Star Wars Galaxies: Holocron on Originally Intended Forms of SWG Content

Responding to comments following Q-3PO's Conference Report (see news item below), Holocron (Raph Koster, SOE's Chief Creative Officer) shared the following (read the post in its entirety here):

SWG was intended to have the following classes of content:

- randomly placed brief encounters. These are equivalent to random encounters in D&D. They spawn a few mobs, maybe a lair, you kill it and move on. They're actually spawned pseudo-randomly, because they appear according to region, thus sorted into difficulty, creature types that fit the terrain, etc etc.
- strongholds. These are "persistent lairs." Sort of Gauntlet generators. They are supposed to be elaborate, small dungeon-sized things. They spawn on the map pseudo-randomly as well. You come across one, you tackle it but cannot defeat it in one session. It takes many days of many people whittling away at it to make it go away. They persist on the map until destroyed, which takes a major effort.
- dynamic points of interest. These small bits of content encompass quests, puzzles, all in the classic MMO vein, but intentionally designed to be consumed once and then removed from the area. Thus, they are also spawned pseudo-randomly. This is the class of events like "you're walking along when all of a sudden a spaceship crashes in front of you. A single survivor struggles out of the wreckage, and hands you a datadisk, saying that it's crucial that this make it to the Rebel headquarters! Then he expires in your arms, and you have a new mission." Each of these DPOIs is carefully handcrafted, of course.
- static spawns. These are traditional static spawns in places that merit them--SWG has a LOT of places that merit them. You always expect to see Jawas at the Jawa Mountain Fortress, and Tusken Raiders at Fort Tusken.
- theme parks. These are traditional classic quest structures, statically placed. The goal was to have intricate, emotionally rich narrative going on in these. Handcrafted puzzles, characters, and interrelationships. They are not hack n slash things though of course combat is involved.
dungeons. These are less intricate than theme parks, and centered around combat, but are no less carefully crafted for all that. There's still a degree of unlocking to do, and so on.

Obviously, these made it in to varying degrees, and the result is that we are paying attention to shoring up the weaker types over time with ongoing development.

What are the pros and cons of SWG's static and dynamic content? Go to this Warcry forum thread :)