Why is making an MMO hard?
Author
Lately, people have been telling me making an MMO is harder then a console game...why is that?
Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game.
MMORPG
or you can have
MOG
MMOG
MORPG
MMOFPSG
MMORTSG
its never ending. and i suppose they are all Games so we can just take the g out anyways.
MO
MMO
MMOFPS
MMORP
MORP
anyways those kind of games are hard because there is a ton of work. you need massive amounts of content, for it to be interesting at least, and you need a server than can support a at least 500-1k people and make sure it never goes down ever.
Basicly, you take any console game, then add multiplayer, make is support thousands of people, add 200x guns, 200x items, 200x clothes/armor, and several classes and abilities and you have a mmorpg or mmo whatever. oh yeah make about 1,000 quests or missions, at a minimum. damn i keep forgetting. oh yeah and the land, you need several million square kilometers of terrain you can explore.
for example, iran is about 1.7m sq km. I think.. its over a mill all i remember.
and im pretty sure like WOW terrain is the same size or bigger than iran. virtually that is.
MMORPG
or you can have
MOG
MMOG
MORPG
MMOFPSG
MMORTSG
its never ending. and i suppose they are all Games so we can just take the g out anyways.
MO
MMO
MMOFPS
MMORP
MORP
anyways those kind of games are hard because there is a ton of work. you need massive amounts of content, for it to be interesting at least, and you need a server than can support a at least 500-1k people and make sure it never goes down ever.
Basicly, you take any console game, then add multiplayer, make is support thousands of people, add 200x guns, 200x items, 200x clothes/armor, and several classes and abilities and you have a mmorpg or mmo whatever. oh yeah make about 1,000 quests or missions, at a minimum. damn i keep forgetting. oh yeah and the land, you need several million square kilometers of terrain you can explore.
for example, iran is about 1.7m sq km. I think.. its over a mill all i remember.
and im pretty sure like WOW terrain is the same size or bigger than iran. virtually that is.
I guess you can say creating an MO isnt "really" hard for someone has networking experience, they can probably create an Multiplayer Online thing where little character people can walk around, and maybe pick up some coins or something. But all you are making is an Multiplayer online thing. You then have to think of and be able to add the Game part in there, add quests, things for the players to do and so much more to keep it interesting. Which that takes a lot, lot of work. Then the Massive part which is the nail in the coffin basically lol..
Quote:Original post by Swattkidd
I guess you can say creating an MO isnt "really" hard for someone has networking experience, they can probably create an Multiplayer Online thing where little character people can walk around, and maybe pick up some coins or something. But all you are making is an Multiplayer online thing. You then have to think of and be able to add the Game part in there, add quests, things for the players to do and so much more to keep it interesting. Which that takes a lot, lot of work. Then the Massive part which is the nail in the coffin basically lol..
To expound on what you said: it's not so hard to make, but it is very hard to make well.
Quote:Original post by ViperGThey're hard pretty much by definition.
Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game.
People often misunderstand the meaning of "Massive" in MMORPG's. The term 'massive' means a few things...
First, massive means that the infrastructure, networking, security, and general back-end scalability must be capable of supporting thousands of simultaneous players. This often requires predictive algorithms, load balancing, and creative resource management.
Second, massive means that the content available for the game - including quests, RvR or PvP combat, storyline, and other game mechanics must be significant enough to sustain players for a long enough period of time. This is sort of a catch-22 as well. The more content you have and the better the MMORPG, the more players you will have. The more players you have, the faster they consume all of the game's content and the quicker you'll need to come up with more.
Third, massive refers to the amount of art assets required by the game. Generally speaking, a MMORPG is just a really big RPG (minus the stuff already mentioned). However, any world large enough to be called "massive" is going to have either quite a bit of landscape, or randomly generated dungeons. They are also likely to have thousands of pieces of environment art such as tables, lamps, weapons, potions, chairs, staircases, shrubbery, bushes, etc...Additionally, there's probably 10's or 100's of thousands of textures to go along with those thousands of models. This requires either a good amount of manpower, or a very long period of time to accumulate.
And finally, massive refers to the amount of man-hours required to sustain such a game. If there are truly a massive number of players, experiencing the massive amount of content, and viewing and interacting with the massive amount of artwork, there's bound to be people with a massive number of gripes, moans, complaints, or requests for aid, all of which must be handled by QA or GM staff members or the game will not hold water for long, and all of the above will have been for nothing.
In general, I encourage people to start implementing their dream Multiplayer RPG. When it's completed, make it better, add more, build up the server's scalability and some day their little Multiplayer RPG may hold the rank of MMORPG.
Cheers!
First, massive means that the infrastructure, networking, security, and general back-end scalability must be capable of supporting thousands of simultaneous players. This often requires predictive algorithms, load balancing, and creative resource management.
Second, massive means that the content available for the game - including quests, RvR or PvP combat, storyline, and other game mechanics must be significant enough to sustain players for a long enough period of time. This is sort of a catch-22 as well. The more content you have and the better the MMORPG, the more players you will have. The more players you have, the faster they consume all of the game's content and the quicker you'll need to come up with more.
Third, massive refers to the amount of art assets required by the game. Generally speaking, a MMORPG is just a really big RPG (minus the stuff already mentioned). However, any world large enough to be called "massive" is going to have either quite a bit of landscape, or randomly generated dungeons. They are also likely to have thousands of pieces of environment art such as tables, lamps, weapons, potions, chairs, staircases, shrubbery, bushes, etc...Additionally, there's probably 10's or 100's of thousands of textures to go along with those thousands of models. This requires either a good amount of manpower, or a very long period of time to accumulate.
And finally, massive refers to the amount of man-hours required to sustain such a game. If there are truly a massive number of players, experiencing the massive amount of content, and viewing and interacting with the massive amount of artwork, there's bound to be people with a massive number of gripes, moans, complaints, or requests for aid, all of which must be handled by QA or GM staff members or the game will not hold water for long, and all of the above will have been for nothing.
In general, I encourage people to start implementing their dream Multiplayer RPG. When it's completed, make it better, add more, build up the server's scalability and some day their little Multiplayer RPG may hold the rank of MMORPG.
Cheers!
Quote:Original post by JWalsh
In general, I encourage people to start implementing their dream Multiplayer RPG.
That's an interesting little grey area. How does one categorize, say, Guild Wars? Hellgate: London? Diablo 2?
I'd submit that for the vast majority of people interested in making an MMOG, server infrastructure isn't really the issue. If you can create the equivalent of Guild Wars but only support four players and 5% of the content, you've already gone pretty damn far. Making a high-quality game is hard, period.
Quote:Original post by drakostar
I'd submit that for the vast majority of people interested in making an MMOG, server infrastructure isn't really the issue. If you can create the equivalent of Guild Wars but only support four players and 5% of the content, you've already gone pretty damn far. Making a high-quality game is hard, period.
The 5% is the trick.
Yes, making only 2 instead of 20 armor sets is easier. But the cost of each armor set is not linear. First 4 have only a few percent lower cost than all of next 50.
Each armor set will need models, animation, textures, all the various mappings, matching to skeleton, skeletal animation, database management, development pipeline, asset repository, ................, ..........................
And once you have that, making 4, 40 or 400 is almost free. But the upfront cost of making the first one is 2-4 years of development.
Now assume the same for every single other thing. Including text, tooltips, icons, window borders, and we haven't even gotten to the game part.
Infrastructure is what makes it hard. You cannot hack as you go along. The Massive is what implies huge amount of infrastructure before a single thing happens. Millions of dollars, and you have nothing to show.
Let's not forget to mention the programming involved in creating an MMO. Video games, even simple ones, can be somewhat complex.
Imagine a simple shooter along the lines of the original Doom. You have many systems that have to work together including AI, some simple physics, loading of game resources, graphics, sound and user interface to name a few. Each of these systems not only must work together but have many complexities of their own that the programmer has to deal with. All of this is pretty daunting for the novice game programmer but then you throw in multithreading (unless you want the user to wait every time more resources are loaded or have the physics choke every time the frame rate lowers) and now you're no longer just writing a game, you're getting into the true tedium of programming a complex system. Oh, but wait! I haven't even mentioned network programming yet! Ooh, that's gonna hurt.
That's just on a small scale (by today's standards). Once you get into programming an MMO, you have to write scalable and secure server software, resource and network management become exponentially more complex and, most important, the chances of making a project crippling mistake become exponentially greater.
Creating a simple game can be a lot of fun. You quickly get a feeling of accomplishment (which, in turn, drives you to want to create more games). So, start off small and work your way up, always using the experience from your previous projects. Remember, Blizzard may have created WoW but they started ~15 years ago with simple games and wrote many more after that before tackling WoW.
Imagine a simple shooter along the lines of the original Doom. You have many systems that have to work together including AI, some simple physics, loading of game resources, graphics, sound and user interface to name a few. Each of these systems not only must work together but have many complexities of their own that the programmer has to deal with. All of this is pretty daunting for the novice game programmer but then you throw in multithreading (unless you want the user to wait every time more resources are loaded or have the physics choke every time the frame rate lowers) and now you're no longer just writing a game, you're getting into the true tedium of programming a complex system. Oh, but wait! I haven't even mentioned network programming yet! Ooh, that's gonna hurt.
That's just on a small scale (by today's standards). Once you get into programming an MMO, you have to write scalable and secure server software, resource and network management become exponentially more complex and, most important, the chances of making a project crippling mistake become exponentially greater.
Creating a simple game can be a lot of fun. You quickly get a feeling of accomplishment (which, in turn, drives you to want to create more games). So, start off small and work your way up, always using the experience from your previous projects. Remember, Blizzard may have created WoW but they started ~15 years ago with simple games and wrote many more after that before tackling WoW.
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