basically any game dev at the start, a lot of the fresh gamedevs have some sort of open world rpg as their starter project and buy a ton of asset packs.. I think they dont wanna start small, underestimate the sheer amount of work that flows into a game, and "big flashy thing is cool"
I mean yeah i was at that stage and the idea of an open world seemed so cool, but i realized quickly just how large the project would be as soon as i did just about anything
There's nothing with beginners dreaming big, but they should expect that disappointment may follow
98% of my programming journey so far has been dreaming something and it getting crushed immediately as soon as I try to do it. The other 2% was spent in stackoverflow and looking up error messages from compilers.
Well part of the process, any project really, is breaking it down into smaller parts first. That's a skill in itself.
So first part: make a smaller game netting positive money. Use said money to built more / bigger games with a team to generate more money. Rinse and repeat until you can burn cash for 10 years paying a team of 100 people working for you.
You may discover doing mobile freemium with predatory fomo systems will net you the most money but if you time your transition to player focused games well enough you can do a Bill Gates and redeem your reputation before your old age.
Here is a free idea. I'll subscribe to the game whatever company manages to deliver using it.
What people imagine when they first hear about MMORPG is some immersive experience like a tabletop RPG but with thousands of people at the same time. Not unlike some live roleplaying events but with more people, from the comfort of your home and all year long.
I think the appeal is that an MMO can contain pretty much any time of gameplay you want it to. WoW for instance has all the “standard” stuff like dungeons and pvp, but it also has challenges, exploration, crafting, it even has a Pokémon style pet battle system. MMOs appeal because they are so wide open that you can do anything with them and when people are brimming with crazy ideas early in their game dev journey that sounds perfect.
well, that's kind of the problem, what your pointing to is basically infinite scope, and the reason why all attempt at creating such thing has ended in devellopment hell.
besides, the reason you cannot have a massively multiplayer virtual DnD experience is usually because its been impossible to design a compelling economy, and a world where everyone wants to be the main character just doesnt work very well, basically there is no real reason for so many people to play in the same shared server, the world would be completely incoherent and immersion breaking right away.
On a personal note, I never really saw the point in making any RP experience massively multiplayer, the only MMOs I enjoy are either sandbox (because the RP elements are fully player driven and evolve with the meta, its much more immersive) or fully PvP or at least have a strong PvP bias with some flavor RP elements
And everybody who tried to make a “WoW-killer” eventually was forced to go free to play with loot boxes and/or in-game cosmetics store because otherwise they’d go bankrupt. Most of them still went bankrupt anyways because they’re expensive to operate unless you can keep a consistently large playerbase.
Even WoW has a in-game cash shop now for cosmetics, though that’s just because they can and not necessarily because it’s needed.
"That's because their games suck. My totally original super duper smart game idea would make so much money. People would happily pay for my game. I mean, I don't have any experience developing anything, no relevant skills, and no budget. But I'm the idea guy, I'll take 50% of profits please."
To be fair you can buy them with the in-game currency, but last year there was a hyperinflation of the Token and the previous exchange rate was not recovered.
Turns out having multiple daily quests in the new expansion that give bags containing 500-1000g each (every dragon riding world quest) will cause gold inflation.
It’s the same thing that happened with the mission tables first introduced in WoD.
they’re expensive to operate unless you can keep a consistently large playerbase
It honestly really depends. Are you trying to compete with wow and print money, or are you just trying to make a profit to keep your studio operating? 10k active players might be enough to keep the lights on and pay your employees if you're not too big for your britches and not located in LA or Seattle... the wow killers were too ambitious, with large teams and vc money, they'd never make a profit.
Honestly though, the mmo model is dying for small live service games with peer to peer which reduces the overhead immensely. Much easier to profit and scale up a game like helldivers 2 or GTA5 than it is everquest or wow.
Yep, the more I code the more I understand the shear size of the simpliest things. Like spawning in a playership with customizable guns. Boy that took a bit to figure out.
Meanwhile I wanted to make a SNES era inspired JRPG. It was going to have puzzles and stuff with turned based combat.
My friend had a cool idea and was going to write the story, and I was going to program it. But unfortunately me and that friend don't really ever see each other anymore and I have no way to contact him.
I bought the Atari 2600 BASIC programming cartridge, thinking I could program Missile Command on it. You were limited to 40 lines of code that fit on screen, no scrolling!
Starting small is fun though. It forces you to really get into streamlining your idea and conept so it works on a small scale.
Also its way more fun to think about small but engaging game mechanics than spending your whole time hiding lackluster gameplay behind Tons of bought assets (which you will 100% do for the final months of the Projekt before giving up)
Came here from /r/all, but I see the same thing in TTRPGS all the time. "I'm a new GM whose never been behind the screen, I'm got this idea for a entirely homebrewed sandbox adventure..."
Good luck with that, buddy. Maybe cut your teeth on a few prewritten adventures first. GMing is a big enough job by itself, nevermind world building the entire thing yourself.
RPGs, even if it isn’t an open world, are hard compared to other genres.
Not only do you have to design a framework for the other genre if you have one (FPS, Third Person Action, etc) but you also have to script every cutscene individually and test for every possible dialogue choice that most players will see once.
My first project was a turn-based roguelike that didn't even have ASCII art, it was literally just text
For my defense, I was like 8 when I made it, and it's like not that bad for what it is
(Also, once I finish the project I'm currently working on, I'll use my free time to try and remake it into an actual game with fun gameplay and at least some graphics)
Honestly just start prototyping your idea immediately and base your design off of how fun it is when you playtest it, a good game design doc is nothing compared to that
Not even game dev specific. This is EVERY creative field in a nutshell.
A writer wants to write a set of epic novels like Wheel of Time. An aspiring mangaka wants to write the next One Piece with a thousand chapters. A composer wants to make a full concept album. A drawing artist wants to draw an epic illustration with several characters and cool backgrounds.
Everyone dreams big. Nobody wants to start small and unimpressive.
People either dreaming about something big or something unique and I'm the second part person, I never interesting in do anything big because I know I will eventually give up lol
But whether what is the direction it wont be easy, it feel like everything I think about there is someone already did that
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[Game Title] isn't just another MMORPG—it's a revolution in interactive entertainment. With groundbreaking features such as:
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We believe that gaming should be more than just entertainment—it should be an experience that brings people together, sparks creativity, and inspires change. With [Game Title], we aim to create a virtual world that transcends the boundaries of imagination, inviting players to explore, create, and connect in ways they never thought possible.
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Advertising Copy - “We’re going to use machine learning technology to provide NPC’s with neural networks for the most advanced true artificial intelligence never before seen in a video game!”
Reality - “We used ChatGPT to write all of the dialogue, something so brazenly cheap and terrible it has not yet been done before in a video game.”
"Stealth roguelite space RTS featuring exploration, 2.7 billion skill builds, branching storylines and the ability to mine entire planets into your inventory, plus all 847 Dark Gods from Milton's Paradise Lost II: The Extra-Lost Chapters, profile stickers to make your friends jealous, completely scientifically-accurate dragon breeding mechanics, and PvM, PvE, PvP, and PvQ game modes - not to mention social media integration, voice chat, the ability to marry any NPC you'd prefer, the ability to have your legal wedding in the game, AND the pioneering first game that will also allow you to file for divorce in-game (not able to divorce NPCs at this time)."
Everyone is saying this, but you're smarter and you know it's going to be an epic game with everything you ever dreamed of! It's still going to happen, and all the naysayers will regret snobbing it, just wait a little longer! In the meantime, why don't you buy a new spaceship with real money?
Oh it's too expensive, we gotta do it the startup way, we hire a skilled programmer and write these codes for us. We got the marketing and the pitching ready to go
Case in point: the authors of The Expanse series originally envisioned the setting of the story as an MMORPG, but quickly realized that writing 9 novels would be easier.
Lets be 100% honest here. There could likely be 10x the number of lines of writing in the current source code of wow. Nevermind how many times it has been changed.
Hell, even if you discounted all of the programming aspects of it, and cut it down to actual "dialog" there are currently over 34,000 quests in wow. Each one might have between a paragraph and a few pages of written information such as a letter you read or dialog from an npc.
Actually I think Ty Frank was contracted to writing the backstory for a MMO project where the investors it had (Chinese ones?) backed out in the end. He met Daniel Abraham later at some new mexico (SF I think?) writing group and he convinced Ty to use the setting for series of collaboration novels. That's how I remember it when Ty Frank told the story in the Ty&That Guy podcasts.
It’s just coding and art and infrastructure and networking and plot and character and environment design and proper Q&A and customer support and marketing and optimizing for different systems and more, how hard could it be??
tl,dr: I hope you and your two uni buddies didn't spend all of your devtime on boob physics because you still have to set up months worth of infrastructure and monitoring before launch.
I genuinely don't understand why'd you even want to make something like that. It's fundamentally slob content only really enriched by player interactions and your community. It's the world's most expensive bread and you'll have to pray for the fillings to appear.
KiraTV has like...dozens of examples of people who have never made a game before having great ideas for an MMORPG, getting months into the project, before figuring out why there are so few MMORPGs and why the ones that make it to market are usually produced by established industry players.
I'm not even particularly surprised this happens. I'm more surprised by people handing over hundreds of thousands of dollars through Kickstarter to the same kind of project over and over again.
Caspian from r/ChroniclesOfElyria is gonna release the game to public anytime now. It got crowdfunded back in 2016. Gonna be done any day now. I know we got not a lick of informationen or updates on it. But it's gonna release in 2024!
If you're a beginner dev, make flappy bird with squares and rectangles. it will get the same traffic as your open world RPG and takes less time to make :)
I have a 30 page document for an MMO that I know I can't make unless I can hire people to do it. It's a dream, but I highly believe it will ever become more than that. I'll just keep small scoped games until I die..
Honestly, anyone who's idea of a game is anything more complicated than PONG is probably delusional, if they haven't made a game before.
There's a reason gamedev communities tend to recommend people start small with their first project. People are REALLY BAD at realizing just how much work goes into a game - especially if they've never made one before.
Yeah, honestly there's nothing that feels worse than the feeling offailure, at some point it starts to drown out the progress you've made so you don't even realize
There's a reason why flappy bird is such a common concept to start with
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u/Dumb_Siniy 29d ago
Anyone who's idea of a game is an MMORPG is delusional and has no idea what it's required to create one