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I can't understand why mmorpg's take so long to make?
havocthefirs
Member Posts: 229
The reason I say this is because I believe there is a lack of planning and continuity in the game making process. I will explain my reasoning for this statement.
I have been working on prototype automated equipment for over twenty years. I started out working as a machinist for a company that produced protype equipment for about seven years. I was then employed by another company for about seven as an assembler that produced protype automated equipment. Finally I was employed by another company as a mechanical engineer that produced, thats right you guessed it, prototype automated equipment. I moved up in each company to a lead position. I have a thorough understanding of the entire process of automation.
At each place I was employed a few things were done differently, however, there was a core process which everyplace followed.
1) A job is acquired and a delivery date is set.
2) The mechanical and electrical/program engineers work together to design the projects.
3) The entire system is manufactured and assembled.
4) The system is debugged and modified until it is in perfect working order.
5) The system is dissasembled, shipped, reassembled at the company that purchased it, wired in, and then the system begins producing a product.
This is of course simplified, but is essentially the process used to making an automated piece of equipment. Keep in mind these systems are engineered and manufactured with less people and less time than it takes to make an mmorpg. The programming to run the equipment is far more complicated than that used in an mmorpg, plus the tens of thousands of parts that were manufactured are physical pieces not just pixels on a screen.
An example would be, say you wanted a company that bottled a soft drink for small sized production was built from scratch. The entire building along with a power generator, hvac, plumbing, ect. would be built. The machinery would be designed, built and installed. A project like this would only take two to three years with less people, less time and less money than it takes to build an average mmorpg. In the end you would have a vastly more complex program than any mmorpg plus a building with a physical working system.
We should all be grateful that gaming companies aren't involved in real world programming. If they were, there would be a nine month waiting list when ordering that soft drink. I know Rome wasn't built in a day, but I'm pretty sure it was built slightly quicker than a Roman themed mmorpg.
Comments
The massive technical feat of trying to get a game that looks almost as good as an FPS game to run with 100s of players. they have to add loads more textures and maps than a normal game, loads of armours and places, mobs, boses raids, towns, cities.
NPCs, lore, quests blah blah.
charachters + classes + skills will takes a long time, never mind balancing them, also taking PVE and PVP in the account at various levels and with various items and buffs/potions etc etc.
I am sure there is loads more but they are basicly trying to make a mini world so no small task.
It is a lot quicker to do quests than it is to make em, that is the problem with WoW. Even with loads of expasnsions you still end up doing every instance multiple times and loads of similar quests. Games such as sandbox games like Eve and pvp grindfest games like L2 don't have this problem.
No way,not a chance.Your machines have a million times fewer parts than any game section.It takes at least 2 weeks to make a GOOD map on a small scale.There is fast ways to do things,but ill give the game designers the benefit and say they are doing it all little by little.I would say a well thought out large scale map including all it's textures and added particle effects/zones would take a month.If the game has 20 map zones you can see right away how that could add up immensely.
There is the time that goes into what you eluded to as pre planning.There is the sketch artists who draw up there player models/beast models game world before it even goes into the PC.Game AI can be another extremely time consuming thing.The bot pathing usually is very limited because of the extreme time needed to do it right.Usually they wil ljust give all the mobs in an area a very simple set of instructions.How many instructions the NPC's have can cause ALOT of the lag we see in games.All the animations in a game ,some one has to draw/texture these up.A simple gun fire can use 10 animation frames ,maybe more maybe less.Some can use several animations to give the effect a more realistic exciting look.
Someone has to sit there and type in all the game dialogue.They have to setup days for voice actore to do there thing,that is after people have spents many hours/days designing the dialogue.You have to play test your designs.I doubt there is ever a person who hasnt made a mistake in there product.Holes in the game world/zones not working properly.People have to create all the sounds of the world.This would take a very long time,as there is hundreds of sound files for textures[surfaces]/mounts/weapons ect ect.
Even if you are givin the game engine,people still have to decide on and go in and code all the game stats numbers.Such things as the damage modifiers/speed of mounts/players ,speed of movers like elevators/lifts.Even though a good game engine makes it simple,someone still has to go in there and enter it all under each area/heading.Game world lighting?once again a good game engine has all the programeables in there,but someone still has to enter all the numbers to make lighting in the world seem realistic.Lighting in a game world is a huge topic and often the elitist in this field will scoff at poor designers.
Really it goes on and on,there is just too much that goes into it to mention everything.I didn't even get into music files.Some of these games go over board and hire bigtime bands musicians/orchestras to record there music files.Sometimes this can be a very big part of a game.I remember a QUAKE exspansion pack back in the day that NIN[nine inch nails]worked on.It was so amazing i was blown away/by the way the sounds music just made the game come alive.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
The thing is, MMORPG's are different to a soft drinks bottle machine in the way that MMO's need to cater to a wide audience. Your soft drinks bottle machine caters to only one company. Try building one machine that caters to hundreds of thousands of company's, fulfilling all of thier needs.
MMO's need content and diversity. That takes time.
I can understand your plight to some degree, that they do take a good couple years to develop and bring to market. But comparing a building and softdrink to programming a game from the ground up is not a real comparison. AS they are completely 2 different things, and they are completed by completely 2 different methods.
What you gotta take into account is that when developing a MMO is, 1 the genre, is it going to be High fantasy? ala Eq1, Eq2, WoW?? is it going to be post-apocalypse earth? is It going to be a Sci Based Shooter/RPG? is it going to be a Skill/level based Shooter? Then thre i the story/plot arc what is the basic plot of the game, what happened, what went down to bring the result that is game story? that takes Story writers, then QA to check over the story for consistency.
Then you have the investors to put money into the game so you have to meet with them and convince them that this project is worth the investment. onc e they okay the deal, its onto programming. Sometimes MMO's will license a already made engine e.g. Unreal 3.0 e.g. star gate worlds, Huxley to name a few. But for the most part companies will develop the engine from scratch for their specific needs as most engines may or may not have all the enabled features they want. with me still?
Then you have the graphics artists, modelers, Rigging animators, Mo-Cap technicans, Music and audio specialists, voice over artists, along with programmers to code the core engine, AI, Particle system, shaders, specialized graphics such as specularity lighting, baked Lightmaps,bumpmapping, Normalmapping, Displacement, Ambient Occulsion, Dynamic Shadowing, High Range Lighting, Bloom, the list goes on which most of this requires most if not a part of coding to enable in the game. then they have to bring it together in a cohesive manner in which it resembles a game.
The fun part isthe game mechanics as their job is to make it fun, engaging e.g. combat how complex is the combat? press a button and watch? twitch based? aim and target with 100% target aquistion controls, and as the you move or your target moves your aim and hit rat probability goes down etc., diplomacy (new interesting feature with vanguard), ease and method of travel? interacting with NPC's questing, how are the quest arranged? are they tied to a overall story arc?, are they just general quest with that specific NPC who needs an item to do something? there is so much you can do I won't list it, but rest assured if you can think of it, a MMO will hve it.
Then thre is QA period, aka BETA testing. This period ranges from "alpha" stage to "beta" stage this allows the developers know what is correct and what needs work, or tweaking to get better. Some times beta testing is not only a stage to formulate and attack bugs that would otherwise go unknown but also acts as a testing bed for players who wish to be more informed of the game by trying it their self. This is a developers way of saying try before you buy see if you like it? if there is something you dont like we have a place just for that to voice your concern. Along with and more importantly forums to submit bugs which range from broken quests, graphical bugs, runtime errors, directx bugs, Videocard driver/soundcard/and chipset related bugs. all this allows the developer more insight to knowing what to do in order to bring the game to market finished as they possibly can.
With MMORGS' getting more and more complex and systems getting more and more varied with cpu, and memory timings, videocards of every flavor, the possibility for bugs, and incompatibility issues are higher. therefore the more systems variations you have to tkae into account the more possible bugs there will be. Being human and therefore not infallable, there is always going to be bugs, though the amount of bugs range from simple, to alot gamebreaking bugs in which the game is not ready for a release. there are several that fit into this category. In any event you can see that Making a MMO takes a while, the average is 2-5 years. It is obviously shorter if they licenese a game engine but still you can expect an easy 2+ years for any MMO.
Do we really want it to come out fast? Or would we take to being patient and allow the developer the time needed yto bring out a solid action packed game that ius fun, immersive, and engaging. As for me? Id rather they take their time, do what they have to do t get the game ready, if there are a few niggling bugs, but the game is otherwise playable I think majority of us will tolerate it if the game is otherwise playable and fun. But just remember when you bitch and moan, and whine about a game's bugs, and other hitches and faults take a moment and think, how long did this game take these programmers, artists, and technicans to code, draw, sketch and otherwise develop and bring to the market in hopes that we would enjoy their game.
always try to take a moment and realize what these people went through, its not easy, and its not going to get any easier, and with people getting more and more knowledgable, as well more 'picky" with what they will tolerate and accept, the road is only gonna get tougher. Just have a bit of respect for them as they took 2-5 years out of their life out of the hope you will enjoy this game, I for one respect people in the game development industry they bust their butt continously. Well thats it, I am out for a bit, I hope this gave you a bit more of a perspective of what takes to make an MMORG. now mind you its not a perfect summarization of what it takes to develop a MMORG, but I feel its definitely in the ballpark.
take care and have a FUN day in your MMORG of your choice.
3.4ghz Phenom II X4 965, 8GB PC12800 DDR3 GSKILL, EVGA 560GTX 2GB OC, 640GB HD SATA II, BFG 1000WATT PSU. MSI NF980-G65 TRI-SLI MOBO.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
Soda machine factory: one building and some machines.
MMORPG: a WORLD , inhabitants, eco-structure, religions/factions, space/time mechanics of that world, physics, etc.
That's the difference.
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Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
Then they have to consider trying to please picky people like myself who complain a lot about different parts of games but don't really have the knowledge of what goes into making them. They have to sell fun after all, hard to do when they're targeting however many subscriptions.
Never give up and never surrender!
If you think you can do it faster. Hop to! Chop chop!
Tell ya what... if you can even design everything required in 6 months, from the ground up, I'll be impressed. Let alone figure out budgeting plans.
By the way, using the phrase "Like in" doesn't work in design. You have to figure it all out. Then the numbers... oh the numbers... everything needs to be assigned values... that in itself could take a small team of 3-5 people months. If not numbers, equations... then you need to balance those.
Now you get to the implementing phase... remember that last step? Be prepared to rewrite half of it... if not more. So you hire some coders to start working with the engine. By the way, if you buy a precanned engine (like Hero or Unreal or GameBryo) they need to figure out how to script for it to get it to work like you like... about a month or 2 depending on the system.
Art... well, depending how "big" you want your options and whatnot, artists will spend months pinging away at creating the different pieces of art for everything. Be prepared to do alot of tweaking later with this too... then the animations...
More system implementing... more changes...
QA. Oh geeze, you broke everything with your first server build. Where's the issue? Nobody knows cause you didn't design debugging into your plan... did you?
Finally... after more programming and integration... you get to MORE QA. So you do some sort of external Alpha and realize "well... I'm missing X and Y" and do MORE system implementing.
Then you realize that either (or both) X or Y interfere with a previously designed and implemented system. MORE QA!!!
You get the picture.
- CaesarsGhost
Lead Gameplay and Gameworld Designer for a yet unnamed MMO Title.
"When people tell me designing a game is easy, I try to get them to design a board game. Most people don't last 5 minutes, the rest rarely last more then a day. The final few realize it's neither fun nor easy."
Computer and console games in general are both art and science.
Technology scheduling for console games: a console's technology doesn't change. This makes them much more easier to schedule. It also allows one to re-use technology, engine, and tools, often completely or with just minimal enhancements. So other than a launch title, and many miss the actual launch, where dev teams have to figure out how to develop on new architecture, console development stablizes and so games are less often late and much easier to manage.
Technology for computer games: This is tougher, because computer tech changes, often many times during a development cycle. The trick is to use your experience and some luck to determine as best you can the tech level that will exist when you plan on releasing your game and then develop for that. This is difficult, but not impossible. And so it's harder to schedule for and manage.
The art aspect of both console and computer games: Games are not widgets, of course. As important as technology is and using it, so also is putting creativity into a game to make the game fun and interesting. Scheduling the creative side of game development is more difficult. Usually a prototype is made and a set of features agreed upon and then management fights against feature creep such that the game is released relatively on time. That said, again during the development cycle, often times other similar (e.g. competitive) games come out and up the standard or bar. These are difficult times as developers have to make some hard calls -- do they take additional time and/or work more hours to add features they hadn't planned on but another game has made standard and therefore players are assuming your game will have them too? Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes no. This is much harder to manage, and schedules have to be updated a lot. And sometimes because of this the game will slip past it's planned launch date and also end up costing more money. But as a wise man once said, a bad game will always be a bad game, but a late game is only late until it's launched.
MMOGs, which are usually done on PCs (although this is slowly but surely changing as consoles are becoming more internet friendly), have all of the above to worry about plus a lot more. MMOG devs have to worry about tools and the client, but also the server and all the coding that has to be done there. Also, with most single player games, they are meant to be enjoyed for a few months and then shelved. So as long as you hit the tech in that window, you're in good shape. MMOGs however, need to look good for months and years after launch. So a lot more work and planning has to go into the tech to make sure it doesn't require major re-writes to keep the game up to date. MMOGs are also relatively new compared to single player games and there are less people out there who have launched one, much less a successful one. So they are the hardest games to manage and schedule for.
And, unless you're a company like Id or Blizzard, with lots of money and a fundamental comittment to taking as long as is needed to release a solid, polished game, you end up with MMOG developers finding it very hard to get the funding to create a competitive MMOG. These games are very expensive. EQ 1 cost $8M, Vanguard over $30M, and WoW something like $80M. Why? Because the bar keeps being raised -- players expect more and more from these games (and rightfully so).
So it's tough and there are definitely easier ways to make money. You really have to love MMOGs to go through 4-5 year dev cycles. And you really have to be able to raise a lot of money to create a AAA MMOG. And again, because MMOGs are relatively new, it's hard to find developers who have worked on them. Ideally you want a team that has both fresh blood in it as well as experienced devs -- you want new ideas and lots of passion, but you also want to get the game done and not repeat mistakes made with other MMOGs.
Also, with growing budgets and the bar being raised, the number of people on an MMOG dev team has increased big time. We did EQ 1 with about 23 or so people. Vanguard took over 100. I know EQ 2 had a lot of people on their team, as did WoW. This is a bit of a struggle because a lot of devs and managers aren't experienced managing team sizes this large. At Sigil, we had to learn things the hard way quite a few times. Creating additional layers of management, splitting up departments into subdepartments, etc. all has to be done. But then at the same time, these are very collaberative games and you want people talking with each other. So the downside, even though it's a necessity, of creating sub-departments and multiple layers of management is that communication becomes harder.
I could probably write a book about this, but in a nutshell, that's the difference.
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
Brad McQuaid
CCO, Visionary Realms, Inc.
www.pantheonmmo.com
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I think part of the problem is a lack of consistent vision. If you stick to your original goals and your original target audience and not change fundamentals of the game, you wouldn't have to delay release and increase costs.
Another problem is flash over substance. Most gamers will gladly play a game that isn't cutting edge graphics and latest technology if it has substance and is fun. Too much emphasis and cost is being applied to the highest end graphics, which many gamers can't even enjoy on their average PCs.
The analogy is broken to begin with. From idea to implementation any major project (a car, a house, an automation machine) takes years of research, planning, construction, and tests.
If you think a soda factory is easy I'll tell you just a very few things that goes into it.
To build a machine that pours exact amounts of soda content into a bottle, caps it, conveys it and packages it, is a huge undertaking. There are literally thousands of sensors, pneumatic and hydraulic cylinders each with their own sensors, metal detectors to ensure that the product has no contaminants, vision systems to ensure continuity, complex mechanical systems where the schematics look like an alien starship, enough wire to stretch from the east coast to the west coast, labelers, scanners, banks of programable logic controllers.
These are just a very few of the things needed, Plus they all have to be programmed to work flawlessly in conjunction with each other. Keep in mind your banging out around ten bottles of soda a second. If a mmorpg crashes you press the reset button and reboot. If your soda bottling machine crashes your in a world of trouble, every piece of contaminated machinery has to be meticulously cleaned and whatever expensive precision parts that were damaged have to be replaced, theres no reset button. Believe me the government takes food contamination very seriously, for every eight hours of run time theres sixteen hours of cleaning and repair time.
So the next time you crack open a bottle of soda, remember thatbehind it is a highly complex, multimillion dollar piece of equipment with a million lines of code to run it. A whole lot of work went into that refreshing beverage you just popped open.
Look at console games instead. There you cannot "just patch it up" if you make a mistake.
$OE lies list
http://www.rlmmo.com/viewtopic.php?t=424&start=0
"
And I don't want to hear anything about "I don't believe in vampires" because *I* don't believe in vampires, but I believe in my own two eyes, and what *I* saw is ******* vampires! "
well think about the console games and how long they take to make. Now take another aspect of content that has to fit the entire game from lvl 1-max lvl. Plus theres this wanting better graphics and that alone is very time consuming
excellent post brad.
for those that scanned past this thread looking for the usual mmorpg.com forum flames. scroll back up. brad from sigil replied to this thread.
btw dude. thanks for everquest and vanguard. keep up the good work.
Games i'm playing right now...
"In short, I thought NGE was a very bad idea" - Raph Koster talking about NGE on his blog at raphkoster.com
Computer and console games in general are both art and science.
Technology scheduling for console games: a console's technology doesn't change. This makes them much more easier to schedule. It also allows one to re-use technology, engine, and tools, often completely or with just minimal enhancements. So other than a launch title, and many miss the actual launch, where dev teams have to figure out how to develop on new architecture, console development stablizes and so games are less often late and much easier to manage.
Technology for computer games: This is tougher, because computer tech changes, often many times during a development cycle. The trick is to use your experience and some luck to determine as best you can the tech level that will exist when you plan on releasing your game and then develop for that. This is difficult, but not impossible. And so it's harder to schedule for and manage.
The art aspect of both console and computer games: Games are not widgets, of course. As important as technology is and using it, so also is putting creativity into a game to make the game fun and interesting. Scheduling the creative side of game development is more difficult. Usually a prototype is made and a set of features agreed upon and then management fights against feature creep such that the game is released relatively on time. That said, again during the development cycle, often times other similar (e.g. competitive) games come out and up the standard or bar. These are difficult times as developers have to make some hard calls -- do they take additional time and/or work more hours to add features they hadn't planned on but another game has made standard and therefore players are assuming your game will have them too? Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes no. This is much harder to manage, and schedules have to be updated a lot. And sometimes because of this the game will slip past it's planned launch date and also end up costing more money. But as a wise man once said, a bad game will always be a bad game, but a late game is only late until it's launched.
MMOGs, which are usually done on PCs (although this is slowly but surely changing as consoles are becoming more internet friendly), have all of the above to worry about plus a lot more. MMOG devs have to worry about tools and the client, but also the server and all the coding that has to be done there. Also, with most single player games, they are meant to be enjoyed for a few months and then shelved. So as long as you hit the tech in that window, you're in good shape. MMOGs however, need to look good for months and years after launch. So a lot more work and planning has to go into the tech to make sure it doesn't require major re-writes to keep the game up to date. MMOGs are also relatively new compared to single player games and there are less people out there who have launched one, much less a successful one. So they are the hardest games to manage and schedule for.
And, unless you're a company like Id or Blizzard, with lots of money and a fundamental comittment to taking as long as is needed to release a solid, polished game, you end up with MMOG developers finding it very hard to get the funding to create a competitive MMOG. These games are very expensive. EQ 1 cost $8M, Vanguard over $30M, and WoW something like $80M. Why? Because the bar keeps being raised -- players expect more and more from these games (and rightfully so).
So it's tough and there are definitely easier ways to make money. You really have to love MMOGs to go through 4-5 year dev cycles. And you really have to be able to raise a lot of money to create a AAA MMOG. And again, because MMOGs are relatively new, it's hard to find developers who have worked on them. Ideally you want a team that has both fresh blood in it as well as experienced devs -- you want new ideas and lots of passion, but you also want to get the game done and not repeat mistakes made with other MMOGs.
Also, with growing budgets and the bar being raised, the number of people on an MMOG dev team has increased big time. We did EQ 1 with about 23 or so people. Vanguard took over 100. I know EQ 2 had a lot of people on their team, as did WoW. This is a bit of a struggle because a lot of devs and managers aren't experienced managing team sizes this large. At Sigil, we had to learn things the hard way quite a few times. Creating additional layers of management, splitting up departments into subdepartments, etc. all has to be done. But then at the same time, these are very collaberative games and you want people talking with each other. So the downside, even though it's a necessity, of creating sub-departments and multiple layers of management is that communication becomes harder.
I could probably write a book about this, but in a nutshell, that's the difference.
I think the paragraph where you state that mmorpgs are relatively new, and that it's hard to find developers who have worked on them might be the most reasonable explanation for the length of time to complete a mmorpg. In the grand scheme of things, mmorpgs being a mere ten years old, I find that being the most reasonable explanation for a mmorpgs lengthy completion.
That being said, having been in the automation industry, aka robotics, for over twenty years. I believe if I had a team of 100 people and 30 million dollars, I could build fully functional, life sized Brad McQuaid. Hmmm, it kinda makes you wonder if I'm replying to the real Brad, or just an automated cyborg.
If you think a soda factory is easy I'll tell you just a very few things that goes into it.
To build a machine that pours exact amounts of soda content into a bottle, caps it, conveys it and packages it, is a huge undertaking. There are literally thousands of sensors, pneumatic and hydraulic cylinders each with their own sensors, metal detectors to ensure that the product has no contaminants, vision systems to ensure continuity, complex mechanical systems where the schematics look like an alien starship, enough wire to stretch from the east coast to the west coast, labelers, scanners, banks of programable logic controllers.
These are just a very few of the things needed, Plus they all have to be programmed to work flawlessly in conjunction with each other. Keep in mind your banging out around ten bottles of soda a second. If a mmorpg crashes you press the reset button and reboot. If your soda bottling machine crashes your in a world of trouble, every piece of contaminated machinery has to be meticulously cleaned and whatever expensive precision parts that were damaged have to be replaced, theres no reset button. Believe me the government takes food contamination very seriously, for every eight hours of run time theres sixteen hours of cleaning and repair time.
So the next time you crack open a bottle of soda, remember thatbehind it is a highly complex, multimillion dollar piece of equipment with a million lines of code to run it. A whole lot of work went into that refreshing beverage you just popped open.
And the fact is that all of those things have already been made and can be bought, all you are doing is assembling them. The only change would be the labels you use.
There are mmorpgs like that. We call them L2 clones, mostly Korean and mostly free.
So, again, your comparison of mmorpgs to a soda bottle plant is ludicrous, unless you are only comparing mediocre (if not total crap), free, clone mmorpgs.
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There is no war in World of BoreCraft
Lets say you're designing a large factory. There's already a framework in place for you to do so. You have parameters given to you: what needs to be produced, how much in the way of resources you have available to do so. There's no need to revise these things. They're set, and your design can proceed in a straight line as a result. Beyond that, there's no real invention happening in mechanical engineering design. You're not building the machinery from scratch, after all, with no precedents. You're buying largely developed technology, knowing exactly what it produces and how it works.
The MMORPG industry, does not have any of those luxuries. To begin with, it is one where you continually have to develop new engines on multiple fronts. You need new server architecture to handle the massive load encountered by a rapidly growing genre. You need new graphics engines to make the game seem modern. You need new network code to handle ever-larger PvP conflicts without lag.
That's really the problem with the industry. There's no effective metaindustry creating middleware engines to ease the development process. If there was, if you had AAA engine development studios on par with id and Epic producing MMORPG middleware that was high-quality, reliable, and highly extensible, then you'd see a huge reduction in development time, as well as an increase in quality. You don't, though, because there isn't a big enough market to justify the development costs of such AAA middleware, even at the huge prices charged for such kits.
That's what it boils down to, really. Saying the problems now are a result of anything but a juvenile industry is fallacious, in my book. As an engineer, you should realize the reality of design. Industries become more efficient as they become less centralized and more specialized. After all, when you design a building, you're one of one hundred players, aren't you? You don't personally draw up architectural designs for the structure, lay out the plumbing plan, and then manually hammer in the nails, do you? That's roughly what MMORPG designers are asked to do, and the sad reality is that most development teams don't have all the expertise needed, even if they do have their share of specialists. That's where the MMORPG industry needs to go, and that's where it eventually will go.
It's already starting, really. The one area where middleware engines are already quite prevalent is the area of graphics engines, and that's because every game needs one. Almost all MMORPG's use heavily modified licensed engines, and the ones that do are usually the better for it. We're also starting to see the birth of MMORPG network middleware, and a few companies are already hitting it big providing all backend financial services, allowing developers to self-publish their own titles without having to train and retain a huge financial staff.
In the future, we're going to see outsourcing of some of the artistic work, too, stuff like model animation and basic texture work. We're starting to see another metaindustry spawning in Asia just to fill this need. AAA games might still have expert inhouse animators in the future, but the reality is that a shift of this work overseas will likely improve overall quality and reduce cost and development time.
Beyond these problems, there are also problems inherent to all large software projects. I can name just a few, to begin with. You're often times working with older engines, trying to refine them to have modern capabilities without rewriting them entirely. This requires a lot of legacy coding, which in turn is generally less efficient and more prone to being buggy. This significantly increases required QA time. When you're not, you have no real template given to you on what your engine should do, other than your own design documents. As any developer will tell you, some features have to be cut after such documents are written, and many have to be added. This itself leads to more legacy coding, with the above difficulties. Such changes are not developers being capricious. It's the reality of software design, whether it be games or operating systems. You also can't necessarily solve these problems with larger teams. As counterintuitive as this sounds, past a point, you actually start to develop MORE slowly with larger teams and more money. This is a documented reality. Beyond this, there's an X factor in programming that you probably aren't used to as a mechanical engineer, at least not in the same form. When designing software, bugs are not always the result of human error. Sometimes, two rights make a wrong. You're not just dealing with things you design, is what you must realize. You're trying to track down bugs which stem from interactions betweem something you wrote and things written by two to three other developers, stuff like graphics drivers, sound drivers, the Windows OS, and the .net framework. To make the problem even worse, you've probably experienced the tedium of reading the available literature for components you use, but there's no exhaustive documentation for a lot of the software that games interact with, as a lot of it is kept secret for competitive reasons.
Don't get me wrong. The industry could definitely do better, but give it some time to settle into its shoes, man. You don't hear me blasting your industry on the safety record and efficiency levels it had during the Industrial Revolution?