Sunday, January 9, 2011

Why is so hard to develop a MMO?

I want to develop a MMO like World of Warcraft, but some basic research says that is going to take months (if not years) and cost a lot of money. I'd like to know why.

From game development matias.valdenegro

  • One reason that mmos are expensive and lengthy to create is the need to have great amounts of commercial quality content such as visuals and gameplay.

    From Fire

  • If you're going to independently develop an MMO, you will likely be using pre-existing libraries and API's and engines instead of creating your own from scratch, which is what takes a good deal of time for developers like Blizzard.

    However, it's unlikely that you are going to find your own custom-built MMO Engine online all ready for you to take and use yourself.

    It requires massive amounts of architecture and design. Have you ever tried programming a simple game? If you have, I doubt that you would be asking this question.

    Once you have that down, there is the question of art design. Artists cost money. And if you are going to do the art yourself, it'll take time. Lots of time. Imagine drawing everything in WoW from scratch -- every single item, character, every detail of the world. Art itself is what will take a large portion of the time.

    Of course, you don't need art. You can just release a wireframe game. But good luck getting people to play your game then.

    With Blizzard, especially, there is the fine-tuning of gameplay. Blizzard has to test and run through and explore every single possibility of their gameplay for months and months just to make sure that it's fair. That nobody can find some exploit and ruin the game for everybody else; that things are balanced and fun to play. And even with all that playtesting, things can still slip through. You can't possibly know how the player's full gaming experience will be, once they are interacting with thousands of other players, with just a few weeks of testing.

    In addition, it takes a lot of money to run a server that is powerful enough to host your MMO.

    From Justin L.

  • I would like to point you to an article by Shamus Young of Twenty Sided on the issue of server population in MMOs:

    http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=6185

    This is one reason. Other's are the overpopulation of MMOs(seriously, do you not see enough ads of MMOs already?) and the strain to provide a lag-free, scalar game that can be improved over and over again.

    The market is difficult, the management is difficult, the users are difficult lots of times and the profit is often lackluster (P2P or the usual market that uses real money for premium items a la Atlantica Online).

    From SoulBeaver

  • Even "simple" indie games take months for a small team to make. This goes into design, programming, art, audio, business, marketing, etc. With MMOs, the complexity is greater -- you need a rock-solid (ideally, exploit-proof) game client and server, plus a billing system, a back-end database that can handle a large number of players, etc. These take time to make, test, debug, and sometimes remake from scratch.

    The fact that games cost money to make comes mainly from the fact that people need to eat (and developers are people). Even with a team of three, you need a few thousand dollars a month for housing, food, and other necessities.

    From Andrew Brockert

  • The first problem is that the software itself is very complicated, particularly for a new or inexperienced game developer. You have to maintain (at the very least) a client and server application while providing more content than you would expect for a "regular" multiplayer or single-player game.

    Even on their own as a single player game, an RPG with the complexity of a World of Warcraft would take professional teams years to develop to the same level of polish: an enormous content investment, lots of work up front and afterward with balancing and playtesting, and some of the most complicated interactions of any game genre. These are commercial-level games, and while yours might be smaller, it will still require a lot of effort just to be a good game before you pour in the extra work to make it become a good multiplayer game.

    Networked game development is not trivial; there are large obstacles to overcome in not only latency, but cheat prevention, state management and load balancing. If you're not experienced with writing a networked game, this is going to be a difficult learning exercise.

    Building it shouldn't be your sole concern for manpower and money, either; also consider the costs of running it after it's developed. Even a small massively multiplayer online game will need constant improvements to its hardware/software to keep up with demand and staff to manage the game and provide support for your players.

    Think about the following:

    • Hosting - Where are you going to host the servers? How will you pay for the bandwidth? How will you load balance players between servers and keep a minority of players from monopolizing the resources of the game? You'll need people to keep an eye on the condition of your hardware and software hosting the game in order to make sure that it will continue to work well.
    • Technical support - Not just getting the game to run, but dealing with problems between players and handling player feedback in a way that will keep them loyal. If you're charging money (say, for a subscription), the billing system will be even more complicated (and most likely require legal assistance and possibly international representation and banking/processing fees). People who deal with these things need salaries.
    • Security - Not just of their game accounts, but you have to consider cheat prevention and doing frequent repairs and community maintenance effort whenever a new exploit is discovered by players.
    Lewisham : In regards to security, I spoke to an MMO developer who said "we assume all players are cheaters, so we do everything server side." This severely constrained them in CPU time, because they couldn't off-load virtually anything to client side. This is why MMO AI is so dreadful.
    TomWij : I made a question regarding the third alinea of your answer: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/249/how-to-write-a-network-game
    ojrac : Don't forget how incredibly expensive it would be to even gather enough users; an MMO without tens or hundreds of players in your level range isn't exactly multiplayer, so you have to get a lot of people before everyone decides your game is a ghost town.
    From ravuya

  • The cost is related most intensely to the labor required for developing assets. The cost of most tools pale in comparison to what it costs to pay people to use them and produce assets.

    Consider that the cost of one fulltime developer can be anywhere between 20k - 100k+. This already equates to very high budgets for normal games, but MMOs require significantly more assets to create. This longer development time means more cost paying the workers, and significantly higher overhead.

    That wouldn't really be all that bad though, but until recently, the 'wheel' so to speak wasn't readily available. So each group that has had to create a MMO has had to essentially create their own. Flying blind means alot of work that may be unnecessary gets created, and things that later on are discovered to be very necessary are overlooked.

    The process of wasting time on things that you don't need, and having to painfully go back and create things where you should have before (introducing further complexity in the form of bugs and whatever else) becomes very expensive.

    That's how it is for most big teams. But Indie/hobbiest teams also run into a few more issues. Usually the big one is not looking at it realistically. People have the tendency of looking at finished, (sometimes) polished work and dramatically underestimating the work that went into creating it. Indie teams usually fail because they do just that, they believe that reaching X level of status would be easy, even with all of their other potential commitments (as most Indies aren't fulltime).

    Eventually not being able to completely objectively look at the project discourages them, and they fall apart.

    From Noctrine

  • Lots of reasons:

    Supporting hundreds or thousands of players introduces a lot of problems. For the programmers, its essentially a giant N^2 problem. For example, imagine something as simple as updating a players position. In addition to dealing with internet latencies, once the position update reaches the server from the player's machine it now needs to be sent to all other player's machines. That's N number of messages being sent, for each player potentially 10 times a second.

    Content for an MMO needs to support all these players as well, and provide enough play experience so that players don't "beat the game" after only 40 hours.

    Server hardware to run an MMO as well as bandwidth costs are typically very expensive.

    TLDR: MMOs are big and complex.

    From dcarrigg

  • I asked myself the same question a long time ago. The best way to answer it is this: Design the simplest, dumbest MMO you can imagine. Say, each player is a little ball rolling around, doing absolutely nothing but watch other players. Use, no textures, just solid colors. No lighting, no combat, no interactions. Nothing. Simple, right? Now write it, complete it to the point where you can distribute it online and people can install it, play with it and report errors. See how that goes. This world is about 3 orders of magnitude simpler than WoW, so factor that in and you'll get your answer. Only with experience you will see what a giant time sink building games to completion is. Ask any good developer how long it took them to finish a prototype of their game that looked almost as what they imagined the final version would look like. Then ask them how long it took to finish the game.

    From Evil Engel

  • World of Warcraft has:

    • 5,500,000 – Lines of code
    • 1,500,000 – Art assets
    • 33,681 – Production tasks
    • 70,167 – Spells
    • 37,537 – NPCs (non-player characters)
    • 27 – Hours of music
    • 2600 – Quests in the original World of Warcraft
    • 2700+ - Additional quests in WoW: The Burning Crusade
    • 2350+ - Additional quests in WoW: Wrath of the Lich King
    • 7650+ - Quests total (how many have you finished?)
    • 4,449,680,399 – Achievements earned by players since their implementation (this figure is already a few days old, and therefore outdated)

    Patches:

    • 4.7– Petabytes (4700 terabytes) of data delivered to players through patches
    • 126 – Different versions issued of every patch, including those streamed to players and issued as self-extracting executables
    • Half – Of every patch’s size is audio

    Servers:

    • 13,250 – Server blades running WoW servers, with a total of
    • 75,000 – CPU cores, and
    • 112.5 – Terabytes of RAM

    Support:

    • 179,184 – Bugs tracked by Blizzard (most of which have been fixed, according to the presenters)
    • 2,056 – Game masters
    • 340 – Employees in the billing department
    • 2,584 – Total customer service employees

    International:

    • 10 – Languages into which WoW is translated

    Blizzard Online:

    • 12,000,000+ – Battle.net accounts
    • 900,000+ - Files on WorldofWarcraft.com

    Source: World of Warcraft by the Numbers by The Game Reviews

    Kevin Laity : +1 for finding a mathematical way to say "because it's MASSIVE"
    munificent : The number of assets is the most impressive one for me. Imagine you're at home cranking on your little game project and every time you write just *five* lines of code, you have to stop and completely author, export, test and complete some texture, sound, model, or animation.
    Jeff : I was going to say there are only around 4000 quests but I was wrong wowhead has a list of 8446 quests but these are not all accessible in the game. They also list 36406 items. Now wow is a huge game. Ever think of writing a mud?
    Klaim : That said, an mmo don't HAVE to be so massive. Wow is the more successful and big example, with EVE i guess.
    The Communist Duck : MMO - Massively Multiplayer Online. Everyone tries to make an 'MMORPG' or an 'MMOG', even though it's more of an 'MO'.
    Kornel Kisielewicz : I love this answer :D
    Klaim : The Communist Duck> Yeah, indies does Not-So-Massive-Multiplayer-Online-Games ...
    Chris S : 4000 quests, 3950 involve killing 10 creatures
    Olie : So, what then? You're saying it'll take OP at least a few months to duplicate that effort...? ;)
    From munificent

  • In addition to the technical and logistics reasons mentioned above there is another huge one:

    MMOs are designed to satisfy a large and diverse set of people. To get an MMO going you need to satisfy at least several of the types of players from the Bartle Test. So you're game is going to need to include some social features, some exploration features such as art, and probably some competition features.

    Much like the audience for an MMO, the creative team needed to build an MMO has to be very diverse. They have to include some really strong engineers to solve the technical issues above. You need some great artists to make a living, breathing world. You need some designers who can both crank out tons of content and make it engaging over long periods of time. You need a full QA and CSR architecture to deal with player feedback and the tons of bugs that will result. Very likely, all of these creators will be interested in the design direction of the project and will either like or dislike whatever direction is chosen. Put all that together and you need a creative team with the ability to drive that diverse collection of people towards a common goal.

    There's simply no way to make an MMO of any scale with an "indie" style team. As your team scales up various creative and personal issues tend to spiral out and the rigors of running a business can really get in the way of building a game. Even if you have all the components above it's very difficult to bring it all together to make a successful, launched MMO.

    Cyclops : Not saying you're wrong, but some companies *have* tried to succeed with only one player-type, such as *killers* in **Darkfall**, a pvp-only game.
    Ben Zeigler : Yeah, you can try that but it does limit your audience somewhat, making the financial constraints even more inhibiting. My comment is more about why a traditional MMO is hard to make, there are many hybrid styles that I think would be easier to develop
    From Ben Zeigler

  • The answers here are great but if you really want to build a MMO I would start small and build parts that you can. What is the end goal by the way. Is it to have a large MMO that is popular or have fun making the game you like to make.

    From Tone

  • It's not so much hard to develop an MMO, as to develop another World of Warcraft. If you're willing to settle for only having a few thousand players, you can make an MMO, such as:

    I'm not saying that it was easy to make those games :) But it can be done by a small number of (skilled, dedicated) people.

    Click Upvote : Runescape was made by 3 people, and IMO its a bit misleading to put it here because the original version of runescape was much smaller and crappier, the current runescape happened after they got a team of hundreds of people
    Cyclops : @Click, the Wiki entry only lists two people for the *game* creation, not the *company* they formed to market it, so that's what I posted. You're right that it was significantly improved, though, I'll edit that.
    coderanger : Not sure I would count Golemizer as much of anything, its rather terrible.
    coderanger : Ditto, KoL is a browser-based RPG with chat and some other limited player interactions, not reeeeeally what I would call an MMO (at least not when standing next to WoW and friends). On the other hand it is awesome and everyone should try it anyway!
    Cyclops : @coderanger, that actually illustrates my point - why does *every* MMO have to be compared to World of Warcraft? And KoL has gone from one person to eight full-time paid employees, which, by any *reasonable* standard, is a success.
    coderanger : I think the question is more about what defines a genre. "Western MMORPG" is a type of game that is fairly well defined in peoples' minds. To discuss if this is good or not (it isn't) is mostly beside the point. All categories have their gray areas, but you can't just slap a label on something and then complain that others don't share your thoughts on the matter (see also: abstract art). In time, a soupcan can become art, but it has to be the will of the public not of the creator. That said, why is it a problem to call it a browser-based RPG with chat?
    From Cyclops

  • The thing to remember is that an MMO is literally the most complicated piece of software one can make. Take every single problem that exists in software engineering, and you have it in an MMO.

    A) Every problem from a normal game.

    1) Resource streaming for an open world.

    2) Particle system running on 5 year old commodity hardware

    3) Physics system to handle projectiles (Even if it's not havok you still need something for the characters falling from the sky.)

    B) Every problem that a business app would have.

    4) High availability clusters

    5) Billing systems

    6) Massive databases

    7) Customer Support back end

    8) Call center support

    C) Every problem that 'internet companies' have

    9) Latency kills

    10) World wide datacenters mapping 1:1 and 1:many architecture pieces

    D) Some nice unique problems for MMOs only

    11) Cross server object replication

    12) More hackers targeting it than they would some banks.

    From Doug-W

  • Ugh. Did I miss an As-Seen-On-TV ad?
    Any game is a lot of work to make. Not just an MMO. Most console titles take somewhere from 18-30 months and from 30 to 200 people working on it, and that is generally with the basic infrastructure already in place (render engine, content framework, core libraries) and people with background in game development joining together years of experience.
    With an MMO you throw some extra ingredients in the mix, like scalability, networking, lots of playtesting, and (generally) even more content.
    Yeah, I'm fairly sure that if you'd try to do that by yourself you'd indeed need a couple of months....

    From Kaj

  • If you want to make a MMORPG like WoW, of course it will be long and hard, but the main reasons for that are the content making, the server/network knowledge required to set up a smooth game, and also a team and a good set of tools to maintain the whole game running with as few problem as possible.

    Programming a game like WoW is of course a complex work, but the most problematic challenge of such a game is to think about a good architecture for it, in terms of "which data is where, where events happens on which machine would it be a client or a server and what data can be omitted and what cannot" etc, and at the end, benchmark the system to see how a server can handle a certain quantity of players, and when it start to be "laggy".

    Technically speaking, WoW is a good product, but don't forget it is very much optimized in term of network and server load.

    Now if you want to make a MMORPG, you have to ask yourself if you would make a game as massive as WoW: it is impossible to make content as good as the one WoW features: it's coherent, artistically beautiful, and has not too many polygons.

    Personally I wouldn't think about making such good content: you have good artists or you don't have them. I think the bigger problem in a MMORPG like WoW is the bandwidth: 5000 players at the same time costs a lot of bandwidth, and I'm sure some day when the internet is a little faster, the server will be able to manage less traffic thanks to p2p protocols... but that's just an idea...

    From jokoon
Posted by Mu Cat at 12:24 AM

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