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MMO industry serious problem : Too long development times.
Lobotomist
Member EpicPosts: 5,981
It is not news that MMO industry is having serious problems.
Ranging from originality. ( pick any mmo )
Failure to retain players even if the game is good. ( Rift , Aion )
More often than not MMOs seem like exact copy of older more sucessful MMO ( wow )
It came to such extreme situations that MMOs are closed same month they are released.
Just to name a few...
I think that one of main reasons is HUGE DEVELOPMENT TIME most MMOs go trough
Lets take one MMO of many : SWTOR
It was announced in 2008 , but the work on it began two years before.
2006 - 2012
This is six years of development.
But our world is changing so fast. And what was relative in 2006 is not relative in 2012
Let see few examples
2006 - Twitter
2007 - Steam
2008 - Iphone
2009 - Facebook (become profitable) rise of social
2010 - Ipad
2011 - Google+
I wont even go into how gaming world changed in 6 years. Graphic , gameplay trends , rise of the indy games.
Minecraft , Kinect , Angry Birds ...
Yet a MMO takes six years from concept to finish line.
This means that you are actually playing a game that is relevant to what was standard 6 years ago.
No wonder we see no innovation.
MMO development times should be cut much shorter. Perhaps the content should be more player generated. Or delivered by updates. In any way 6 year development trend is simply not feasable way of delivering fresh and relevant games.
Comments
And the astronomical amount of money. No investors are going to risk so much money in anything innovative.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
You do not know how much did they worked at any given time of the development. First 2 years might have been just design work for only a handful of people while the programmers, artists and so on were mainly working on other games.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
STO and CO show that development lenght is not the core of the problem. If SWTOR and GW2 will be successfull, it might actually show that it is required to have a long development time.
As for lack of innovation. We are not talking about some kind of art here. But commercial business. Risks are calculated here.
EDIT : I do think however that the long development time makes it very if not too difficult to determine potential success. But at the same time it is required to come up with a product that has enough content and polish, which is just the basis for a successfull MMO I think.
Might happen as development tools and other aspects become cheaper. The massive budget, massive content AAA mmo that takes years to develop is not going anywhere. All those games people call failures, still made some decent money and people enjoyed them for the 2 or 3 months they played.
Its not the work I am concerned.
Its the fact that 2006 most of gameplay features were determined.
Its the only way to go around it really.
You can not start development of a game before you know what the gameplay is.
It might have more relation to the payment model. OP's idea might work for B2P games. If STO and CO started out as some kind of hybrid f2p model, they might have been more successfull. If players can play without sub, they might be more forgiving about lack of content at release.
There's a good case to be made here. MMOs are a technology more than anything according to Jeff Strain's speech.
It's interesting to point out that Spacetime Studios originally created Blackstar MMO for PC, using their 3rd gen engine but after that was pulled by NCSoft they moved into the mobile scene and using this C++ engine on that platform where it's relatively feature-rich and competitive in that market. Lowering risk and delivering a faster product (ideally a suite of) to market are all attractive issues for investment but most Engines are x1 game, x1 long development exposure, x1 massive risk in a market already full of established mmos and a market full of future mmo built on better tech.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
I agree and disagree tbh.
Look at the development of Twitter, Steam, Facebook firstly;
The cycle here took a few years to get the system right, then promotion, and trial and error. If the game or MMO development had such a luxury, there would be alot more/better games out there.
Twitter: Was laughed at with people saying "Who needs that social chat, we have email"
Steam: "Valve just wants more market share, and who needs to be in contact with their friends all the time"
Facebook: "", sorry drawing a blank on this one, but it was not the first, think back to MySpace with a few addons and you have more people online wanting social games, hence the FaceBoom or is that facepalm.
Ipad is just another console without the plugs, ie portable. I can see its potencial once it gets rid of it's dippers or that Mac Dude gets out of the game. It's slow, full of issues, although it can sell out and get peoples attention.
Google+: These guys are only doing it because everyone else is, social platforms and they can get Ads on FaceBook and even more share when you sign your life away, I mean sign up for GooGle+. Personally I'm betting there is another better way/idea in someone's head atm and he/she's just in need of funding.
What I am getting at is that there are new ways of connecting people in games/mediums, yet how many of the latest MMO have dropped ingame "group/social" tools that we've gotten used to having and need in order to play their game in the first place. Some of the few I've tried haven't even got grouping options, or the add Friend feature, WTF.
Maybe they all try to be more like WoW than they realise. So, they have gazillions of online players "registered" but not always playing, socialising maybe, but they are on the buss looking out the window for something better. And this is where the Game Devs need to Think before they start making their game, deisgn it with some of the new "features" gamers want, then watch the WoW stomp.
Sadly I think the industry is in a stage (like back in the 80's) and looking for a fast buck rather than creating a game. Until that changes, we'll get the same. Maybe we'll see an MMO with Facebook/Steam/Twitter plugins where you can utilise the best features of the social Boom, I just wish they'd mature it abit.
Like your example, SWTOR, well it's getting Old, people want that other SW game mechanic back, say no more!
I kind of agree here. 6 years to develope a single game is kind of ridiculous.. I hope it is good.
Also, the constant pushing back of the release date... After awhile, people just lose interest. Of course you want a well polished game, but should it take 6 years to get to that point?
Add something that you know is gonna keep people happy and get people interested from the beginning and you will know how to develope your game and that you will have a hit on your hands.
All this copy and paste wow crap... Make something that will stand out and be unique and fun, not same old same old. That is my opinion. I think the game is taking so long because the devs are realizing that they cannot have a wow clone and be successfull so they are looking for more innovation.
"When it comes to GW2 any game is fair game"
It's all well and good to want MMOs developed faster, but that's the period of development time it takes for a fresh MMO to be competitive in today's market.
The biggest complaint in any new MMO is the lack of content. The new ones are competing against tried-and-true MMOs that have had a decade or more to improve and add content.
There are companies that come up with a different spin on gameplay and pump out their MMOs at a faster rate, like gpotato and Aeria Games. These games can afford to do so, because they only want to hook people in the beginning so that people buy Cash Shop items. They almost always lack any real content at the end, but by the time people get through the grind implemented, another MMO will be released to get people to invest in early Cash Shop items. The cycle continues.
Final Fantasy XIV is an example of an MMO that was released earlier than was ideal. Square Enix thought they could do what they did with FFXI, which was build steadily to become a juggernaut. Unfortunately, times have changed. Back when FFXI only had a few classes and was just starting out, there weren't a lot of MMOs to choose from. People had to put up with things they didn't like, because there were only a handful of MMOs to turn to. Nowadays, there are dozens if not hundreds that a player could easily play instead.
In order for a P2P MMO to survive, they have to hit the ground running and release content at a ridiculous rate. Players will no longer stand for a grind, so you'll have a game where players get to the end quickly and will be expecting content equal to the amounts that WoW or FFXI or Everquest have.
Where does that put developers? They can't implement long grinds to buy time for them to release content, because grinds now chase players away to other competitors. They essentially have to build from scratch what other MMOs have had almost a decade to provide. Not to mention, the older MMOs are also releasing new content to compete with the release of new MMOs. If you pay attention, giant content updates or massive patches generally coincide with release dates of an MMO that might be a competitor.
So it's pretty rough being an MMO developer as of late. Players have been spoiled, which is not necessarily a bad thing. People now know exactly what they want and what they don't, because they've experienced some form of both in other MMOs. It puts a tremendous amount of stress on a new MMO to be perfect from the start, which is unrealistic. These things take time.
You don't want "fast" development.
Look what happened to StarTrekOnline and how they wanted to develop it "fast", with a simple reskin of another game.
Art can't be hurried.
Problem is that recent MMORPG's have small amount of content. Due to new titles beign easy and providing very fast levelling , content gets old very fast. Those titles focus on raiding and while most of players don't raid. So most of players hit level cap much faster than in it was in older titles, and then get bored because they dont raid or enjoy grinding instances to death or don't have time for it.
Other possible thing that players could do are non-existant or simplified (crafting , housing ,exploring).
So players get bored and start leaving game.
Of course develop time is bit too long but that even get more ridiculous when you realize that game is developed for 5 years while providing enough content for 2-3 months due to how easy, fast and focused purely on intances/raids mmorpg's became.
Movies are based and often copy's of former big hits movies, paintings evolve by the artist before them, music evolves by the music before it. everyting works that way, and yes mmo's do to. inovation is a small thing that grows slowly whit every ten-twenty years getting a breaktrue much like in science.
the doom we seen in the past 5+ years of mmo's is not that they were realy bad games but the time spent on them after launch was done poorly.
Once a base mmo hits the market all sailors gota start sweeping the deck and make it shine more by adding new paint to it, Meaning you have to keep adding new mechanics to your game and already inc this in your design document. T
The best exsample of currently would be EvE online. they came out whit a base game, expanded the mechanics, and kept expanding it, they upgraded the grapics a bit (easy for a space game I admit) and meanwhile keep expanding the base game. the game is as playable and shiny now as it was on its release day, thats the way you can keep a mmo succesfull.
I always said it and I always will, Fluff = good. got a action mmo? add some freaking easy to code fishing mechanics in, add mini games. add everyting you can think of that your engine would suport and if needed expand the engine.
Funcom had this chance whit their enigine but failed big time by making the few mini games compleetly useless, its player towns useless, its crafting useless and all they realy did was adding more of the same content. thats a clear exsample of how not to do it. I hope they do better whit thier new game.
SW:ToR as we know will be a fairly bland game, it will be fun,hell ya, but it will be a base game some might run out of content whit quite fast. its their job to add more, stop thinking insite the box by simply adding more epic ionic awsome raids (most pll actualy hate raids and gear "token" grinds) and start thinking outside the box. if needed take a look at freaking FreeRealms and look how a damn simple game can be fun by adding tons of stuff to do (even if its designed for kids)
bleh..enoug of this, I will else never shutup when it comes to this kinda crap , 20+ years of mmo play does that to you...
Edits: Spelling,spaces,langugae stuff..still plenty wrong but readable now.. in 20+years my brain still aint tuned for non-native language :P
The highlighted red text is false actually.
During WoW's WotLK era, more than half the playerbase did at least one raid.
MMO's are a bit unique in the fact that you spend 50 hours in an MMO for a month and no one bats an eye.
Compared to single player, that's an awful lot of game-time. I finished Mass Effect2 4 times and stopped on my 5th playthrough. I have about 70 hours on that.
People will complain the content is too little but compared to game time of other single player titiles, they are not.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
I'd agree with other people who've mentioned that fast development time isn't necessarily a good thing for the players, which we are. Understanding the business is important to keep these games running and to create new titles, but there's a certain point where a developer has to decide if they're in it for the money or to create great games, and great games truly are a form of art (these two things don't have to be mutually exclusive, either). It's in the eye of the beholder, right?
So yeah, I get that these projects need funding, that they need to invest in safe projects with calculated risks, and that companies are looking at faster and more efficient ways of making MMO's, though aren't making any significant progress. In fact, of the examples that come to mind, STO and CO were two of the most flim-flam MMO's I've ever played, much of which I would attribute to the relatively short boil they received. In my opinion, they're the perfect example of business getting in the way of game design or production. Eventually there will be a time when those calculated risks turn into liabilities, and I don't know when, but it's hard for me to believe that they'll stay the same forever.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
I don't have a problem with the long development times of decent MMO's. If you want something like SW:TOR or GW2 then it'll take time. You want to play something else instead? No problem really, the quality games are just around the corner. If you want the eternal grind, then there are plenty of those around. Maybe people just expect to level up too quickly. Should you really be able to hit cap in a month?
Games with many levelling paths and options are worth waiting for. If those take time to develop then so be it. What is the alternative, only have p2p WoW and f2p korean grinders survive? I'm just glad there is a market out there for quality games and when they get here people will no doubt be all over them.
Waiting for Guild Wars 2, and maybe SWTOR until that time...
Heh , you do know creating a MMO is way different then a stand alone game right?
A MMO needs to be persistent without a ending , otherwise it wouldn't survive long. On the stand alone game , there is a ending.
The problem with the MMO industry is not the fact that they take years to release their product , the main issue is that they announce their product WAY too early.
So what happens? Look at SW : ToR for example , this game has been announced since WW2 , still not released. People expectations are off the charts since the game has been in developement for so long. And there's the problem , when the game WILL release , a load of people will be dissapointed and ditch out the game.
The Hype meter on this site is useless and shouldn't even be considered since you got fanbois creating thousands of accounts to 10 star the game.
Sw : ToR was a simple example , you got Diablo 3 , which was officialy announced back in 2007 , and we won't be seeing it by the end of this year. To be honest , It's been so long that I'm not even anticipating it's release anymore , and even if it were to release now , I'd go do some groceries and mow the lawn before MAYBE grabbing a copy.
There are still more examples of what were supposed to be GREAT MMOs but ended up being trash.
Bottom line , the main issue are Devs announcing their games way too early. If SW : ToR were to be announced right after Galaxies shut down , I swear no one would of cared that galaxies shuts down , but since ToR is taking forever since it was announced too early , people begin to have doubts. Which is normal.
Faster development is a big contention as the OP states: IE If you have a deadline, you can spend tons of time on delivering it be it a student dissertation, a month end or an MMO release date... but it's never going to be perfect if the deadline exists to limit how much effort is worth putting in.
So, with that in mind just look at a couple of engines and how they are marketed to prospective interested parties:
Hero Engine:
Unity Engine:
These all highlight concerns that devs want to optimize:
1. Faster dev time, reduce risk and cost also
2. Tools for actually iterating the game play and testing more rapidly all the systems that emerge together & multiplatform spreading the risk etc.
Definitely the case that dev time is a major part of the process of MMO but also a challenge to work solutions into shortening. That said, there are good reasons why eg ArenaNet or CCP produce their own MMO Engines.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
yes, perhaps, but do you have any idea as to what it would take to recode all the necessary parts to make each game look completely different, to play completely different from every other Unity game made...to add *anything* innovative you'd have to rewrite the engine entirely. this is not a linux kernel we're talking about here (and even building off that is tremendous work). Unity, Hero, etc., are fully formed engines. that means they come with inherent limits, limits the OP and others rightly point out begin to happen when a game is started 6 years ago. go take a look at a more open engine (not just open source, but open ended for content and coding) like Ogre and then come back and tell me how you are going to use it to build a game in the next 6months.
have you considered for instance, on the artistic end, just what it takes to animate a single motion? and *then* you have to code it so that animation works everytime on every single character of that type. gahd forbid they change armor or clothing and the animation that has to go into that. then all of that, how a cape billows about you as your toon runs into a fight, or how that same cape reacts to the fall from being knocked back on the ground, then build a database that holds all those things on your machine as reference points and then ask that database to actually locate you and a thousand others on an x.y.z axis that's different for every person fighting that same mob that knocked you back, or the thousand other mobs knocking others back. --and that's just the movement of a cape--
now do that with every single other thing each and every other character in a game does. this is not NWN mod editor. this is creating from scratch. and it is often easier to build off an engine you have created because you know what the game is going to do or not do.
i spent a bit of time doing research into game development, as i was also curious as to the length of time it took companies and just how the process moves. perhaps there are certain aspects you could speed up, but there are many you cannont. ie., you don't want slapped on code to an already existing engine w/o real development time.
aside from the specific examples above, think of the movement from concept, to financing, to creating each and every detail of that concept just in a form that can be understood and used by coders, writers, and artists alike, to the actual beginning of coding the game to work on just one machine, to the server code, the database code, and the list goes on, not including the *constant* testing and retesting just inside the company's division working on that game.
while i certainly agree there may be areas that could stand a reexamination i really feel that the OP and some others have not gotten a real grasp on what it actually takes to build a game, even using an already existing engine.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
It is not false. Doing ONE raid and raiding is totally diffrent things. I googled but I cannot find it now but I remember WoW developer stating that around 20% of subscribers actively raid. That corellate with my experience in various themepark games, I usually was in very casual guilds , but at same time I usually was in raiding alliances consisted from ppl from various guilds.
Most people that I knew and played with didnt raid at all, or even if they joined a raid (when my alliance needed 1-2 more ppl) almsot all of them havent expressed interest to raid more than very casually (like 1 a month). Most ppl don't have time or don't want to book their time 2-3 times a week for whole evenings. Not to mention to spent time to grind for consumeables ,follow raid guild/alliance rules ,etc.
Besides WotLK was long time ago, I am under an impression that traditional tiered raiding , got old since then.
Comparing single players game to mmorpg is bit missed imho. Publisher of SP don't have to keep you interested after you buy game , of course there are DLC's but that is not source of main income , in SP game.
I think that mmorpg's if they want to sustain subscribers population they HAVE to provide VARIOUS activities. Not just raids, instances and daily grind quests.
There are more ppl playing mmorpg's now than 5 or 10 years ago. Playerbase is diffrent as well.
So imho developers should cater not only for raiders who just want to level cap as soon as possible and start raiding , but also to diffrent players. Those who enjoy questing , those who like exploring , those who like crafting , those who like socializing , those who like to pvp.
Well, I'm still fairly new to coding but enjoying the ride so far and all the more appreciating the development process to be more and more complicated as I learn more about it, in fact. Interesting points above, but as stated, these engines are like any other part of the economy, getting different companies to specialize in different niches to speed up delivery and efficiency therefore having a competitive advantage through cutting costs leading to, in this case, more competitive implementations of mmos for different types of gameplay.
So yes, I still still think MMOs are in the process of long development, exacerbatingly so compared to any other game development (hence I'd doubt for the immediate future I'll ever attempt an mmo personally until eg Unity and such like can help me along ; ) ) But that said, even if you take these engines the concept is possible to produce a good mmo out of them one way or another and that is what reducing risk and dev time will tend towards, I'd say.
Ok, your argument is good that these engines limits are indeed a problem for looking for something different but the trend is "ENABLING" I'd say in the mmo industry towards better times ahead if the huge cost and develoment can be snipped downwards? That is the massive problem with MMO development atm, that high risk does not lend to innovation and subsequent lack of excitement from the forum users here, for new MMOs?
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
i agree with your last paragraph there wholeheartedly. i do think there is more than likely 'fat' that can be trimmed on the development time of things. but where exactly in that process, i'm just not educated enough to know.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
one thing is for sure, the last wave of triple A MMOs with short and rushed out development cycles nearly killed the MMO genre, almost burying it under a 10km high pile of horse shit.
Im totally willing to give long development cycles a chance, the alternative has proven to be beyond ridiculous...
Do you care to actually name them?
I've often wondered if MMOs would be much more successful if they cut way back on graphics, voice-overs, etc, to focus more on gameplay - not just for gameplay's sake, but in so doing, they wouldn't be so bogged down, unable to change due to the vast amount of resources used to just get where they are. They could be much more portable, flexible, adaptive. Dynamic.
With the much lower overhead of a shorter development cycle, and fewer employees needed, it would be a lot easier to turn a profit, too.
Look at the success of browser games like Runescape, or Facebook games like Farmville. How important is it really, to stay at the cutting edge, graphics-wise? I think its important for some genres, but MMOs just sacrifice way too much for it.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.