The Undiscovered Country
My former boss Scott Hartsman wrote a really good piece last week about the complexity of building MMOs. He’s right on the money about why it’s so hard to bring these games to the market, which can be summed up as “They be hard to make, yo.”
Okay, we can analyze things a bit more thoroughly than that. After all, that’s what you pay me for.
Two points I really want to underscore:
MMOs have many more potential points of failure than the average title. Not only do you have to make a fun, solid experience just like any other game (no small task in and of itself), you have to do so with most of the action taking place on a server instead of on the game client. This requires a solid back-end infrastructure to handle gameplay, reliable billing, data security, and the other stuff Hartsman talks about. And because these things are invisible to the user when they work well, the only way you’ll hear about them is if they suck.
There just aren’t a lot of people with experience doing this. A lot of times on message boards you’ll see backlash when certain developers are announced to be working on a title. “Danuser? Are you kidding me? That guy sucks. Why the hell would they hire him?” Like Hartsman said, this industry is really young. Practical experience working on an MMO is valuable in and of itself, because these games are inherently different from what has gone before. Having worked on WoW doesn’t guarantee you are a genius, and having worked on Auto Assault doesn’t mean you are a failure. It’s about what you learn from a project and how you can apply it going forward that counts.
To paraphrase Warhammer Online’s Paul Barnett, MMOs are the undiscovered country of game making. We don’t have a tradition of campfire tales to hear from our elders, so we have to make things up as we go along. Unfortunately, that means some companies will be learning their lessons the hard way.
The infrastructure and scale are the main differences and even there, the gap is slimming.
But of course I have to take a contrarian point of view to you both because I have a far simpler theory that actually has data to support it.
You see, since the dawn of video game time, the vast majority, upwards of perhaps 95% of games, have sucked balls. It stands to reason that the vast majority of MMO games would also suck balls.
I don’t think experience matters here also, I theorize that on a percentage basis, games have sucked balls at a constant rate which would definitely not happen if people learned from their failures.
I’m not debating if it’s hard to build a game, without a doubt a lot of work is involved in even making a bad game (I would know), but to act like they are radically different and that’s why they suck so often is a bit much.
So uh, does that make you Lewis and me Clark? Or am I that dude who carried bags and stuff for you guys?
^^ Shwayder ^^ = Pocahontas
Shwayder, you’re Pocahontas. Duh.
And Coray, I really hate to fall back on saying that you really don’t understand how tough good MMOs are to make unless you’ve been through the process, but you really don’t understand how tough good MMOs are to make unless you’ve been through the process. Even making a really crappy MMO is an ordeal.
However, I do agree that the majority of people make stuff that sucks, no matter what platform or industry we’re talking about. This is why I feel that relying upon user generated content is precarious at best — not because professionals are so much more skilled than non-professionals, but because at least having a process to vet one’s work increases the odds that it will be marginally less sucky.
Damn you Cyan, you beat me by minutes.
Curse my overthinking of replies!
On your first point..customers don’t care about that stuff because it is INVISIBLE.. OMG woot my credit card wasn’t declined
happy day.
And your second point I agree working on X game does not make you good or bad but sucking is sucking. Not all doctors or lawers are good at what they do, yet they will always have a job.
LESS BOARS=LESS SUCKY.
Ryan you are the Indian guy who was never heard from again….
“I don’t think experience matters here also, I theorize that on a percentage basis, games have sucked balls at a constant rate which would definitely not happen if people learned from their failures.”
Not necessarily true…its possible that developers can learn from their mistakes but then make new mistakes instead of replicating old mistakes.
I think it is symptomatic of the slippery fish that is software development. Everything about the process thwarts timelines, cycles, tasking, etc. (i.e., a schedule). I think the word, “complexity” pretty much sums it up. Maybe you have heard of the book The Mythic Man Month? Classic text. The issues described in that book about software development/management relates, as one would suspect, to the software development of games, and in particular, MMOs.
I actually would venture so far as to say that MMO development experience would be somewhat more valuable than, or at the very least equivalent to having loads of experience of developing a large variety of other single-player game types, but I do suppose it may vary depending on what position you’re referring to. Producer, Designer, Code Ninja, Art Director, Sound designer, yada yada..
From a designer standpoint, many MMO-elements are like mini-games in and of themselves. You have the obvious leveling game, the questing game, the guild game, the PvP game, the raid game, the tradeskill game, the “press X button at the right time in the right sequence to make Y effect” game, the house decoration game, the auctioning/buying/selling/get_me_better_stuff game, the “get the most achievement possible” game, so-on and so-forth… Many different systems that in an of themselves are their own “games” with all of the necessary rules, mechanics, and rewards, but put together in cohesive fashion in the context of a “world”. Hence, designing for an MMO I would think to be like designing many different types of games while being mindful of the necessary world cohesion.
From a coding standpoint, not only are you putting together various “games” in the MMO, but there’s also the other layers…
Client programming including the basic game loop, rendering, events and event processing, network protocol handling, memory/swap and disk management, loading/unloading assets, etc.
Then there’s server programming, cluster computing, again network protocol stuff (not just between the server and the game client, but inter-server communication mechanisms for handing off client communications for processing on other servers, logging, and database communications), game rules and logic (combat, world positioning, tracking of objects/NPCs,etc), chat (including channels/filtering of spam/etc), activity logging and many database queries (kind of said that already, but it’s worthy of mentioning twice since it’s such a huge part of the system), handling failover for server crash events (bad things do happen), etc. etc.
Then there’s tools programming, which is for things like server resource monitoring and the many many business intelligence data analysis queries that can be done against the massive amounts of data recorded in the database by the server processes. Data is only good if you can ask the right questions, right?
I’m going to hold short due to post-length and understate this a bit.
Oh, and let’s not forget the DBA’s role for structuring the database tables, indexes, keys, queries, etc. and coming up with those magical ways to pull up the data that many internal teams need to make intelligent decisions about the future of the product. Again, vastly understated, but I’m hoping I’ve been able to at least hint at how an MMO could be much more difficult than just a standard single player game.
I should put the disclaimer that I’m just an outside observer so by all means you experienced MMO devs can correct me if I’m way off the mark