In terms of planning, the reverse is true. In the early days, developers were left to dream up whatever stories they wanted, often without any real plan of how they would develop. There were some exceptions to this, of course, which tends to be seen in the longer quest series (Myreque, goblins, etc), but why there are also oddly disparate, unconnected, even supposedly contradictory narratives (e.g. Tower of Life).
It's led to the developers of today having to come up with creative ways to tie all of these disparate loose ends together in a way that is both narratively interesting, and without causing too much confusion, which also respect what has come before. It's not an easy task. Retcons of older lore have been one way to do this, though they aren't ideal - sometimes, though, they are the cleanest and quickest way of getting something to make any sort of sense. We try not to do that anymore, and have refined our approach and techniques over the years.
IMO, a single narrative designer would not be able to wrangle everything alone (though there would be some value in having one person on this full-time). Runescape is just too big (and long-running) for one person to keep it all in their head. Luckily, we have a group of devs (and QA and beyond) who care about maintaining the game's lore, all of whom have an extensive knowledge of the game's lore. Last year, we got a bit more organised and formed the Lore Council (before that we had something else, less organised) and we regular meet to discuss current and future lore development. The group collectively has a wide range of experience and disparate backgrounds, so contributions are from a range of perspectives.
We have and are establishing plot lines and character development ahead of time for years to come (and seeding them now, like in the early days, but with an actual plan this time around!), but it has to be left to individual projects to fill in the details as and when they go into active development. We have a discussion group for individual projects in which we discuss ideas and newly introduced lore, so nothing is written in a vacuum.
The issues raised here are primarily outside of a developer's control. Even a competent narrative designer wouldn't be able to do much in those situations. I think we'll always have a slight issue of different developers' voices coming through when writing dialogue for well-used characters, but that, I feel, is a small issue in the grand scheme of things.
09-Jan-2017 10:40:10
