What Products are needed to make an MMO?

#1 Torque 3D is a good start for a client. What's more important is what you'll need for the server side - and that's way outside the scope of what any Torque product does. Torque can support a fairly large number of concurrent players (once upon a time it allowed up to 128 players) but that isn't really an MMO. You need some serious data services. You need to decide how you want your maps to work - I remember the original Guild Wars had a map system similar to EQ (map "zoning") and Torque is "mission" oriented so that is probably fine. You'd need tons of art assets, but if this is just a "proof of concept" thing then really just what comes with Torque is probably fine.

Winterleaf Entertainment is working on a product called OMNI that is designed to be a massively multiplayer game toolkit that works with Torque 3D.

This game uses Torque 3D as the client and seems to be pretty nifty.

I'd like to point out that any "massively multiplayer" game is a poor choice for a beginning project. They are designed for massive numbers of players and that means massive design tasks, massive data handling and massive amounts of skill and experience to pull off. I'm not saying "don't do it" but you should really stop and think before jumping in.

#2 Noted, maybe I should start with the basics lol
Thank you

#3 "massive" in MMO generally means a large IT effort including servers, load balancing of players into server zones, etc. If a game is mission based (like T3D) then the IT part is to make sure a particular server is not overloaded and move players to different servers. I don't know for sure, but I suspect a lot of these server systems are rented or require a large staff to support.

However, if you want to make an MO (multiplayer online) that is a good starting point. One place to check out that sort of thing is Prairie Games. They have this page. Check out the link for server architecture. It will give you an idea of why T3D is just a piece of a MO or MMO architecture.

#4 It's a kind of a vague and subjective term nowadays that applies to a lot of concepts. Originally, it meant a game that could support a massive amount of players (compared to the number of players in multiplayer games at the time) that could interact with each other. Even then, due to limitations, there were typically shards or servers grouping the players separately. There are several splits now stemming from the original concepts.

World of Warcraft
-Partitioned worlds (continents being separate instances) existing on separate servers
-Massive number of players partitioned into separate worlds
-Players can interact with other players on their server (or cross-realm/instances)
-Players can change/visit other servers or cross-realm)
-All players on a server could theoretically interact with all other players on the same server at the same time in the same place (hardware allowing, which current hardware does not)

It supports massive numbers of players, even though they are separated by servers, so long as large groups of those players can interact with each other at the same time (assuming the hardware could handle it). WoW falls into this category as do most other MMOs. Even though it was/is over 10m players worldwide, servers typically only hold a few thousand characters (ref: various census sites), with probably only a few hundred actual players at a time. Realistically they are partition even further - each continent is a separate instance blade/server (I have one sitting on my shelf from the charity auction), though there are no boundaries so all of those players could gather in one location with the above caveat about hardware. Wintergrasp (before instancing) was an example where even 128+ players could not be in the same area at the same time. In-game protests are against the rules because they also tend to bring servers down by overloading a specific server (such as the one hosting a particular capital where the protest is held).

EVE Online
-Single 'world', partitioned by system existing on a single cluster (server)
-Players can interact with any other player in the game
-All players in the game could theoretically interact with all other players in the game at the same time in the same place (hardware allowing, which current hardware probably does not)

All of the players can theoretically gather in one place (assuming the hardware could handle it) within the game at the same time. To my knowledge, only a few MMOs actually fall into this category with EVE Online being the poster child. Assuming the hardware could handle it, theoretically, every EVE Online player could go to the same place and interact with every other player in the game at the same time. Nothing else really even comes close to this, in this definition. From EVE's standpoint, one would think it is the definition of massively and everything else is just large multiplayer running multiple game instances.

Guild Wars 1 (and to some extent Tabula Rasa)
-Single world that is instanced in its entirety
--Guild Wars has public (cities) and private (everything else) instances
--Tabula Rasa's world was pretty much all public instances (similar to a single server Guild Wars 2, except that there would be multiple switchable instances of each public zone instead of an overload server)
-Any player in the game can/could interact with any other player in the game
-Instance caps limited how many players can interact with each other at one time

I don't know what the instance cap is for Guild Wars 2 or what the instance caps were for Tabula Rasa, but Guild Wars' largest instances vary for towns it varies by what type it is (up to 100), for PvE its 12 (Cantha elite dungeons) to a typical of 8, and PvP its 12 vs 12 at the largest. Tabula rasa was probably closer to a couple of hundred per instance at most, and it would bog down as in the finale event when they were all in one place.


OTHER
-well, there are many many other definitions out there

EDIT: I edited Guild Wars to say Guild Wars 1 because I realized after the fact it may be confused with Guild Wars 2, in the OPs question.

#5 The definitions also change with time.
From the viewpoint that many games until recently only support 8-16 players, then up to 64 players in a single instance, even 128 or 256 players together can seem pretty massive.

EVE Online is the most massive of the massively MMOs based upon the second definition, with nothing even close. It would probably be the most difficult in the category to reproduce because you not only have to deal with the data issues the other forms have to deal with, but you have to deal with cutting-edge tech that allows the players to all play together (such as slowing time when a system gets too big during battles). It is probably the leading edge of the genre - and no it's not my favorite so I'm no saying that out of bias.

World of Warcraft is probably the most commonly defined MMO nowadays. Even though it is sharded, partitioned, and semi-instanced (unlike Ultima Online which was still shareded but one world per server in the beginning that wasn't instanced or partitioned), it still has large numbers of players in those partitions compared to games of when it was released. Even a few hundred players playing together in one game nowadays is something.

Guild Wars being an MMO depends on who you talk to, but Tabula Rasa was considered an MMO by most. If you made Guild Wars into public instances with a hundred or two players per instance, they would be very similar so I grouped them together.

#6 From a game client perspective (the question related to Torque):

If your definition of MMO is restricted to EVE Online, then no - probably not even a chance unless you do a major re-write and know how to do it, which even most AAA developers don't know how to do. Just consider doing just a multiplayer game instead (4-64 players). There are very steep tech hardware hurdles that you would have to surpass to produce something like this kind of game and still keep it 'massively' and not crash any time too many people gather in one location.

For the WoW definition, then yes you can do it with Torque as the client (as has been done already). Don't get stuck on the 'millions' of players vs client issue because even WoW's client/server tech can baulk at anything over a hundred or two players in the same place - on the client it's the player's hardware that becomes an issue so mileage varies. It's also the reason mobs tend to stop chasing you or disappear entirely after crossing too far into another zone and why some mobs just pop into existence as you approach them. For both the server and client, this is why they changed Wintergrasp from a world pvp event to an instanced pvp event - neither could handle that many players.

For the third definition, then the answer would be definitely yes, the client is well suited for it, assuming you lean more towards Guild Wars and less towards Tabula Rasa, with the main difference here being the number of players supported in each instance. In these case, you are really just running a game instance that resets every time a new one is created (non persistent world), but with persistent character data.

#7 As for the back-end, that's where your work is cut out for you.

Data persistence (even if it's just player data) needs to be realized.

As far as networking, it really depends which direction you want to go. If we're talking the most common cases, take a look at Minions of Mirth and the kit at mmoworkshop. However, if you're talking about the Guild Wars case, assuming you treat it like a lobbied game with authoritative servers, then you mainly deal with the handoffs for new instances and optimize to conserve bandwidth costs on your side.

Lastly, content is what will probably take most of your time, and that's not any less true of a single player game or multiplayer game, assuming you have content and it's not randomly or player generated.

#8 I guess I forgot that you mentioned Guild Wars 2, in particular.

Guild Wars 2 is kind of a hybrid. All of its areas are instanced - public instances - like Tabula Rasa, EXCEPT there is only one instance of each area per server, if that makes sense. When you go from one area to another you are transferred to that area's instance. If the instance that exists on your server is full, you are instead transferred to an overflow instance until a spot opens up.

From a game client perspective, the biggest issue will be how many players are allowed in your instances at one time and whether you want more than one instance of an area per server. If you were to keep your instance caps low then you shouldn't have too much of a problem with it. However, keeping it lows means either more overflow servers/separation (gw2) or implementing multiple area instances per server that allows people to switch at will (tabula rasa). As an alternative, you could just go the GW1 route and make all non-town/non-pvp instances private.