I decided to poke at TESO since it was free on epic and it's truly the most MMO thing in the world:
you get a giant setpiece intro mission where a lady is imprisoned and you're like damn.... I'll come back to rescue you.... someday..... after 40 or so levels of content.... and then you go to town and she's just standing there in a building like "it's nice to see you again, it's been so long since we went on ALL those adventures" and I'm like. oh. this is the 'season 2' main quest or something huh. And they just enabled it for everyone because players don't like the old stuff anymore. Amazing. Truly an incredible blender-ifying of what assumably at one point was a coherent linear narrative
godddd Guild Wars 2 has one of the funniest examples of this. for anyone who's never played it, essentially between expansions they do smaller "living story" releases, but season 1 of the living story in particular had some MAJOR growing pains as they were figuring out what worked and what didn't
essentially, season 1 left off after the end of the story of the base game, and the events of the living story would take place in like "real time", so already for players that haven't finished the game there's just weird NPCs in towns and weird events occuring outside, referring to things they haven't seen yet
if you didn't keep up with the quests as they were being released, tough luck, you'd be missing parts of the story
and in the end it culminated in the main race-neutral hub city being completely destroyed (and subsequently rebuilt over the course of season 2 or something iirc). like, for real, even outside any story quests, it was just a crater.
story missions in GW2 are instanced, so now when you go through the story missions of the base game that take place in that city, it just looks completely drastically unrecognizably different. god i can't imagine what it must feel like as a new player lol
there is no way to replay these quests, there's just like, an NPC that lets you read what happened in season 1, and then you jump straight into season 2 where everyone acts as if you, the player character, have witnessed those events in person
