Budget to Design an MMO

uquipu

What are the areas to consider when designing and developing a new MMO? Things that cost money and time?

Combat System
Art work
Content, world Size
Content, Quests
Content, Dungeons
Content, cities, towns etc
Lore
Classes
Races
Apparel, weapons, armor or clothes
Spells, melee and ranged
Polish

What else?

mmosnark

Time and money-wise, for a DIKU style MMO, it's all about the content.

Hyanmen

Character customization options

Servers

Story & Cutscenes (in some games)

Animations

Crafting, Gathering

Search system

Grouping mechanics

Grouping content

Solo content

Monster design, behaviour (AI) and skills

Class adjustments

Character progression system

PvP (in some games)

Payment options, customer service and infrastructure

Marketing

And god forbid if you want to innovate at the same time..

 

And if any of these features is lacking, huge Q_Q ensues by the players who do not get what it takes to build an MMO. You just have to prioritize or it won't work.

Yamota

Network code, hardware, testing (alpha testing, not beta testing done by players). Also if you are making a 3D game then a lot of time and/or money will go into either creating a 3D and physics engine yourself or using a third party one like Unreal Engines which can cost upwards of $500.000 for a licence.

Hopscotch73

QA

Loot tables, merchant tables....

quest design, level design

Community management

Crafting systems

Economic systems

Vehicle/mount systems

and ideally: Housing systems.

Amaranthar

There's an excellent 4 part (each is short) article posted at  this developer blog.

"I'm building a company, not a game."

A very worthy read with figures and explanations.

bobfish

Most of the money goes on art and sound, though both of these decline post launch, it is still where the majority of your budget will go.