Game Breaking changes

[lorcoft]

I have a question for the programmers in the community.

I'm currently studying game design in college; I got into a discussion today with one of my teachers who's a graphics programmer about changing the game world.

In a nutshell, I was told that the idea of expanding content in the game world of an MMO by writing new quests, changing NPC locations, dialogue etc is unthinkable in the industry because it's cheaper to design an entire expansion of new content than it would be to forward the story lines, change npc functions (say from merchant to quest NPC) and even a few world changes... changing the model for a building for example; because of the risk of causing a world crashing bug.

The impression I got, is that when a code freeze happens... even suggesting a change to that code is so unthinkable, you could be flogged and castrated. Even as an idea for an expansion. (Which is why WoW is so "ground beaking" by destroying the original game world for the next expansion)

I fully admit I haven't learned a lot in terms of programming yet, but I do know that here in the EQEMU folks have changed NPC's, created brand new NPC's, even the implementation of a BOT system.

If you wanted to, using just the tools created by the community, you could completely rewrite all of EQ's content. Keeping the same game world (the geography), but create objects like tents and barrels.. rewrite every piece of dialogue and even change the name of every zone and from what I've experienced you probably would not break the game.

I've seen completely custom worlds built in the emulator community. I do believe that it is possible that changing 1 NPC that has some bad code somewhere could cause problems to be patched... but is the game world really so fragile?

It seems to me, that not being willing to alter the original game world in an MMO when planning expansions is a wasted chance; I do recognize that players new to the game have to be taken into account... but seriously, is this of such a huge concern to programmers in the industry that it's a cardinal sin to think about it?