A fairly intresting post mortem of a indie MMORPG

[Sairon]

Okay so I was browsing around gamedev and found a rather intresting read, some of you have probably already read it because it's far from new stuff even if the last part was completed rather recently. It's a post mortem on a indie devloped MMORPG http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part1.php.

[Evangolis]

I did find it interesting, although not terribly surprising.  In fact, the biggest surprise to me is that things went as well as they did.

[Margalis]

Good god that hurt my brain.

This guy's writing style is:

I did this.
Then, I did this.
Then, I did this thing.
Then, this other thing happened.
...


Most of what he talks about should be blindingly obvious to anyone. One thing I am learning in my slowly increasing age: never underestimate the ability of people to not learn anything from history, including their own very recent history! There are people that can make a mistake 100 times in a row and go out and make the same mistake the 101st time.

The big mistake here is that MMORPGs are not incredibly new anymore, at least certain aspects of them are well-understood. And not just MMORPGs either.

In FF6 there was an item you could equip and all it did was make you walk faster! Lesson: people don't like walking slowly in games! Is it realistic that people can run around forever? No. Who cares? Everyone knows that in MMOPRGs faster walking speed is better (until it becomes absurd) and that's true in plain old RPGs too. If you go back and play DQ1 and FF1 they are unbearable in that regard.

I wouldn't really call this thing interesting, more like predictable.

One thing I did find interesting was some French company offering to host his game, because it reminds me of an amusing anecdote from my own life:

When I was in high school a friend and I were working on an RPG for the Mac. It actually had really good graphics but it was very unpolished and only about 1% complete. Some guy from a developer for 3DO contacted us and asked us about making our game into a 3DO game based on some newsgroup postings I had made. They were that desperate for 3DO content!

Then again when you look at a game like Way of the Warrior, it looks like it *was* made by 2 high school kids.

[Sairon]

Yes his writing style wasn't perhaps the best, but it was good enough to get me through all the pages. The guy sure did have persistence to stay with his game for as long as he did.

WoW has very slow runspeed and barely no means to increase it. With to fast runspeed players blaze through content way to fast, but I agree that fast runspeed is prefered from a players pov.

[Soln]

style aside it's a good caution tale.  I've read it before, and what still strikes me as one of the biggest errors was not knowing the technical and business effort into building an online service.  Increasingly it looks like people who are used to the console/PC/mod games think they can enter into developing and running an online service without any extra effort.  And I don't see any change in that. Remembering WoW and LUA and its text protocol...

[HaemishM]

Mistake #2: Releasing the game without a solid plan for how the gameplay will work.

I would want to cockslap him for making such an obvious statement, except that many commercial MMOG's feel like the developers didn't know this lesson when they started either.

[Sunbury]

Actually its pretty impressive going from nothing with no plans/schedules/budgets/designs to a running MMORPG.

Funny thing, if he did that in the realm of "Commerical Web App In the Ra-Ra 1998 till the .com crash" he'd be a multi-millionare, since most of those companies were built on those same principle.

[Heresiarch]

While a map editor and a 3D engine is enough for a single player game...

omg lolz. Some of the "kids" (note: I'm over 30) that I've worked with have kinda taken this approach to game development. If you can draw a map and you have a map editor, then your game is 90% done! The "skeleton" is really everything except class balance and content. At the stage quoted above, he doesn't have a skeleton; maybe a metacarpal, or maybe both an incus and a malleus.

most of them actually expected more than harvesting items and completing a few quests. This was very disappointing for me, and felt like giving up many times.

In Piaget's theory of child development, it is not until someone reaches the age of 7 that they are able to take the viewpoint of others. Said another way, by analogy: I've talked to many game critics that like to lambast Myst and The Sims. "How can anyone play that crap, they're not even games?" And in the MMO world, I've worked with several devs that thought that EQ was stupid and said they didn't understand why anyone played it. Well, that's great, you've just admitted that you have no comprehension of player motivations.

I think good game design comes not from creativity but from a good understanding of psychology. Well, both. Whatever. My point being, if you can't see why people are entertained, all you're doing is trial-and-error, hoping that other people respond to the crap you produce.

The end of June and beginning of July was a very productive period for us, and a few newer features were added, such as ...a new quest. [emphasis on the singular indefinite article added]

How many quests did WoW have at launch? 6000? Let's say they had 10 people writing those damn mad-libs for four years. That's 2000 man-weeks, or about three quests per man-week. And I'm not including world-building, game mechanics, quest interface, creature placement, or model-building in that. So, if one has a running game, one could add a new mad-lib every day or so. With a decent set of dev tools, a mad-lib quest should take under an hour. And that includes testing.

Meh. I'm not learning anything from this article. My suggestion for wanna-be MMO devs: build a simple, stupid clone of a trivial RPG first. A single-player game. Something like an early Ultima. You'll learn more, make revenue sooner, make tons of mistakes to learn from while working on simple, throw-away games, and get to your final goal in much, much better shape.