Quote Originally Posted by MikkoAkure View Post
Considering that there's only 1 single source suggesting that and everything else in the game contradicts those couple of lines, I'm going to have to disagree here.

Koji Fox himself said that the game takes place in a Simpsons-style time bubble where it's always the same year and everyone is always the same age.

People might get upset with that and say that there's no way all of it can happen in just 1 year or point out moments when someone mentions something happening 3 months or 1 year ago, but this is just the nature of an MMO. The game is constantly getting new players and more content loaded on top and to keep everything consistent for the writers and preventing the need to age up child characters all over the game including the twins, it's just always 1577 6AE/1 7AE.
And for some clarification on this, it's not quite literally 'the entire game takes place within the same year', it's more 'they write loosely as if no specific time passes'. Outside of in-game events which are their own weird thing, they just write it with no explicit statement of the passage of time. It's more or less up to you how to read that, if you think the events of the MSQ take place in one really wild week or if there's significant gaps between expansions or whatever, but the developers just never state timeframes or milestones. I'd compare it less to the Simpsons, which has to grapple with background technology and celebrity figures changing, and more to Futurama which has no such problems, and can just go 'all this happens and Fry's still nebulously late 20s' with nothing really standing too weird about that.

In contrast, Elder Scrolls Online made the... interesting choice to explicitly set the entire game and all of its ten years of content within one specific year, 2E 582. Evidently, a very eventful year.