How long should a top notch MMO take to build?

asdar

I'm not complaining or bashing any game, I'm just curious.

I see people that think it should take 10 yrs which just seems ridiculous to me, but 1 year is just as crazy.

Darkfall took 8 years or so, and people constantly complained that it had 8 yr old graphics which seems to be what would always be the case graphics being the carrier by which the game is built.

I'm coming down around 3 yrs based on watching development. anything longer than 3 yrs and the game seems to whither anything shorter and the game has problems.

I'd especially like to hear from someone who has actually been a part of a dev team on a real game.

SpottyGekko

I have no experience with developing MMO's, but I've been following the genre with great interest for the last 15 years.

 

It would depend very much on the scope of the game, but I'd guess that these days it should take 3-5 years to build a AAA MMO. 

 

However, I'm not sure if it's possible to come up with any meaningful number, seeing as there are way too many variables:

• scope of the game
• amount of voice-over and cutscene contents
• size of dev team
• experience level of the dev team
• using existing engine or building custom
• extent and source of funding
• etc.

 

sunandshadow

3 years is probably an ideal balance between keeping the original concept timely and putting care into the development.

Skaioverride

id say 5+ years, usually when you hear of a game being announced its already been in development for at least 3 years of just planning and resource allocation, some games like blade and soul seem like its been in development for 7+ years.

Zapzap

For a AAA MMO the rule of thumb is 4-5 years.  Anything less than 4 years and your likely gettting a game missing quite a lot of features. 

Nuhaine

From a design perspective, a game is never truly top notch - this is a term applied to it by those that enjoy the game. Many games release and then work towards having the necessary content to be considered this way by fans, while others spend many years working towards this goal before release. Most get pressured into the former, however.

 

Many studios use betas as a way to measure volumetrics and statistics. This is why betas seem like a finished game sometimes while other games are barely playable in beta state. How quickly a game is able to come out is also related to how much money you can put into it, and the people working on it. A studio in general is rarely to blame unless the team working on it is unable to deliver what the studio demands, having promised something to the public which they are not adequately geared to supply.

 

How long it would take depends on the type of game, the quality of the people working on it, and the amount of money spent. This will generally make a process take between two and seven years before release, plus another year or two before a lot of the things they had planned to add but couldn't before release get added into the game. This also applies to unforeseen problems - an unpopular/unbalanced mechanic or 'feel' that may be driving people away that went unnoticed. Solving them can take a few weeks to a few months each.

 

Indie games may be of a smaller scope, but they have a lot of personality in them from one person as opposed to a whole smash-up of people. Top-notch games can be made surprisingly quickly by those who have the heart and the skill, and a little help from friends and the community.

PapaB34R

excluding planning, finding (if need be) investors and the right team an AAA game should take about 3 years, any longer and the engine will be obsolete, much shorter and it will lack content. Also cutscenes and voice acting isnt really an issue in a mmorpg, worldbuilding is on the other hand an extremely time consuming task, which most who are not familiar with the developing games are aware of.

Then theres the usual, animations, quest/event creation, storyline etc.

Nuhaine

Originally posted by PapaB34R

worldbuilding is on the other hand an extremely time consuming task, which most who are not familiar with the developing games are aware of.

 

That's why we are seeing more sandbox games now - games with a very bland world to be decorated by the players as opposed to the developers.

 

Konfess

I agree with SunAndShadow, three years should be enough.  First year for Alpha, and start on beta assets and QA.  Second year for Beta and continued assets development and QA.  Third open beta (Let the riff raff in), final QA before Golden.

This all assumes enough resources to get the job done.  Some of these steps may in fact take 2 or 3 years, all depending on factors.  But I have interviewed with a Russian developer who insists it should only take 6 months and little or no money of his own.

tawess

4-5 sounds right to me.

 

1-2 years to map out the game and put together the concept. Then three years to build it in order to avoid to much of a tech creep.

 

But that is assuming a full dev studio backed by bags and bags of money. Smaller studios i would say 6-8 years is not unresonable.

Abaxial

Here is a related question: at what point do you go public about a game in development? If you are going to be in development for 5 years, and you announce the game when it will still be four years before it launches, is there a danger that the buzz you generate will have faded by the time the game is ready?

Quizzical

As with any software development, if you want to do it right, it takes however long it takes, and is impossible to accurately predict ahead of time.  Estimation errors tend to be on the low side.  See, for example, Hofstadter's law.

You don't necessarily have a huge development team when a game starts.  You can add a bunch of writers, artists, and so forth after the game is well underway rather than having to hire them right at the start.  If you have five people in the first year and 100 in the last year, the last year is rather more expensive than the first.  So the number of years to complete a game isn't necessarily predictive of the cost.

And even once a game does launch, you don't necessarily know when they started on it.  They're not obligated to tell you, and a game could easily have been worked on for several years before any public announcement is made that the game even exists.

Quizzical

Originally posted by Konfess

I agree with SunAndShadow, three years should be enough.  First year for Alpha, and start on beta assets and QA.  Second year for Beta and continued assets development and QA.  Third open beta (Let the riff raff in), final QA before Golden.

That's ridiculous.  It takes a long time and a lot of work before a game is ready for alpha testing.  Maybe you can get to alpha inside of a year if a game mostly consists of reusing work that has been done for other projects, but anything with much innovation in it is going to take some time.

waynejr2

Well, since you asked about Top-Notch, meaning the best, I would say it should take at least as long as the current top notch game took to develop.  Unless there is another top-notch game in development ahead of you, then it should take at least as long as that.

Nasa

To me 5 years seems to be the avarage. WoW and GW2 was 5 years.

One of the reasons Duke Nukem Forever took so long was because they had spent too much time creating the game that the engine got old, so they had to start again with newer engine many times.

sunandshadow

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by Konfess

I agree with SunAndShadow, three years should be enough.  First year for Alpha, and start on beta assets and QA.  Second year for Beta and continued assets development and QA.  Third open beta (Let the riff raff in), final QA before Golden.

That's ridiculous.  It takes a long time and a lot of work before a game is ready for alpha testing.  Maybe you can get to alpha inside of a year if a game mostly consists of reusing work that has been done for other projects, but anything with much innovation in it is going to take some time.

I was actually thinking more like:

- 6 months designing the core concept (team A)

- 6 months concurrently making the alpha for the core concept (team and designing the rest of the concept (team A)

- 1 1/2 years concurrently developing the alpha (team and the content for the game (Team C + contractors) and balancing/playtesting the parts that have been implemented (team A)  If kickstarting, publicity begins at the beginning of this phase; if private development, publicity begins in the middle and is limited to marketing to potential private beta members.

- 6 months private beta focused on bug extermination and load balancing (team .  (Team A has moved on to concepting first expansion except for small amounts of marketing/promotional/website/teaser stuff).

end of 3rd year = launch of public beta

This multi-team concurrent process is efficient but assumes you have money to throw at development staff.

ArChWind

more time and money than it's worth

Kabulozo

Graphically, western MMOs will always be weak compared to Korean-Jap MMOs, Lineage Eternal development started in 2008, the only video shown so far  is an alpha version from 2011 and it already looks better than ESO for example. More of the game will be shown at G-Star 2014 on November 20th 23rd.

 

Black Desert is the most gorgerous MMO I've seen thus far, Bless in second place.