Mmorpg

#21 Blending is almost a must, if you make something completely out in left field you break too many expectations for how the genre works.

so what I mean is, you make a RTS MMP lets say, and you come up with all brand new ways for how chat works, for how unit movement works, for how combat works, etc.

problem is your game is so foreign to everyone that you will have to educate people about even the simpliest concepts in your game.

the funny thing is the way a lot of these companies make it, is to do what someone else is doing but do it better., (ie DAOC is everquest done better, but they did add there own flair with realm vs realm, WoW, sorry but this is like a super polished EQ with some interesting twists, see a pattern here?)

doesnt mean you should do that, and if you really want to compete with those guys on a content, art, graphics, game play level it will cost you a ton of money, Ive worked on so many of these and paying even a small team for a few years costs mondo bucks.

if your setting your sites a little lower and trying to hit the several thousand subscriber market, thats is completely doable and on a really small budget. totally agree there.

yes you can make a fun small MMO game on a beer budget, but dont expect to be competing against EQ, DAOC, WoW anytime soon.(sure its remotely possible but highly unlikely).

The reason people suggest going with something small first is if youve never mad a game you have a tremendous amount to learn, if youve never worked on or made a MMO you have 10x more to learn then that. no different then programming, start out small, learn the basics, and the leverage what youve learned to kick it up a notch.

a MMO is not a good place to try and figure out how to make a game, you need the basics first then you can work on figuring out how to apply what youve learned to thousands of players simultaneously.

(5 servers to support 2500 players) good luck a MMO requires a lot more then just the game servers. plus getting 500 players on one server is no picnic unless they just stand around and dont do anything, and there are no monsters and no private areas and no combat etc and the machines are expensive.

MMO's require a respectable infrastructure, billing, customer support, patching, administration (noc),
development environment, test environment, production environment, QA, marketing, then within the "shard" itself you may have chat servers, guild server, database servers, session manager, loginserver, authentication servers, game server managers, depending on design players might not connect to the game server but through some proxy server so they dont have to connect/reconnect all the time. and on and on.

typical MMO's no have anywhere from 10 to 30 machines per shard not including a lot of the stuff I mentioned. shard costs range from 125,000 on up to a few million per shard(typically some more some less).

if your programmers are rocket scientist you might be able to get 2500 to 5000 per shard, maybe and thats only if the rest of your infrastructure rocks otherwise people cant log in, cant patch,
its laggy as hell etc.

oh yeah dont forget about all the t1's or larger youll probably need, credit card system or some type of payment/billing recurring billing system, etc.

if you could get a lot of expert people to work full time plus for free for 3 or 4 years you could make a competitive MMO. but that just doesnt happen.

just paying 20 people 50k a year is 1 million per year just in salary, and many get paid more then that, plus all the company infrastructure. so it does costs millions to make one at the professional level.

people dont seem to make them for free(at the indie level) because thats a long long time to work on something like that for free and teams have a tendency to fall apart as members get jobs that actually pay money now instead of the big maybe in the future.

k i had a point but it turned into a blog, ah well. ill stop here, Ive been doing this so long and worked on so many I should write a book lol.

#22 I used to play asherons call a month or so back , i think they had nine differnt worlds, i remember seeing over 500 players on the world i was in (basically what i was basing my assumtion on)

i think they would call somthing like that "client side "

ok so i maybe i dont know what the deal is, but from what iam reading im not the only one. then

#23 Well... the term "client side" is usually used when speaking of a certain aspect of gameplay. For instance, we're choosing not to have client-side payment info retention, because that would be far too susceptible to damage.

Anyway, moving on.

AC can support more than 500 players per world (often called a "shard" or a "server") because it's really more than one server, networked ("farmed") together. Basically, they split up the maps and distribute how much work each server has to do. The central city, which is very busy, might be all that one server can handle, whereas another server might be handling an hefty portion of the overworld.

Each shard requires a lot of servers to run.

So, anyway, like I've been saying all along... an MMO is feasible, and even without wads of cash to burn, as long as you understand what you're getting yourself into, and know how to get funding.

#24

Quote:Blending is almost a must, if you make something completely out in left field you break too many expectations for how the genre works.

Of course, at the same time (and I'm sure you'd agree, Martian), there's the need to spring new gameplay onto players without slow evolution from time to time. Occasionally, playing it safe is what drives your game into the ground.

Nothing can replace good, simple game mechanics, and I think the job of indies is to bring innovation into all the genres while keeping things as simple as possible. There's no use in us trying to make the next, prettier, EQ or Halo. But taking simple and fun concepts to the market(Think Tanks, etc), and bringing innovative new features to old concepts(Gish) is where our strength lies. The fact that we haven't yet done this to other genres should mean nothing to us but as a motivational factor.

From my POV, the persistent world market needs some major revamping, seeing as how every new game that comes out has so little innovation that it's a wonder that they bothered at all. Honestly, there's features that are just now coming out that have really been part of PW's forever, and just never leveraged, such as using emotes to affect gameplay(I heard a rumble about WoW having it, but I'm not sure about that, so it could be that none of the current games have that).

And what this all has to do with the server math that everyone is doing is that people keep wondering how they can make money with indie PW's. This is the answer: Innovation. You don't have to get as many subscribers as SWG or EQ, but you can easily get enough people to break even if your game is fun to play. It's been done before, just stop sweating the money and make the game. Once you have that, get a small business loan to get it launched, and then the real work begins...

#25 @Ted yup I agree with that. I think one of the points I was trying to make is not so much the amount of money you could spend (but dont have to), its the amount of time it will take, a PSW/MMO can take a lot more time and expertise then a regular game. So if you go that route your going to need a lot more commitment from your team.

Probably one of many reasons why we keep seeing the same old same old stuff in MMO's. Its such a technical challenge to get one working, no one has a real idea how to make one from a game design standpoint (no one has really nailed it yet imho), that you spend so much time just trying to get the basics up and running that you go with what has been shown to work.

so from a financial standpoint, if you can make one that takes 3 to 4 years, is basically the new EQ and gets you
a modest 100k to 200k subscribers whats the motivation to go in a different direction? You just made a me-too game that can net you 1 to 2 million a month? Plus dont foget the pressure to not spend 5 to 8 years making one
and making a super high risk brand new, never been done before MMO. the cost is usually too high.

You want to try something new and experiment with new game designs, new combat systems you dont need to spend many years and tons of money to figure that out, you could do a single player game to get a feel for the concepts.

MMO development teams dont like to experiment all that much, its such a big undertaking as it is, its so expensive, you generally cant take the risk to do something completely off to the left.

However, you as indie game developers, can and should take the risk, thats the best chance of getting your hand in the cookie jar. Big companies want big returns they dont pay for innovation, they pay for successful high subscription games (and we make them as low risk as possible so we dont spend 80mil on one and we go tried and true because we know it will get subs) Big companies do not want you to spend 10 of millions of there dollars on a chance they want a reasonable sure thing.

But you as the indie community should snub all that and go for it, wouldnt be surprised if in the future some of the ideas that are experimented by the indie MMO builders gets used in the mainstream MMO development (since they arent likely to come up with anything new).

Plus as indie MMO builder you can do very well with much fewer subscribers (part of the design for your MMO should be to figure out how to run it with minimal expense, minimul upkeep etc so you dont spend all your income on maintaining the game).

So I say go for it and try not to be another me-too MMO, we are already doing that enough for you :)

#26 @TheMartian: Nail on Head man. In SO many ways commercial MMOGs have stagnated beyond belief--they are still using design theories for game systems that were based off of late 70's-early 80's pen/paper games, yet the same basic combat, magic, levelling, and just general game play structures show up time and again.

If an Indy team is going to make a MMOG (as mine is), you may as well do things differently enough to completely move from the "me-too" category to the "whole new mindset" category.

Push the pack instead of being pulled along by it. You aren't going to go gold with 500,000 players in any case, so you may as well show the gaming community alternative play styles and see if you become the next "motorized automobile". It wasn't very successful the first several years either, but hey, anyone driving a carriage with a horse team lately to get to work?

#27 I found this site packed with food for thought. While it isn't the be all and end all, it's great to get you thinking about many issues involved in MMOG's.

#28 Seen this a million times... Infact it was pretty much identical to the first game I ever "designed" if you'd even call it that... It's bassically just saying "Ok, we'll make real life... only midevil" Its just a huge list of features that can never all be put in a game by a decent budget. Sorry to burst your bubble, but I just don't see it happening anytime soon (Trust me, I worked 4 years just trying to assemble a team, I had a team, but after realising what I wanted was impossible at this stage of life, they all dropped out, including even myself.) Try to start with something a bit more simple, like a puzzle game, and then work your way up, MMORPGs are the hardest games out there to make... Something that wouldn't require years and years to make so that you can get a bit more known, a bit more money, and a bit more fan support. Once again, I'm sorry to ruin any dreams you might have of this beautiful game (I agree it is beautiful, but what seems to good to be true usually is)

#29 I totally agree with you Sam, I have no aspiration to design/create an MMORPG whatsoever, I simply thought that it covers a lot of issues that anyone who is designing a game of this genre should be thinking about. I doubt that many of the subjects touched upon could be implemented in a fun manner, if at all, but it gives an idea of many issues to be thinking about, from the biggest to the smallest. The design on that page itself isn't that important, but the wide range of topics it covers is. Like I said, it was just to get developers who are leaning in that direction to really think the scale/multitude of tasks they are taking on.

While not looking to create an MMOG myself, I still found it very interesting, the impression that stuck out the most after reading it was just the sheer ammount of work that must be involved in actually implementing an MMORPG. Scary stuff :)

#30 Just remember that, once in a blue moon, indie MMOs (even MMORPGs) succeed. Gamedev.net has a very nice listing of "Teams That Can"- indie groups that have successfully produced functional games. At least 5 MMORPGs are listed.

Yes, it's difficult. Very difficult.

Yes, it's expensive. Very expensive.

Yes, it's possible. Very possible.

#31 We need a community Mini MMO game project.

Something like a Realm Wars but it has a "micro" fee. $3-5 bucks a month.

GG would collect most of the fee and in return we would spin out some kind of Torque MMO starter pack.

LVL 50 Space Orc?

(Yea ok back to reality it's too expensive to develop mmog's.)

It would have to be like this
TSE - MMOG Client
- New network code for client
- Middleware (management tools)
- RDBMS

#32

Quote:Something like a Realm Wars but it has a "micro" fee. $3-5 bucks a month.

What's wrong with working on Realm Wars? You forego the fee and get the basis for an MMO starter pack anyway. And it's already been under way for a very long time.

Quote:Yea ok back to reality it's too expensive to develop mmog's

No, it's not. You just have to be creative. Do you need the money for manpower? No, just a dedicated team. Do you need money for servers? Yes, and if you are or have a friend who does tech work, you can build those servers for a fraction of the cost to buy them. And you might even be able to negotiate a deal for bandwidth.

#33 You know, it doesn't take long for the naysayers to pop up on MMO threads, and they definitely have their place for the healthy discussion of this topic. There's a bit of perspective that people need to have when talking about this on both sides though...

1) Money: The bulk of the money comes from bandwidth when talking about hosting game servers. It's the same for everyone wanting to host a Battle.Net clone, and the only way around it is to charge for services. What people don't remember is that at least one MMO(forget if it was UO or EQ) started out in a rented house, including the game servers.

If you go along on a shoestring budget and then get a small business loan when your game is ready to launch for rent, servers, bandwitdh and a bit of marketing, then you should be able to break even(this is assuming your game is good). The cost of development really does scale just like other genres, you just have to find out how to make it do that.

2) Manpower: Everyone talks about how it takes so many people to make an MMO. There's two active people on my team right now, and the other four or five are tangled up in life issues. I still managed to get more done on my own in the past six months than in the previous 18, and it doesn't come down to how many people I'm throwing at the problem, but learning about the problems I have. I did the AI, mission generator, GUI, and combat timers all on my own. Today I should finish up looting functions(only because my Access database is bitching about multiple connections- otherwise it works).

Assume high-turnover rates. You'll have those whether you're doing a puzzle game, FPS, RTS, or an MMO. I've had better team retention on my persistent world project than on the RTS project I tried back in '01. What's that mean? Nothing, really. Just that people come and go, and you have to deal with it.

3) Gameplay: Innovation isn't always the key. I know I always talk about it, and I plan a lot of it- hell, I plan to evolve the gameplay after launch, which isn't something that other games do, but if something can be done better, it's better to give fair warning and change it than let it sit there and lose you customers.

In my mind, I don't design my story around my gameplay, I design my gameplay around my story. That means, that if I have a story about a haunted house, I don't say "how can the story fit the features I have in mind?", but rather "what features do I need to execute this story for the player?". That is the real mother of innovation. Instead of saying "I want an MMO with these features, now what story should I use...", I sat down and did what Tolkien did: Created maps, peoples, cultures, a back story, and then said "hmm, now how do you play in a world like this?".

It's a tall order, but that's why you need to be creative. It means not being married to features or gameplay, because when you finally test it, it may not be fun, so you have to change it. That's not the way big companies are used to doing it, because of the money they spend. What money do I spend? The cost of dsl to get my research info? That's worth it.


Continued...

#34 In short, people like to look at problems as insurmountable obstacles, and they fail because they've already failed in their minds. And that's the real secret to success with this. Here's a short list of things I needed to learn up to this point:

- AI, from rules-based to neural networks and Artificial Emotion theories.
- Maze algorithms, finite-state machines, procedural .map creation and rules-based systems for my "dunegeon generator", and I'm not done yet. It's already 80% of what Anarchy Online does, but I want 150% at a minimum.
- Torquescript. I had no idea how to do it until February, when all the coders I had relied on thus far had quit(one taking the copy of TGE I paid him to get). I'm doing 90% of my gameplay work in there.
- TGE coding. Still learning it on the fly, and have to keep at it if I want to get my DTS morphing solution implemented. I know how to do morphing, but I just need to put it in the right place and expose it to script for testing.
- Databases. The newest challenge is designing the database to be efficient, and it's not, so it needs to be redone. I may also need to move to MySQL in order to get the looting function to work.
- Business. Lot's of meetings with Small Business Administration people for advice, lot's of business research and document writing, not to mention the constant pitching and being shot down and/or having potential deals fall through.

Okay, so there's the short-list. None of that is easy, but it seems that the people who fail at making persistent worlds want exactly that: easy. People quail at having to research problems, and then blame the genre for their shortcomings, instead of rising to the challenge and not only getting something done, but growing as a developer as well.

And noone says that the persistent world has to be your main focus. Whatever happened to developing technology for it on the back burner while you work on other projects? And no, the advice of doing a puzzle game first doesn't count, because that's just saying to give up and wait for success to come by some other road, while I mean to take all roads at once.

#35 One comment I wanted to add to Ted's last post there, people also fail for another reason and I see this time and time again.

They come up with a design thats gonna have the best AI ever seen, the biggest maps every built, the most number of unique items ever created, the best combat system ever, etc etc etc.

Dont take on too much, if youve never built those systems before then your gonna burn yourself out trying to accomplish all that.

Instead, get the basics up and running first, get some basic ai, some basic maps, etc and then start trying out your game ideas, style of combat, put a few items in and get all the item management working, etc. Put in simple implementations of each system and then grow them over the course of the project.

Test your ideas, figure out which ones just are not realistic or technically feasible and come up with something else, dont get discouraged.

But trying to out do every game out there in every category is not realistic and will only stess out you and your team till it implodes.

In the end none of all the hype stuff matters, if you game looks decent and is fun to play it doesnt need all that other junk. Stay focused on the game basics and test test test as much as you can to keep an eye on the fun factor.

Technology wont make your game fun, and it wont get your subscribers, a fun challenging game will do that all for you. dont get too hung up on what other MMO's have done.

#36

Quote:They come up with a design thats gonna have the best AI ever seen, the biggest maps every built, the most number of unique items ever created, the best combat system ever, etc etc etc.

Actually, I'd say that when people say this, they're building the game for all the wrong reasons. It's not a competition to have the biggest maps or whatever, and though having the best AI is nice, it should be AI that gets you where you need to go. I think this gets covered under the other thing that The Martian said:

Quote:In the end none of all the hype stuff matters

Amen.