f13.net

With the recent demise of Wish and a glut of MMOGs out there with only a few actually worth playing(IMHO--EQ2,SWG:JtL, UO,WoW) I know we as a gaming community have said more than once to ourselves "What the hell is this in here for?" or "I wish they had chosen to do xxx over xxx" or "Why can't I be a 200ft tall dwarf?"

So why not be creative and go out on a limb? Why not attempt to come up with the ideal F13 MMOG design/production plan? There certainly must be enough collective gaming experience and technical know-how to give it a decent shot. There will be a fair number topics we'll have to tackle but I think if we take em in order we should be able to come up with something at least midly feasible. Who knows it might end up even being pitched!

The discussion structure for this topic will probably be leaving each step of the design plan open for 2-3 days then moving onto another step after reaching a reasonable consenus.

Allright with all that out of the way I think one of the key factors about keeping gamers playing a MMOG is a decent underlying evolvable plot.  We've all played our share of MMOGs (and regular games with good plots), so what were some parts of the plot line that kept us coming back to the game?

I take it that you'll be the one providing the $50 million operating budget?

EDIT: Please be to reading the Game Development Thread.

And the code monkies!

Delicious delicious monkies.



LordDax, your progressive construction way of thought scares me.

Sweet creeping jesus, I'm tempted to delete this thread.

This won't end well.

Not too fast... the new guys need a warm welcome.

You know what would totally make a new game like that?

Celebrity Endorsements.

Imagine playing a game where you might have a chance of having a chance of being on the same server as Jennifer Garner.

Oh man, that would be stellar.

As funny as that was, and it was funny, get a new shtick. Thanks.

Sorry, I'm procrastinating in my search for inspirado.

Actually, believe it or not, this is an attempt by our start-up DreamSquad studio to come up with a decent design plan to pitch to our investors. We were hoping that a thread like this could come up with a better plan than a team of 25 guys(and 2 girls) sitting around in a room doing it by ourselves.  But like all game studio start-ups we could be part of that 80% that flop, so there may or may not be a point to this anyway.

However with recent commentws,  I think it might be easier to get our ideas critiqued, commented and castrated by the f13 community. So why not start with the overlying topic

Would the market/general public even be interested in a new MMGO? If so, would a modern day fantasy style one(ie swords and sorcery + technology) have an mass market appeal or would it be a niche title?

Do you have any ideas at all?

It would be easier for us to critique, comment, and castrate your ideas if you could lay out what you have.

Easier than asking us broad questions.

And yes, modern day fantasy (magic + tech) always has a good appeal.

LordDax,

While quite noble, you're soliciting commentary from a community of jaded gamers.  The sad truth is that most of the people here are intelligent, mature, and insightful making them atypical targets for a profitable new MMOG.  While there have been many good ideas generated in these forums, it seems unlikely they could ever be pitched as the basis for a new mmog.  The game ideas found here could only be considered for a niche market and therefore difficult to find backing for.  

If you want good ideas for a profitable game that the general mouth-breathing computer gaming public will buy, start with WoW and go from there.  Smooth-running cartoonish graphics + dumbed-down console-style gameplay + brand recognition = PROFIT!  Sadly this seems the current formula for MMOG success.

EDIT: I forgot a treadmill and the *DING* sound... gotta have those.

Hush, you jaded people.  Don't discourage him.  Maybe he can code the Bat Country MUD.  If he does a good job, we can take up a collection and start him on his way to Raphdom.

You make a good point Nebu. And most of the majority of our staff, wants to actually create a game for the jaded ones(even though I keep warning them of profits..). In response to MrHat, we do have one idea that everything seems to hinge upon.

After some brainstorming in recent months we want to see if it would be possible to create a game with a, what we are calling, "overlord" system to keep gamers playing. Our working idea of the system is that in the initial stages of gameplay, players must survive the dragkons(more on them later, but think of them as the mystical missing link),  returning to "Earth" and retaking their place as "demigods".  After a period of initial ruling the dragkon's begin warring amongst each other attempting to wrest control of the entire planet. This opens up the overlord system. A player can attempt to become overlord of the entire world by fighting/negotating his way to the top. The overlord gets a large amount of power over other aspects of the game (international relations, taxations, global contests, holy wars, just some of the things we are thinking about.) Another player can attempt to become his dragkon's overlord by deposing the old overlord or inheriting it. And like with all overlords, there will always be an underground resistance....

Can you castrate that one MrHat?

Take UO, change the names of stuff so you don't get sued, and remake it with 3d shiny.

You mean do what Wish was attempting to do? Yeah, that'll work.

If you could make a game that was fun without being repetitive, where skill was a greater factor than time played, and that rewarded complex problem solving...

Ok, who am I kidding? I'd still probably find a way to bash it.  I do like what you have to say... you don't work for Alienware, do you?



I think you'll have to come up with more detail on game mechanics before you'll get any useful commentary.  Storyline is easy, implementation is hard.

What? You mean you didn't see my antenna? Nebu makes the point of skill VS time.  Do you guys know of any game that attempts to address this problem so we can take a look at it? If not, then what type of skill? The option that I can see is the type of skill required of an RTS, so maybe intergrate a large scale battle system for countries going to war? Someting along the lines each soldier would be a player of that country who has chosen to take part in the event ? Or if there is not enough playerbase perhaps each participating player is in command of an AI regiment, their superior officer in charge of them, etc etc. Anyone think this would be an aspect of gameplay that would pass intergration into the game and make the game more robust and invovling for the jaded set?

Mixing a classic first person mmorpg with "something else" may sound good, but a) that's a pretty steep curve to do for a first title (i.e designing 2 good interfaces and game systems), and b) they are plenty of good examples of seperate titles (if people want to play a good RTS, why would they be in your game to begin with?).

The rule of the day seems to be, make it fun from the get go, which pretty well means focusing your efforts on just a few game systems and doing them really well.  Try to throw in everything and the kitchen sink and you're dead.

So, what are you're teams strengths and backgrounds?  Play to your strengths rather than try to reinvent the wheel.

In terms of skills vs time, consider a model of gameplay more similar to MtG or what GW is trying: you can learn/buy/find a huge number of skills/powers/items but can only use a few of them in any given adventure session.  People with more time will be able to gain a larger number of skills to choose from, but since the system has built in limitations it would not dilute player skills.  But be aware this approach would be much harder to balance, so you must also be resolved to tweak. adjust/nerf without regards to whining.  Just whatever you do, please, no more "auto-attack and make a sandwich" styles of combat.

And no goats.

So make with the details so we can poke more holes please.

Xilren

1) Ban the concept of exp from your dev team.

2) Using a skill-based system, let people "max" a character in 50-60 hours.

3) Lots of skills but not infinite mix-and-match.

4) Everyone starts with 100hps and it never goes up. Ok maybe 20-25pts with the right skills.

5) Animals are for eating, not fighting.  

6) Monsters should be able to horde and conquer NPC towns with mechanics for the players to fight back the horde/re-take the town.

7) No mezz/paralyze/stun/root spells.

8) Tank mages suck.

9) When working in a group, bonus to skills - either faster skill gain or bonus tohit/dmg/etc.

This (http://www.themis-group.com/reports.phtml) may be more up your alley if you move past looking for free consulting. :p (and have money to burn)

*hides*

Allright time to tackle your comments. I'll start with Xilren. We aren't really talking about true RTS persay, because you are absolutely right. Why would someone buy our game if they can find a more engaging RTS from an establish game house? We are thinking more of the RTS battle strutcture, different player types, player skill sets, chains of command, and tactics. If we don't end up sacraficing our ideas for feasiblilty and intergration, we would love to see an army/battalion of players vs another army/battalion of players , with the "officer" players actually drawing up battle plans and co-ordinating attacks in realtime with all their subordinates.  

One of our members has really gotten into the GW scene and has been talking about not following a strictly lv based system but more of a skill tree. For instance, your army could be great at a certain point in time because one of your "officers" has risen through the ranks and gained a few leadership skills that give benefits to the group he commands. We've also tossed around the idea of actually having to recruit players to join your army which could help with the economic system. Recrutiment could be done through a number of means, we've discussed standard salaries and also "fame&infamy". Fame and Infamy can be used in a number of ways which we are currently discussing but include help reducing salaries because of inspired soldiers who gain additonal benefits from being in a "Famed" unit, giving access to certain events(state balls, international confreneces, etc)

Quite a number of our members have very specialized fields when we decided to form a company in our attempt to create a game. We have human/computer interfacing specialists, graphics designers (3d animation), cinematics, and a few other specialized areas. Our knowledge of languages and systems spans a We haven't decided on what coding process we are going to use, because we want to finish our design plan first and then find the best way to get it off paper.

Shiznits-thanks alot of the list. I'll make sure it show up on our round table. Im actually quite intrigued by number 6. Anyone else care to comment on monsters being "active participants" in the game? In going along with our "war" system I think players taking player towns might be an interesting concept as well.

Azharn-We've looked into market research companies.  We are in talks with local university professors and grad students to do some of our research, as we are located in a large academic area.

Any comments on the system I described at the top?

Only comment I have is that the RTS Commander down to player level is being done already--we're just not talking about it much at the moment!

1. "Chains of commands" smacks of macros.  This leads to unattended/uninteresting gameplay.  If I don't have a means to think on the fly, I become a spectator.  

2. If there is a role of general, more will wish to fill that role than are equipped or are needed.  

3. Tactics.  Yes, please!



Once an army defeats its opponents, they will grow to a size and economic stature that will be discouraging to opposing players.  Meanwhile, many will flock to this large army for their share of the glory/cash.  What incentive will their be to the underdogs? See post release Shadowbane for some other examples where idealogy and implementation met head on.



Wish attempted this.  The difficulty in implementation lies along a number of fronts.  If you can do it, great!  Seems like it would take some effort to do right.
 
a) The assaults need to feel organic and feel like a threat.  NPC's become very easy targets once their AI has been overcome.  The first invasion would be fun, latter invasions would seem more of a nuisance.

b) You now introduce a need for mob AI.  This will require time and resources.  

c) Timing of said raids to accomodate players in a number of time zones and be scaled to server populations during those times. (i.e. more work/resources).

Hope that helps.

Why codify this?  People will naturally self-assemble. Witness clans in FPS games even though the genre is individualistic to the extreme by design.  Also, codification would constrain the fame/infamy duality to some artificially cartoonish definition.  You'll always get players that wanna be "bad guys" but the dynamic is so much more interesting when fame and infamy are diametrically opposed on the other side.

To make the social aspects of the game even more interesting, encourage intrigue and infighting by making it easy for players to communicate anonymously off-game.  Maybe provide email accounts on your server that cannot be traced to the player account.  This will exploit another human tendency, fractiousness, and hopefully combat the problem of the over-powerful group.  Other MMOGs suffer because it's so easy to communicate on the Internet.  Yours will depend on it.  This approach also jives well with the programmer's credo of maximum laziness.  Code as little as possible into your game.

However, I don't have a concrete example to counter Nebu's. The only other thought I can only offer that if a single army can dominate the whole world, perhaps the world is too small.

Domination is easy to avoid if territory/asset maintenance gets exponentially more expensive.  The model breaks horribly when victory makes it easier to acquire resources (and thus more victories).

Offer enough money and we will spit ideas faster than you can record them.  Otherwise, either sift through the mountain of marketing and development information contained on this site, for youselves, or STFU and go away.

Yup.

Also, if you want realtime on-the-fly commands, add a voice chat client.  Either between officers.  Or have it as one of the skills, the greater the skill the greater the distance or some shit.

Planetside shows how this can breakdown. Any jerk can grind their way to CR5 (highest command level) and then start spamming the command channels. The problem is how does a game systematically limit progress fairly? How are bad commanders removed without losing that player?

I think you need to have a one-eyed alien dispense careers when you log on. You are a general. You are a pizza delivery boy.

Having just read Snow Crash, I'll take it!

LordDax, is your idea PvP, PvE or a mixture of both?

I can. First loosing sucks, with this system you will have majority of your player base as losers most of the time since overlord and his guild will get advantage over everyone.

Second once you get Uber guild to the top, probably composed from beta test guilds, they will put rules in place that will make it harder to defeat them. So one you are looser you will stay loser.

Safety in numbers – once you get one guild with overlord to rule most players will join them as opposed to fight and more then likely to be repeatedly crushed by them. Overlord will allow plenty to join to further secure top position leading to more disadvantages to any and all possible opponents.


Few things you fail to see and it is clear in your designs.

1)   It should be easy to recover from loss
2)   Loosing is bad enough – there is no need for additional punishment


So let me rewrite your idea into something workable.

Everyone starts as ether dragonkin or human.

Dragonkin are more powerful to start with than humans but become less powerful by fighting – so more you kill or fight less powerful you become with power only regenerating slowly with time.

Humans start as a weak race that accumulates power by fighting but looses it with time.

Dragonkin can fight each other, humans can’t.

Game has skills that you can improve by ether training or fighting. Some skills can be gained only through fighting some only through training.

Character power dependent on your skills and your items - items gained through crafting and skills gained through training and fighting.

Award the winner with shiney/fame and at the same time penalize the power of the winner. Keep awarding the losers with power until one of the losers becomes the winner. Repeat.

I wanted to let you all know that we have been hanging on your suggestions at your round tables. Alot of stuff you guys have said usually gets the initial response of "Damn. Why didn't I think of that?" or "Yeah! Exactly!"

Recently we have been taking a look at the overlord system since, thanks to help from the f13 community, in its current state, does indeed perpetuate a solid state/caste of winners and losers. We've started to come up with a few ways to combat this. The one we are to discuss today is reworking the storyline so that each dragkon has a set lifespan/power limit. Think of it something like the chinese calendar with "Year of the XXX".

 In the beginning of the power cycle, the dragkon starts out weak but gains power  as his period reaches its halfway peak point, this in turn empowers his acolyotes. But due to the division of energy between fighting the celestial battle and ruling the "earthly" realm, their power begins to fade after xxx period of time. The flow of the mystic life blood of reality begins to seap into another dragkon empowering them and affecting their alcoyltes, leeching it from the previous dragkon and their followers.

 The previous dragkon would not be able to attempt to wrestle for power for a time due to their hibernation to regain some of their power.  The hibernating dragkon's acolyotes could attempt to hold onto their authority, but with their new opponents now having their abilities enchanced by the lifeblood of their empowered dragkon, it would be an extreme effort.  

What do you guys think? Is it feasible to continue down this line of thought?

Hah, that's actually a sweet idea. Saves all the fixing and nerfing that MMOGs tend to do in the name of balance. Simply make the characters all unbalanced, with each one having its own moment of glory. "On Thursdays, I'm uber, but the rest of the week, I'm a gimp."

You'll get some peculiar subscribers to say the least.

PS: stop with the corporate dev team round table bs, I don't buy it

well round table sounds more professional than "sitting around our office lounge with pen paper and laptops,  shooting the bull with game ideas." :P

Depends on how easy it is to work around this.  Briefly, if the prize is worthwhile enough, a sufficently large guild will have multiple people try to acheive overlord status on a continuing basis.  Yes, the particular player account it would be linked to would change, but a lot of guild accountts are already shared.

Worst case, a guild could try to have a different qualified candiate for overlord for all 12 (or whatever) of the mystical months.

So, how would you prevent this?

Xilren

Good question. I'll bring this up, and post soem of our brain storming later today.

Why would want to play in un-uber time? I personaly would cancel my account until my 'month' or if cycles fast enough just not log in in weak state.

This post makes my brain hurt.

But after figuring out what he was saying...  he does have a valid point.

Alkiera

I blame lack of sleep. What I was trying to say is that if you have 'power-up' and 'power-down' states that are time-based why would you ever play in 'power-down' state. I'd personally just log-in when in 'power-up' state since like most people out there I hate playing with disadvantage.

Excellent point. And to all the gamers of like mind like this, what would possibly entice you to continue to play during the "power-down" periods? Although powered-down would be more of returning to normal instead of being blessed by Lifeblood. But your thoughts and comments regardless. Faster advancement, situational events, ???

If it makes my power-up state come sooner. Still I'm likely to just macro it off and complain that game is boring and you have to macro to get to fun parts.

I guess if you made it so that the power-up and power-down periods were not too disparate then it would be ok. That way you can still fight back against the enemy enough for it to matter. If you stayed away entirely then you would lose too much ground to make up if your enemy put up resistance. You have to make it more about dealing with the different states than waiting for the power state to come into play.

The way we were thinking is that, just like in modern globabl power struggles, if the weaker countries act independently against the powerful one they get crushed. But when they combine forces and resource the sum of their parts is equal to or exceeds the dominant power. This would also possibly help player/player organization  interaction if they hoped to get a decent shot at the big cheese. We are also thinking about maybe, if you can convert some of the acolyotes of your oppenent the ruling dragkon loses some power because of the lower Faith. But we are hesitatnt that there might be alot of bullying and new player recruitment just to padd the ranks and leech Lifeblood.

Hrm.  Reminds me of the dragon cycle from the Taltos books.

One way to make people who aren't top dog log in is to make positions 2-12 mean something.  If your clan is currently number 8, make it so that you can do things to push yourself ahead of whoever is #7... and make being #7 mean something over being #8.

Reminded of Salvatore's Dark Elf series, where Drizzt's home city worked like this... each of the families vying for position, not always with #1, because that would be suicide... unless you happened to be #2, or maybe #3.  The others fought with those just above or just below them in the peking order.

Alkiera

Maybe instead of a straight power-up/power-down cycle you could have certain abilities enhanced and some others diminished.

Maybe the dragkons are crustaceans and they need to molt periodically.  Right after they molt, they are nimble and fast and so their attack statistics are maximized, but they are soft and vulnerable so their defense statistics are minimized.  Right before they molt, their shells are hard to the point were they are nearly impenetrable, but also very hard to move.  Then their defence statistics are maximized and their attack stats are minimized.  Make all the dragkons of a particular stripe molt simultaneously.

Then again, maybe I've been looking at my son's Yu-gi-oh cards too much.

If someone logs on and can't do something constructive and at maximum efficiency, they lose the incentive to log on.  

The only solution that I could consider would be a phasic system where attacking/defending/building strengths cycle.  At this point, you'd always have something constructive at a high point.  

Of course, this still forces a style of gameplay... something that really detracts from fun.

We finally formalized the authority/ranking/player relationship structure so here it is:

1)Eternity (the all powerful force, basically Time personified)
2)Celestial Dragkons (16 members of our 'Content Evolvement' team)
3)Overlord
4)High Dragkin (dragkonic mutated humans)
5)Mutent'il Ken (enhanced mutanted/evolved humans)
6)7 House of Hratko (human house that war for dominance)
8)Common populace
9)Mangini (Outcasts)
10)Zamost (greatly enhanced and evloved beings but greatly oppressed by law)

A more indepth description of each rung in the ladder to come soon, but feel free to tear that apart in the mean time.

You need to dump that "Dragkin" term right now. It just smacks of non-creativity. In fact, dare I say, it is a down right 4th grade-ish wordplay mishmash of dragonkin. Saying it aloud is cumbersone and ends up sounding like "dragon" anyway which seems to tbe the word you are trying to avoid for some reason.

Let me see if I follow this.  Rungs 1 & 2 are out b/c those are dev functions, so players can really operte on rungs 3-10.

3 is the high end political/econ/war game we've already touched on, but if only one person can be Overload, that run might as well not exist for 95% or better of your playerbase.  Its smacks of designing content of the catass ala high level raid zones with locked content that requires a huge guild of powergamers to do, or the original Jedi system.  IMHO, you shouldn't design too much content that only benefits these folks b/c it's a much much lower ROI.  Besides, all too often the dev's focus gets skewed by too much attention on this high end game and the bulk of the simple day to day gameplay suffers as a result.  The low and mid game better be fun else who cares how great the end game is?

So, need more details on rungs 4-10, especially, how would someone change the rung they are on b/c most sound like their tied to your character's race?  Is that changable (i.e. everyone starts at 8 and you can move up to 4 or down to 10 via gameplay that actually changes your character?  What does the rung structure actually allow/disallow you from doing?  Need context.

Xilren

Xilren is correct. players will start out at rung 8 and depending on their actions will move up or down the ladder. At the proposed timeline for the onset of the game rungs 6-3 have not been created yet by the people of the world, so players who fufill certain requirements can end up becoming the first of the higher caste. And since 4&5 are mutations there will be some interesting events that occur before those rungs are created. More to come on this later. Oh and rungs 9&10 while lower on the chain, they are not without their own suprises. In fact the Zamost might even have an anti-overlord trump card....

As a warning, this is close to a word that has a rather negative connotation around here.  8)

Alkiera

The plural of mangina?

If Harry Houdini was a mangina, perhaps?

First problem.  You have a 27 person team in pre-production.  Even if nobody is making a dime, you have a budget problem.  You have too many hands and too little design space.  The actual number of ideas you will be able to execute in a game is small.   I have a dev-lead friend currently in preproduction for a major, money-is-not-an-issue, studio.  At 6, he feels his design team is too large.   Having your production staff too large is an extremely common problem in software design generally, and a frequent cause of project failure.  See Peopleware by Tom DeMarco, also Eric Bethke has a nice book on game production.

Don't discount good production techniques, they are the cause of many software project failures, particularly in this industry.

Second Problem.  


I'll bet you've played PnP RPGs.  When you got tired of D&D, and decided to build your own game, you began by designing your game system; one that would let you create the setting you wanted.  But with PnP, you are the hardware and the software.   With computer games, those things have to be built before you can firm up any design or setting.  Message boards are littered with the flaming rants over unfulfilled promises that turned out not to be technically possible.

The key issues with MMOs are Customer Service and Technical Polish.  These things aren't as interesting as plot and game design, but they are what break the majority of MMOs that do get out of Beta.  If you are going to pitch a game to investors, you will need to talk about hardware requirements and launch and maintenance costs, bandwidth expense, all of that.  Story is all gloss.  Which brings me to....

Third Problem.
You are writing storyline.  You don't want that now, you need to know what systems you can support before you write the storyline.  The following makes the point better than I can, I think.

Pulled off  this Corpnews Thread: (http://www.corpnews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1700&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0)


The foundation is what you need to build, before you design a story to go on top.  Story is infinitely adaptable, and limited only by your wit and insight.  Code is much less flexible.

The story info you want for investors is a one line zinger and a short paragraph that tells them what you want them to think about, and does the least to constrict you when it's 18 months down the road and they are trying to fit your game into the mental box you sold them.

That means a sentence like "We want to meld the flavor and appeal of World of Warcraft to the EverQuest subscription model".   And the paragraph talks about The Alliance and the Horde battling it out in exciting yet vague terms.

Shadowbane has many useful lessons to teach about building MMOs, and one of the most important is the following.  If it isn't in the code, it isn't in the game.

Final Problem.


Way too specific.  At this point it should be "Characters will fight monsters and/or other characters and they will level (since levels are inherent in your heirarchy - personally I think levels suck, but everything you've talked about implies them).  At some point characters will get special powers to modify the world as follows....".  Simple concepts, which coders can get to work on to build your prototype.   If you can get a working prototype up, your chance of funding goes way up.

Anyway, I've gone on way too long.  I'll wrap with this.  The problem with MMOs isn't a lack of ideas, it is a lack of execution.

What your game needs is a unique system of character creation.  See, what you do is have female characters get pregnant, and give birth to new players.  And you let people PK the pregnant female player, take her fetus, and shoot it out of a catapult.  That would own.

Now get to work, your company is at steak!

You've been beaten to the punch on both (http://www.wildwestsim.com) counts (http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2004-08-16), sadly.

Newbs these days...

Ouch I think I pulled something reaching that far back.

Anyway, it seems simple to me, smear the queer.  Pardon the offensive name but I never heard it called anything else.  Whoever is on the upswing is the target of all other dragkon factions. (Seriously change that name!) Then whoever attacks the head faction most severely gets bumped up one month to the next power cycle.  This has two effects: 1) No need to encourage conspiring of factions that might lead to dangerous dynastic possibilities. The guy fighting beside you this month isn't your friend, and he is going to try to rip your throat out when you’re in power.  2) The powerful faction is so busy on their month defending and attacking that they have no time for crafting.  The other time is then just as valuable as the only time to do repairs, crafting, training (as mentioned earlier), making enough money for tribute (see below), and generally defending from the powerful faction's aggressions.

If done right there will still be those who will only play when their faction is powerful but there are just as many people who will log off for that devastating, stressful, and hectic period.  But if too many of the faction’s players follow that path the bump system in the power cycle makes it possible for a faction to become dormant, that is to say always bumped.  If your guild needs to gain land/recourses/power they must fight.  On the other hand if a guild becomes too weak they might seek other avenues for advancement, IF you allow for bribery and inter-factional trading, oh and backstabbing... literally, the subtle knife cuts deepest.

On a seperate point, Evangolis is right, it may be too soon to be worrying about this stuff.  Too many games have had fascinating metagames and absolutely insipid day to day gameplay. Here’s a rule to remember, if you wouldn’t fight/craft/mine/hunt/explore just for fun, the game is worthless.  You must make the most fun part of the game the shit work.   In real live you can enslave people and bend them to your will, but in a game the slaves will just leave.  You must make it so that the lower class has the most players and only the diehards seek advancement.  You see the secret to cat herding is making the cats into cattle, absolutely happy to chew cud their entire life.

If you don’t have the gameplay down yet stop all this talk of overlords now.  If you don’t believe me go read the old developer interviews of what was going to be in Horizons, and then go play it…

If your MMOG actually survives and makes it to release, and better yet if it garners enough subscriptions to survive in the short term, you need to insincerely smile and agree with the fanboys, but actually listen to those who think you game has problems and unsubscribe.

You ego is your own worst enemy. Adopt the artist mentality, and stop seeing your efforts as a business proposition, and you will probably be narginally sucessful at best. You can code, model, and texture. You may even be able to write a good story, but in the end run, the market, not you, decides whats fun.

What differentiates your company in attracting capital to start a game?