[Braen]

First here is the link to the thread...

http://www.vanguardsagaofheroes.com/...495#post227495

Now for his tidbits (Brad-speak in bold):

1. We will try very hard to slow MUDflation by making the new items in expansions and such better in many ways but not that much better than older items -- we've made mistakes in the past by putting in much better items in expansions in order to make those expansions more attractive and doing this too much was a mistake, especially long term and in considering the overall health of the game.

2. We will have an expansion team AND a live team, the latter's repsonsibility to refresh the content of the 'old world'... this is something we didn't do nearly enough in EQ and are determined to do a much better job this time around. Plus, with a seamless world and lots of real estate, we can not only refresh/revamp existing areas in the 'old world' but also add new dungeons and others to the 'old world' quite easily with a patch.

Next someone asked about adding content to a seamless world compared to a zoned world:

You can do it with either zoned games or seamless games... with a zoned game, you just add a connection point to a new area and you can then transfer into the new zone.

The advantage of a seamless world is that every square foot of the world is actually there. If you could take a look at, say, an internal map of Thestra, the entire continent is there and then dividied into a grid. We focus on 'corridors of content' -- areas with the most points of interest, dungeons, etc., where we expect players to travel and frequent the most. Off the beaten path, however, instead of just running into a zone border, you can just keep going. This gives us the opportunity to, via patching, plop a castle down in an area that was previously just a field, or a dungeon entrance into the side of a mountain into which you can suddenly just walk (no zoning).

By making extremely large areas, more than we can at launch fill with detailed content, it leaves us plenty of room for the Live team to easily add new areas as opposed to in a zone based game finding some point to create a link to another zone. Both work fine, but the seamless world allows the addition of content in a more seamless manner

This also gives us plenty of room for people to place houses, start player run cities, and a whole lot of other ideas that we have but will have to wait for post-launch.

It is true that by adding new areas to parts of the world that are already there we will be affecting the area around where we place the new content. But I think that's a good thing -- it makes the world feel more dynamic. Where there was once, for example, just a relatively empty swamp patrolled by wandering monsters, after a patch a haven for undead could appear, which could then be tied into the lore and ongoing storyline.

Obviously, there was to be care involved and forethought -- you don't typically want to suddenly plop down, say, a level 40 fortress teaming with aggro mobs only a kilometer away from a newbie area, but barring this (which would just be bad design and planning) I think the seamless approach is a lot more immersive, dynamic, and exciting.

Then someone was concerned about expansions and itemization making the old world obsolete:

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree there -- I think a lot of items in Kunark and Velious were far superior to those found in the 'old world' which led to rapid obsolescence and a lot of areas previously heavily frequented relatively quickly abandoned in favor of the dungeons and other areas introduced in the latest expansion.

While one does want to introduce new items to entice players to explore the new areas found in the expansion, it should be done carefully and the 'old world' revamped preferably around the same time to keep the whole world, not just the new expansion territory, attractive and filled with players.