Mod Jack runs the lore and such, but it’s actually the executive producer who technically makes this sort of call. Which means, Mod Warden (who came from games with these long arch plotlines) is the key factor to making it the plan, and then Mod Jack for executing it
This isn't the case. In principle an EP could get involved at the level of the story that we tell and the way we deliver it, but in practice none of our EPs ever have. In general they have higher level responsibilities to deal with than this.
Is it not the EP's responsibility to determine how update planning and scheduling happens? They may not be directly involved in the story planning, but setting up the thematic update planning we've seen with EGW and now Legacy of Zamorak would seem to be the "big picture" stuff I'd assumed the EP decides (with input for you and other team leaders of course).
It does depend a lot on company and department. When I worked at Rockstar, the EP at the time (Leslie Benzies) was functionally the creative director and lead designer as well, which has good sides and bad sides. On RuneScape, which is a huge, complex, multi-faceted game with a lot going on beyond the content itself, the EP has to wear a lot of different hats and deal with a lot of different people, both above and below them. In the specific case being referenced here, of the EGWD and the way story plugs into it, none of that really involved Mod Warden at all.
The general strategy to plug story into all or at least most updates was mine, along with the more specific story elements of delivering the elder gods in the form of a god wars dungeon, splitting that dungeon into four updates, etc.
For sure, but I'd say it started before Archaeology. It was just gradual. I agree Archaeology was the tipping point though, the point where it was felt.
But take the EDs for example; Those are full of lore, are pretty much entirely PvM content from a gameplay perspective, and yet if you go back to Temple of Aminishi's release it predates Archaeology by almost 2 years.
Simultaneously, they're a distinct shift from when we got Araxxor for example. "There's a really big angry f**koff spider boi in a hole over there. That's it." It took years for Araxxor and Araxxi to be retroactively labeled Colossi, and we still don't really have any other information about them; There was going to be an Araxxor quest at some point but it got shelved/never made it into the "planned" phase in the first place.
The distinction with the strategy of the EDs as opposed to the EGWD is that the EDs follow the model of Mazcab - they set their own story and aesthetic, separate from the "main" story of RS (although there kind of wasn't one at the time, we were still in a holding pattern after Endgame). The EDs do a better job than most similar things by making a high degree of effort to integrate into the existing world (characters like Bryll, recurring stuff from Ports and the Arc, dragonkin, etc) and also by starting and finishing a story across a short series of updates rather than leaving it hanging.
The EGWD though works quite differently to this by being part of the main story, in terms of quests leading up to it and out from it - rather than a story separate from RS, EGWD "is" the story of RS during that period.
Funnily enough Archaeology was also intentionally developed not to plug into the main story. There's more to say about that in a future livestream or something, but the inclusion of Archaeology into the story is very much retroactive rather than planned.
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