital download and pay to play for further development.

Suppose you spend a year and thousands of dollars making expansion pack 1. Your players beat it in a year. That becomes history. New and old players alike can only play the new expansion pack 2. There is no way for new players to experience expansion pack 1. You are just going to throw away all that content that costs time and money to make.

Furthermore, your new content needs to be rich enough to entertain new players. And you'll need to do this without help from old content, since they are "history" and cannot be accessed. New players are not going to buy your game so they can learn about all the history they didn't participate in. So, you'll have to fill each expansion with enough content to rival the initial release.

Isn't it much better to have initial release + expansion pack 1 + expansion pack 2's worth of content to great new players?

I'm currently fiddling around with a few other ideas that will allow new and old players to experience the world they influenced...

Usually, games need one of two things (ideally, both): Replayability, or On-going content.

There needs to be something for the player to do, either doing something new - reaching a new goal - aka, leveling / killing a new boss / etc.
Or redoing something they've done previously - aka creating an Alt / farming a boss for gear / etc

Having a non-static world where actions of the players makes a difference would be a wonderful thing but it limits content. There's a lot of single player games with deep storylines whereby your choices affect the world and the progression of the story. In singleplayer games they only have to deal with the actions of one person.

In WoW the first quests you get in the starting areas are "Kill x amount of somethings" (for humans it's Kill 10 Kobolds). The world was static so they didn't have to worry about the fact that there'd be hundreds of people set to the task. In a dynamic environment what would happen? The first 20 people come along before eventually the kobolds are driven back and the monastery is left in peace.

There's only a few core possibilities for a dynamic environment, which I will try and use the above example as an illustration of:

1: Your task leads to a defined outcome.
You kill kobolds in the area. Eventually all the kobolds are driven off. The area is safe.

2: Your task leads to a defined outcome. It struggles to return against that outcome.
You kill kobolds in the area. The kobolds get driven off. They fight to come back, you have to keep driving them off.

3: Your task leads to another task, which leads to another, which leads back to the first.
You rescue the area from kobolds. You rescue the next area from kobolds. You rescue another area from kobolds, eventually they "escape" to where they started.



Number 1 is the "bosses don't respawn" scenario. You kill a boss, everyone is safe, everyone is happy. But you run out of content. Either you will reach a point where people end up doing repetitive tasks in the same zone (like current MMOs) or you have to keep developing and releasing brand new content. Old content is lost.

Number 2 is "bosses work to respawn" scenario. You save an area, but eventually the bad guys return and you have to save the area again. This basically means it is like the current repetitive MMO, except quests have a cooldown period.

Number 3 is "bosses don't die" scenario. You chase the enemy into a new zone, then another zone, then another. Eventually you get back to where you started. Again, like the repetitive MMO of today, but quests are just quest 'loops.'

The first scenario is the truly idyllic dynamic world scenario. This is where what you do matters, and the world changes, and you can see how things will turn out in the end. The problem is what is there for new players, and what is there in the end-game. Will there be as much content in the new world as there was from the start? If not, then that is detrimental to newer players. But then presumably this new content isn't dynamic, it is just repetitive quests for players to complete endlessly. The only way to counteract this would be to continuously generate brand new content while knowing that it is going to become obsolete.

Number 2 and 3 are just different ways of reusing content whilst mimicking dynamic progression. But either you'll reach an equilibrium whereby the world is essentially static, or your actions don't really have any effect on the world.

Now, I'm sure there's different ways of rehashing this, but essentially it boils down to: either you're going to have to keep creating brand new content, or you're going to have to reuse content, or your players are going to finish your game and go play something else.

I'm currently fiddling around with a few other ideas that will allow new and old players to experience the world they influenced....

Brainstorming...

WoW did this with Wrath of the Lich King came out. What they choose to do is actually have a separate phase of the world for different people. Completing a set of quests brought you to a new phase of the zone. There were sometimes new buildings all the NPCs were in different places etc etc. The only drawback is that only people who are in the same phased stage as you are visible. This was pretty confusing when they first released it as sometimes you'd be grouped with a party member who was on a different set of quests as you and you couldn't see them. However, in the end I think it worked out pretty well.