Why is making an MMO hard?

What does the first M stand for?

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.

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 ViperG Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game.

They're hard pretty much by definition.

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!

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.

Quote:

Original post by Antheus 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.

Precisely.

Quote:

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.

But...that kind of content creation pipeline is necessary for most any game. Perhaps MMOG implies a certain level of quality; few think about a 2D MMORPG, whereas you can still make money on excellent 2D single-player RPGs.

The real point is that no matter what your game development goal is, you have to break it down into achievable milestones. If you can't plan out a basic prototype that you can make in 1-2 months and then build upon, you'll never get anywhere. You don't *actually* need to build up all the infrastructure just to make a simple demo using free models where you can run around and kill things. Break it down into smaller bites and you might actually get something playable, even if you never reach your goal.

People tend to say that making a multiplayer massive online game is too difficult for a small indie team (1 or two programmers with 1 or two artists). I guess it really boils down to the type of game you want to make "massive". If you want to make an RPG with a massive online "feature" then yes it's going to take an enormous amount of work due to content (graphics/models,sounds,quests) to make it interesting enough for player. But not ALL massive online games are RPGs or need tons of content to be fun. I've played some massive online games where there are no quests, very few models (including avatars, weapons, land; at least when they started), and no more than 4 music tracks for the whole game, yet they became VERY successful in a short amount of time. As indies you have to design your game in a way that uses the fewest possible content while maintaining the fun element (In the future you can keep updating and adding features/content to the game).

Forgot to say that you can find here in gamedev a good example of someone using procedural content to create the game world thus making it possible to actually "finish" the game since the amount manual content needed for the game is realistic for a small indie team.

Quote:

Original post by drakostar 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.

Diablo 2 is very much a standard multiplayer hack-n-slash RPG. Nothing massive about it from waht I remember. Hellgate: London, from what I've read, is much the same. Guild Wars is the only "fuzzy" one. From what I've seen it's fairly massive in cities, but outside it because instanced (meaning your party of up to like 32 or whatever are the only players in your particular experience). But in cities I believe it still only supports about a hundred or so players. That is big, but is it massive? I'm not sure.

I'm guessing the network infrastructure for an MMOG is extremely challenging. Try connecting a few thousand (2,000-5,000) computers up and keep all that data synchronized and lag-free (or close to it). That's quite a task. For a multiplayer RPG holding about 16-32 people, this would be much less of an issue. For an even smaller multiplayer game of 4 people, I could see many people getting it done since, even if you do some things in an impractical or slow way, you only have four connections and the general speed of computers and the internet can make up for it. With a few hundred or thousand players, everything must be highly tuned and optimized.

I used to play GW a lot and I can say it's not in any way massive. The cities are small and far between. The explorable areas are instanced. The level cap is only 20. Runescape is honestly just as good, as long as you can get past the graphics. And Runescape was made by a very small team as I understand.

Quote:

Try connecting a few thousand (2,000-5,000) computers up and keep all that data synchronized and lag-free (or close to it)

It's only a handful (several to several dozen) of machines per server. These games aren't Google.

Quote:

I used to play GW a lot and I can say it's not in any way massive. The cities are small and far between. The explorable areas are instanced. The level cap is only 20.

Level cap has nothing to do with server scalability.

From the numbers they posted, IIRC, each of their processors runs 80-100 instances simultaneously, which is quite a feat for real-time combat (<250ms required response time).

bottom line is - if you ask why, you never made even a simple game.

I ask non-believers try to just make a match 3 game with triangles and boxes and then come back to the question. 90/100 will fail making the match 3 game, the rest will agree why its so hard.