Biggest challenege in developing an MMO

Lordmonkus

If this is something that has been discussed to death before then my apologies but I am curious as to what other people think is the biggest challenge a developer faces when designing their game.

To me it's probably the balance between realism and player convenience. Do you make the game more like real world and provide challenges to players at the risk of the game becoming a chore ? Or do you do away with tedious tasks to make the game play more fun at the expense of immersion ? Of course with this balance in mind which segment of the gaming market are they after ?

Looking forward to hearing other peoples thoughts.

ThomasN7

Being able to have enough money to actually support your project . More than half of mmo games fail because they run out of money resulting in a buggy release and bad first impressions.

demalus

Biggest challenge is to make a good game instead of trying to leach money from unsuspecting MMO fans.

ladyattis

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Originally posted by SaintViktor
Being able to have enough money to actually support your project . More than half of mmo games fail because they run out of money resulting in a buggy release and bad first impressions.

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I still find it amusing that game developers always whine for more cash where other sorts of developers often do similarly sized projects for less. Of course, maybe the comparison isn't entirely fair since most other industries are not scared of the GPL boogey man so they use open sourced libraries, firmware, and interfaces to lower the overhead, but still MMO developers often want to create their own damn rendering engine, network stack, UI library, and even their own damn memory management system which often screws up because it isn't compatible with the native operating system (durrrrrrrrrrr!). Maybe if game developers would get their egos realigned back with reality then they'd realize a plethora of other industries have produced the foundation of the skeleton code they require that's more stable, cheaper even when it's closed source, and down right easier to use (for a coder). Once that day comes, games will probably churn out faster and with better compatibilities, but that day is right up there with the closing of the US federal government as unlikely.


-- Brede

Lordmonkus

Hehe ok I should said other than financial because it's pretty much a given that money is going to be a massive issue to all but the biggest developers out there.

Atleast small devs like CCP and Flying Labs have proven that a small dev can do it with a relatively small budget with games like Eve and PotBS. Both games are respectable. Eve launched with some problems but overcame them and CCP has grown themselves a great game. PotBS' launch I think was better than Eves and I think is still going well (I haven't been following the game very closely to know for sure though).

While finances can certainly make or break an MMOs development I don't think that it is more important than good game play design decisions. A small dev with limited money can make a great successful game while a big game dev with tons of money can make poor design decisions and no one plays the game.

paulscott

not being managements dog...

Unknown

Making the game both a smooth and cohesive experience.