What you need to make an MMORPG.
Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Black Desert Online. I’m writing this because I’ve just gotten out of another discussion, with someone who has some money and wants to make a video game. Predictably, they want to make the next World of Warcraft or Black Desert Online or Guild Wars 2.
Before you quit your day job, and start writing the game design document for your dream-perfect, ideal MMORPG, there are five things that you must have to be able to make an MMO. To be clear, these five things are in no way related to the game or the ideas for the game that you plan to make.
Ideas don’t matter right now.
Everyone has ideas. Ideas at the moment, are cheap. I have no interest in discussing ideas about combat — be it action or turn or real time, ideas for a crafting system works, what is the lore of the world, or the class or classless systems and how skills work. This is because ideas are not important at this stage. Everyone has them and you don’t need them yet. This is what you need before you even start writing your GDD.
1. Bank loan, Mortgage, or Kickstarter: Money.
You will need lots of it. Because making an MMO is expensive. There are few games bigger than MMO in terms of cost. For Example: World of Warcraft cost USD63 Million before marketing and promotion. The Elder Scrolls Online cost USD200 Million. Final Fantasy 14 is rumoured to be about USD400 Million.
Your player base does not care if you are a 1-man army or an army of 1,000 designers, artists, programmers, marketers and other support personnel. What they will care about is whether they get the experience promised to them via game marketing. Delivering that experience is what keeps them coming back to play and consuming new content as it is released/updated.
Money is the thing that pays for your development costs. I’ve already mentioned a few positions, so let’s add a few more: Writers and narrators. Voice actors. Bug testers. Security specialists. Don’t forget the physical servers and other support and development hardware. There are software licenses to consider to say nothing of renting an office space, and keeping the heat and lights on too.
Please note, the above is development costs only. We haven’t even begun to talk about what marketing your MMO is going to cost. The MMO landscape is saturated with dozens of MMOs and word-of-mouth is not the powerhouse marketing tool it used to be. Social media marketing (Influencer, streamer, cosplayer, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) is going to devour your budget. And who/how is your game trailer being made?
Whether you are an established MMORPG company or a rockstar team of A-Listers in a startup. Be prepared to have at least millions to fund development, pay everyone and market your game.
2. The sand trickles through the hourglass: Time.
Understand that MMOs take a long time to make: World of Warcraft was in development for 5 years. Guild Wars 2 also took five years. The Elder Scrolls Online took seven… Star Citizen…. A decade plus and arguably counting.
Making an MMO is not a “free time” or “side gig.” This is not something you put together over a couple of weekends or at the IGDA Global Game Jam. It will require focus and commitment and hundreds if not thousands of hours. Putting this in context. I have been a “home cook” for the past five years. Sounds impressive until you break it down.
It is not five years at 40 hours a week as a home cook. It’s realistically 5 hours a week for five years. I’ve spent 240 hours a year as a home cook. The professional chef in one year will rack up over 2,000 hours in the kitchen.
When making a game, what you put into it, determines what you get out of it. Making an MMO will be 40–60 hours a week for between 3 and 5 years, and even longer if you’re trying to solo develop one. Making an MMO means putting in the hours. Even more of them if you are working solo.
If you think taking ten years solo is fine, remember that technology will have moved forward, and you will likely be left with an outdated foundation and you will be forced to edit, amend and update your game.
3. What is your profession: Skill and Experience.
Almost every time I ask the question, “Have you made a game before?” The answer I hear most often is “No.” an MMORPG is not a good place to start your career in game development. The MMORPG as a genre draws on the features, and attributes of multiple genres: First-person and third-person camera. Archery or ranged combat means FPS-type systems and mechanics. When you add the puzzle solving, the crafting and then mount racing you’ve blended genres.
You now have the defining attributes of multi genres thrown together, and you’ve got to make them all work together fluidly. Remember when I said ideas were worthless earlier? This is why: Everyone can have an idea, but they and their idea only have value if you there is the skill and ability and experience to make them a reality.
The MMORPG scope is too broad, the cost astronomical and the fail rate too high and is impossible for a single person to make a commercially successful one. Start by making something simple and easier. Make it small, fun to play with quality gameplay, content and mechanics and polish it to the highest degree possible. Hone your skill and your ability and specialize in a few areas, while remaining a generalist in others.
If you have no experience making games: Start by getting some and learning the basics. Online tutorials are available for game design, programming and art. You will have to do a lot of reading as well before moving on to making small game projects.
3a. The Game Jam
Game Jams are a good introduction to the process of crunching out a small, simple game that is fun. Polish and refinement come later, as does artistic and programming skill. It will also give you some exposure to sound and music design, problem-solving, debugging and the challenges of scalability in game development.
Just remember that making games is a process. Be patient and focus on learning, developing your skills and improving with each project you undertake.
4. Having a Team
The scope of the MMO means you can never make one on your own. You will need a team to make an MMORPG, and ideally, it will be an A-Team. Each person on the team will need to have the training, skill, and experience in whatever it is they are going to be doing. How many people? Check the credits list on any MMO. You get the idea.
Those skills will be from everything related to game development itself (artists, designers, programmers, engineers, sound, music) to the business side of things (human resources, finances) to marketing (social media, public relations et al) and both physical and cybersecurity. I could go on about the other roles and positions but I won’t. Suffice to say that you need experts to ensure that your game is not only built to the highest quality possible but will also launch smoothly.
But before you can have a team, you need to know what it is you can do well and can bring to the development team. Otherwise, your MMORPG is not going to get very far at all.
4a. How to Find a Team?
As you build your skills, work on projects, participate in game jams, and various online communities, you’ll meet and find people that you synergize well with and can work with. Consider these people for your team. Just ensure that role responsibilities and expectations are clearly outlined.
5. Gathering the Players.
This is by far the hardest step in the whole MMORPG development process. How do you even get a player base for a game that doesn’t even exist yet? Firstly, understand that you need to have the player base ready to GO the moment the game releases: you need to have so many people trying to download and play that your service is overwhelmed. This is a good thing on launch to have.
You need to have hype and a dedicated player base. World of Warcraft leveraged this incredibly well: They had all of the fans of the Warcraft RTS franchise foaming at the mouth. Final Fantasy 14 was able to leverage its entire fanbase. Elder Scrolls Online was released, riding on the successes of Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind. Despite how it’s fared, New World had the might and power of Amazon, and Twitch behind it.
Every ounce and scrap of publicity, public support and positivity has to be gathered, leveraged and amplified. Developers can be used to build hype. There’s a reason why game trailers say “From the team that made…” It’s about building a fanbase that will love and care about your MMORPG and support it.
Not having a connection to games, or famous MMORPGs or other popular game franchises sets up an uphill battle: If your MMO does not connect to something players care about, why should they care about your game?
The five things to have before making an MMORPG besides “ideas.”
1. Money: If you can’t afford to pay for things (salaries, rent, engines, assets, skilled professionals and developers and marketing).
2. Time: MMORPGs are massive in scope and scale with many moving parts. Not only do you need time to build everything, but also time to polish and refine and
3. Skills and Experience: You’ve got to bring ideas to the table that you can make a reality, a strong understanding of the games business, and marketing.
4. The Team: If you can’t do it, your team needs to be able to it — whatever “it” is. The specialists must have the requisite skills in their specific parts to make sure they can deliver the quality you need.
5. The Players: Hungry, rabid, and eager to murder each other for a chance to play your MMORPG because there is something that they can care about, that appeals to them that they already love.
You don’t have those things right now, and it's fine. You can acquire them: Crowdfund for the money, online courses to learn the skills you need, and networking to find the right people for your team. Finding the players will be the biggest challenge. But it can be done. The best example of this is Adam Bond.
He spent the early years making flash games by the hundreds to ultimately find fans and profitability with just a handful of his projects, starting with Adventure Quest, before going on to make Dragon Fable, and then Mech Quest. He finally established Artix Entertainment to finally make his MMORPG Adventure Quest Worlds with that preestablished player base.
Adam Bond proves that it can be done, but it will take a lot of money, time, and effort, working with a skilled team to deliver your MMORPG to your (hopefully) legions of loyal fans.
