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I remember ages ago it was common to see the advice "don't try to create your own MMO" as they were one of the most complex game dev projects you could do. Are

I remember ages ago it was common to see the advice "don't try to create your own MMO" as they were one of the most complex game dev projects you could do. Are MMOs any easier to make now given the libraries and cloud services that exist today?

anonymousab 7y ago
As you suggest, there's much more legwork already done on both the technical and design fronts that people can leverage. But there's a wide difference between making a proof of concept and making something that scales+people want to play. The former is much more tractable these days, and the latter - ignoring the difficulty of competition - is a bit easier but still a hard problem. Content is somewhat easier to create, but still hard to scale (and quality demands are higher to match the improved general capabilities and expectations).
munificent 7y ago
It's easier to make a 2010-era MMO today than it was today. The problem is that "MMO" today now means a 2019-era MMO. Player expectations rise in sync with technology advances, faster even. So if you're targeting a AAA, tech-heavy genre like an MMO, it never gets easier.
- rodolphoarruda 7y ago
  I agree. I have a long time design of an MMO resting in my computer. It is a text-based game that runs presidential elections in a corrupt country in Latin America. There are 4 parties competing and the winner, of course, it the one whose candidate is finally elected. The biggest design problem it had was: how to implement massive voting, programmatic. So maybe today, the 2019-era as you mentioned, using AI somehow could be the solution.
  - srpinto 7y ago
    Would you be willing to share it? As a latin american this really interests me.
jokoon 7y ago
Realm of the mad god proved it's possible to make a miminalist MMO game The difficulty is building a MMO that is appealing and fun to play, so you have to think about multiplayer game design, which can involve a little bit of game theory, economics, reward systems... A mmo is not difficult to make by its strict definition, once you have a large open world, the spatial partitioning to manage network traffic, things work. What is hard is to populate such a large world with "life", activities, things to do, and especially rewards in a persistent world. MMO are amazingly interesting, world building is a vast subject, but building a quality MMO is also enormously expensive.
- moduspol 7y ago
  Honestly, this is the appeal (to me) of building a private World of Warcraft server. This way, the user-facing artsy stuff is mostly done. You just need the backend stuff, although admittedly some fun is removed since you have to work with the network protocols the pre-existing clients expect. You'd undoubtedly learn about how and why various aspects of the game were implemented the way they were. And yeah, there's already a project for private WoW servers, but if I ever get a few months off work, that's something I'd like to look into doing separately. Maybe after enough time, Blizzard would open source the clients so we can hack on those, too. Although WoW still brings in good money, so that'll probably be a while.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
They're definitely easier now. Msot of the "don't try to create your own MMO" advice comes from mid 2000s. People were amazed by the concept of games like World of Warcraft (and the $$ they brought), so they wanted to make their own WoW without being aware of how complex such games are. And this was in times before Unity and other game engines. It's easier to create a game like this. There are even MMO middlewares available. Still, when people say MMO, you can never tell whether they just mean a persistent online world, or literally a world that can fit thousands of players in it at the same time.

anonymousab 7y ago

As you suggest, there's much more legwork already done on both the technical and design fronts that people can leverage. But there's a wide difference between making a proof of concept and making something that scales+people want to play. The former is much more tractable these days, and the latter - ignoring the difficulty of competition - is a bit easier but still a hard problem. Content is somewhat easier to create, but still hard to scale (and quality demands are higher to match the improved general capabilities and expectations).

munificent 7y ago

It's easier to make a 2010-era MMO today than it was today. The problem is that "MMO" today now means a 2019-era MMO. Player expectations rise in sync with technology advances, faster even. So if you're targeting a AAA, tech-heavy genre like an MMO, it never gets easier.

rodolphoarruda 7y ago
I agree. I have a long time design of an MMO resting in my computer. It is a text-based game that runs presidential elections in a corrupt country in Latin America. There are 4 parties competing and the winner, of course, it the one whose candidate is finally elected. The biggest design problem it had was: how to implement massive voting, programmatic. So maybe today, the 2019-era as you mentioned, using AI somehow could be the solution.
- srpinto 7y ago
  Would you be willing to share it? As a latin american this really interests me.

jokoon 7y ago

Realm of the mad god proved it's possible to make a miminalist MMO game The difficulty is building a MMO that is appealing and fun to play, so you have to think about multiplayer game design, which can involve a little bit of game theory, economics, reward systems... A mmo is not difficult to make by its strict definition, once you have a large open world, the spatial partitioning to manage network traffic, things work. What is hard is to populate such a large world with "life", activities, things to do, and especially rewards in a persistent world. MMO are amazingly interesting, world building is a vast subject, but building a quality MMO is also enormously expensive.

moduspol 7y ago
Honestly, this is the appeal (to me) of building a private World of Warcraft server. This way, the user-facing artsy stuff is mostly done. You just need the backend stuff, although admittedly some fun is removed since you have to work with the network protocols the pre-existing clients expect. You'd undoubtedly learn about how and why various aspects of the game were implemented the way they were. And yeah, there's already a project for private WoW servers, but if I ever get a few months off work, that's something I'd like to look into doing separately. Maybe after enough time, Blizzard would open source the clients so we can hack on those, too. Although WoW still brings in good money, so that'll probably be a while.

skocznymroczny 7y ago

They're definitely easier now. Msot of the "don't try to create your own MMO" advice comes from mid 2000s. People were amazed by the concept of games like World of Warcraft (and the $$ they brought), so they wanted to make their own WoW without being aware of how complex such games are. And this was in times before Unity and other game engines. It's easier to create a game like this. There are even MMO middlewares available. Still, when people say MMO, you can never tell whether they just mean a persistent online world, or literally a world that can fit thousands of players in it at the same time.