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General: Timesink: Why MMOs Take So Long
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
MMORPG.com contributor Shannon Drake has been in and around the game development business for a while now and today begins his journey of answering the question: Why exactly does developing an MMO take so long when the final product doesn't always seem perfectly polished?
The problem with creating an MMO is that you're constructing a world, with all that implies, and it requires accounting for everything under the sun. Unless there's two suns, or no suns, or eight suns, or a combination of suns and moons, and what would that do to gravity, to daylight, to the religions on the planet... Part of the reason for the legendarily long development timeline is this world building, bringing a coherent world with rules and people and a history out of the aether of the design document.
Read Why MMOs Take So Long.
Comments
Was fun to read ^^ Humans are just humans , they cant help themself being jerks ^^
Maybe make a new jerk mmorpg ( not referring to anything sexual orientated ) ... who knows maybe it is the next WoW xD
That was a wonderful article! Very well thought out and presented.
<p align=center><a target=_blank href=http://www.nodiatis.com/personality.htm><img border=0 src=http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/20.jpg></a></p>;
Very interesting and informative article. At the end you should have something about 'then come the ad/marketing people who do know anything about games but sell it to stores, web sites, customers, etc'.
Wow, great article. Interesting read. One of the better ones I've read here in recent history.
Steam: Neph
Thank youn for the article. I enjoyed reading it :-)
EvE doors
See the best doors on EvE-on!
And at the the end of that the mmo market is very saturated. Definitely reinforces the "long-term" in development.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Definitely one of the best - and funniest - articles here in recent memory. Now pardon me while I go clean the coffee off my monitor...
Firebrand Art
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
RE: people will still complain about lag when they're trying to play The God King of Video Card Killers on Grandma's Wal-Mart Laptop.
... that's now about 5 years old.
Great article. This should be a "must read" for those who think devs write "sucky games" just because we hate players.
Awesome article.. The comments about jumping out a window and choking the griefer were well timed!
Great article.
I truly laughed at the described griefing.
Brought back memories :-).
Great article, everyone should be reading this, doesn't matter if you're a developer or a gamer or a trolling crybaby griefer.
Iam wondering who Shannon Drake is and why she/he(were in the interweb) is so pissed off.
Thats what i get outa this anyways.
This article is pretty much based on the assumption that everyone imagine a MMO in a "WOW world". How about some objectivety?
Whoever wrote this, got my atteantion for all the wrong reasons.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/261448/page/5
"I'd just like to see more games that focus on the world, and giving the people in it more of a role, im tired of these constant single player games that you can walk around with millions of people."
- Parsalin
Someone at MMORPG.com should write a server-side AI routine that automatically links this article whenever the argument about "OMG BUGGZ!" vs "Its still beta, moron" comes up. It could start by keying on variants of the phrase "Well I work for a software company and I know..."
In other words, a great article explaining the realities of any large-scale gaming project.
I can also roleplay the tower in a chess game and shout "is that a peasant at the horizon I see? I will smash it I will! Oh damn I broke one of my merlons!". -- maji
It felt both sad and nostalgic reading this article. Thanks, I enjoyed it, and the perspective it will hopefully give some of the people out there who seem to think developers are simply people who want to tick off their playerbase.
The best ones are when new content or a new game releases everyone is level 1, the first thing you hear is omg the lag, *the company* should have put good new servers in instead of these ancient slow things so we can play. A week or 2 later the whole place is empty, and people complain that they are wasting servers on old outdated areas.
Go figure.
Yes, a very good article indeed. It's a great insight into how "you" (or "we" in my perspective) totally aggravate, annoy, and just plain confuse the development teams.
Actually, I think you're the only one making that assumption. As one that has played a myrid of MMO's I would never make that leap that every MMO is based on the "WoW World" design (albeit I have no problem with that design, as appearently many do). I believe her/his point was that overall MMO's development takes time. Irregardless MMO they all of the game mechanics, world design, storyline design (lore in some MMO's), race/culture design, etc., etc., etc.
See she/he wasn't POed, she/he was just stating facts. Things the end user ( you and I), never see. So, she/he was a lot more objective than you give them credit for.
I just lost IQ points reading this dribble, there are so many holes you could shoot a shotgun at it from 50 feet away and not notice any new ones and not to mention the obvious but unless the servers arent on earth, they arent hundreds of thousands of miles away its impossible.
crimino ergo sum ,)
If there are no complaining customers and no player griefing happens, then how can you claim you got customers? Interesting read, but unfortunately that doesn't only apply to the gaming industry.
On the other hand I've been let down a few times by some publishers/development studios. Publishing some unfinished product, burying it because it was a financial disaster. In those cases they could at least make it open source so someone could more easily bugfix or adapt it to personal taste (even if only for private use). But I'm dreaming again and copyright laws will strike back.
I thought it was a good article. You should post some of those "holes" that you see.
Also, the author said "hundreds OR thousands of miles away" not "hundreds OF thousands of miles away."
Missed the hyperbole, did you?
I'm also curious what "holes" you see here, being that you are, I would assume, an expert in video game development.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Fantastic article! Well-written, very informative and astute, and made me smile all the way through. I look forward to more, Shannon ^^
Nice article. Wonderful read. Keep up the good work.
Gaming since Avalon Hill was making board games.
Played SWG, EVE, Fallen Earth, LOTRO, Rift, Vanguard, WoW, SWTOR, TSW, Tera
Tried Aoc, Aion, EQII, RoM, Vindictus, Darkfail, DDO, GW, PotBS
good read and so true!
It was a good article. A light read that didn't take a lot of time to figure out. This is how some sitcoms on TV should play out. Has truth in it, but it isn't making fun of anyone and everyone at the same time. Classic!