The Fundamentals - Where Indies Go Wrong

bobfish

I think that it is great that more and more indepedant developers are attempting to make a break into the MMO genre, that one place where a good game can either make or break your entire career.



But it amazes me time and time again how few of them understand the basic fundamentals of MMOs, the very core mechanics that you absolutely must get right if you are going to stand a real chance of having success in this genre.



There are some basic things that these developers should concentrate on from day one, before they've decided what all the features are and definitely before they've started to flesh the game out with content.



The first of these is combat - this makes up over 75% of an average player's game time within an MMO these days, whether you are looking at the monster that is World of Warcraft, or the lowly minnow of Ryzom. You create a character, you're given a sword, gun or staff and you go out and kill things. Then you kill some more things, then even more things and on and on this goes as you level or skill up your character.



On a few rare occasions we are blessed with titles that make an effort in their crafting systems, like the aforementioned Ryzom, or Fallen Earth amongst others. In these games there is a break from the mindless killing, but you can still spend a healthy amount of time just fighting.



So why is it that so many developers make the combat systems unwieldy, unresponsive or just plain unfun? This should be the first thing into the game, it should be the first thing that is given any serious testing and it should be the first thing that is perfected! Long before you spend time and money on fleshing out the game world, adding more fluff to game that people just won't experience because your combat is so broken that no one can stand playing the game long enough to see past the few ten minutes!



The second is perhaps a little less obvious, but is almost as important - choice. Now this doesn't mean that more choice is better, in fact in many cases more choice is worse. Especially when you have a finite amount of resource to put into your game. What is important is that the choices you give people are meaningful, I don't care if you have fifty classes and a thousand skills, if of those fifty classes twenty of them are warriors only each one uses a different type of sword, they are all going to play exactly the same!



The concept of choice isn't so you can fluff out the game with more time sinks, it is so that you can give people different ways to play the game. They may all go through the same motions of killing or crafting things, but we all know that in most cases a mage throwing fireballs is going to play different to a paladin wielding a big sword. These are the choices that you need to concentrate on, these are the choices that help people stay with the game rather than get bored or it before they experience everything you have to offer.



Pick what you want the player to experience and concentrate on making those few choices each a great experience, so that they are not overwhelmed and that they feel fulfilled with the decisions they have made. Not to mention that most players are clever enough to realise when you've just cut and pasted something and put a new lick of paint on it.



Whatever else a developer decides to do with an MMO can't really hurt it too much if they get the above two fundamentals correct, solid combat system and meaningful player choices.



Rant over, just so tired of seeing so many indie MMOs fail before they've even got to release because of these two simple things.

 

TLDR: Don't bother replying if you can't be bothered to read it

Buttermilch

You are totally right!

Combat is the most important part of an MMORPG. Sad to see that so many MMORPGs have the same boring combat system. :-/ It's easy to spice it up by just changing bits of the common target-based combat system.