In 2004, Nihon Falcom began releasing new (box purchase) chapters in their annual Trails JRPG/3D visual novel series. Fans are never kept waiting more than one or two years to find out what happens next with their favorite characters, visit new cities and countries, find out which countries are going to go to war with each other, the payoff to a years long subplot (usually disappointing), etc. As of 2023, there are 13 entries in the series and still going. 2012 saw the relaunch of the subscription game Final Fantasy XIV that releases a new chapter in its ongoing 400+ hour long visual novel story every 4 to 5 months. 2014 saw the release of the mobile visual novel/RPG Granblue Fantasy that delivers new fully voice visual novel stories to read every 2 weeks. In 2020 the Chinese took that format and added a 3D component to it and released Genshin Impact, a 3D visual novel RPG that delivers new content every 40 days and each year releases a new city and surrounding area to explore. I think its story is a few hundred hours long too now. That spawned a new genre of imitator Chinese 3D RPGs like Honkai Star Rail or Wuthering Waves. And so on. What I am getting at here is that for long while, Asia has been making serialized RPGs with regular releases to maintain fan interest.
So why hasn't the West been doing the same? Mass Effect got three games over a five year period, and then that was it. The same deal with The Banner Saga trilogy. Warframe only managed to deliver 2 hours of story per year before the timetables became enormous after the Sacrifice. World of Warcraft and GW2 are the currently only ongoing serialized Western RPGs, with receiving a new update every 7 months, but does not have an emphasis on story like those Asian games. GW2 had more of an emphasis on story but unfortunately its development has been troubled since 2019 when layoffs hit the studio, veterans left, inexperience new people came in, content hasn't been as good or in as much quantity, etc. Seems to have entered managed decline (WoW arguably has too with less and less zones being made nowadays compared to 10-15 years ago). During the 2010s, Assassins' Creed was probably the most like Trails in that it reused the same battle system and code to release a new entry every 1 to 2 years, but it was a different cast and setting each time and no one cared about whatever overarching story there was. There seems to be nothing on the horizon here in the West.
Given Baldur's Gate 3's popularity, you'd think that people would gobble up a serialized version of that with new chapters coming out every few months (if as a live service game like FF14, GBF, or Genshin) or year (if like a box purchase series like Trails). But no one has jumped on that, is instead content to just make box release games with many years between entries, or if they're making live service games then it is gamey games like Fortnite where the updates give new maps to PvP on rather than new chapters of a story to go through.
