PC Zone has an interview with Bill Roper, senior producer of Blizzard Entertainment about Diablo 2. He was asked if they would consider making a persistant online world similar to Everquest. This is his answer: If you talk to anybody in the industry, you'll find that this is kind of the Holy Grail, making a game with a persistent world, where anyone can jump in at any point and then just jump out again when they've had enough. Doing this would definitely be a shift from what we've done in the past, because if you want to do it well, you have to maintain it, even after the product shifts. This is why it makes sense for people to pay a monthly fee for a game like EverQuest, because you have to maintain a team of 15-20 people who work on providing new content. It's the only way to make the experience worthwhile. It's a different model to what we've done before, and while this wouldn't necessarily scare us off, we'd have to sit down and have a look at how we could do it. You can check out the entire interview at this link.