The original version of Everquest

So what’s made WoW so successful, straight from launch? Well, two of the three lead designers on the game (Rob “Furor” Pardo and Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan) were both heavy players of the EverQuest series of games, being part of the same guild. This meant that although you had a veteran game designer in the form of Tom Chilton, it’s reasonably safe to assume that the design team were focused strongly on what concepts would make the game more fun for the player and which would pull away from that. With this in place, concepts that had previously been traditional in MMOs (such as a heavy death penalty) were abandoned and new ones that rewarded players (such as granting players a bonus for taking regular breaks) became the norm. Before the game was even announced, the stage was set for World of Warcraft to become a mainstream MMO, designed from the core with the player in mind.

By the same token, development of a new MMO can be a high-cost, high-risk business. Blizzard managed to mitigate a large chunk of this risk by using the same root engine for both World of Warcraft and Warcraft III, the continuation of their real-time-strategy series, forking development part-way down the process so that they could be tailored for their eventual purpose. This meant that a lot of datafile formats and toolsets could be repurposed to go from one game to another, allowing you to share your development cost between three titles. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing was happening with their current in-development titles, Diablo III and Starcraft II. This afforded them additional luxuries not commonly known to game developers – additional development time. WoW was in production for about 5 years while various design choices were implemented, tested and so on.  One often used mantra by Blizzard designers is “iterate, iterate, iterate” or continually revisit concepts until you’re completely happy with how they work. By comparison, most other MMOs tend to go through a punishing two year development cycle where as much as possible is crammed in before launch, with further content promised as patch updates later.

Age of Conan: looks pretty, lacks content

Following on from this Blizzard had a couple of luxuries. The low polygon count strategy allowed the art and animation teams to create a large amount of assets – items, creatures, monsters, environments and so on – quickly and easily. This meant that they could ramp up the number of developers working on questing content such as building storylines, developing quest hubs and generally making sure that there was plenty of content to lead a player from one area of the game to another. By contrast, most MMOs of late (I’m thinking of Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan) have been really heavy on pushing the realism factor or advancing graphical capabilities in order to win some screenshot space in the videogaming press, or to have some flyover videos to impress the public with.  Eye candy might be great for the initial wow factor, but it’s content that keeps people hooked and playing for months on end.

Finally, Betas. Now, I’ve taken part in a few beta trials, and they’ve usually been of the kind that starts about 3 months before release, just in order to make sure that there are no glaring problems with the wide variety of hardware out there. This was particularly the case with Tabula Rasa and Hellgate: London, where the beta was more of a pre-release demo than an external testing phase. Compare that with the 7 month beta window that WoW had before release and the sheer amount of changes and revamps that took place when developers found concepts that just weren’t working for players. Even post-lanch, Blizzard kept piling on the pressure by releasing new content on a regular basis. This allowed gamers to build confidence with Blizzard and the development teams, reassuring them that they wouldn’t be left with a game that suffers from a lack of post-release support.

So as you can see, Blizzard made several strategic choices that gave their movement into the MMO arena the best possible chance to succeed.

Hellgate: London eventually flagshipped

It’s only natural to assume that as a result, other publishers would consider learning from this and foster their own creative paths in order to support the mammoth amount of work that an MMO requires. Unfortunately, this hasn’t exactly been the case. In LOTRO the game was pretty but dull, with a huge amount of “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” and not enough “how do we make this fun to play?”.  In Age of Conan the game suffered from a lack of cohesion between the various different aspects – items had stats associated with them but it wasn’t obvious how each stat benefited your character, and crafting and player economies were severely neglected. In Hellgate: London, Flagship Studios tried to circumvent a large part of the development process by having different aspects of the world being randomly generated on the fly, but this only served to make areas feel repetitive and indistinct once the scenery had been encountered a handful of times. Not only that, but the nascent development company got heavily tarred with an internet meme that only grew as they became insolvent.

That hasn’t stopped studios from taking risks and developing MMOs. Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Trek Online, DC Universe Online, Jumpgate Evolution and Otherland to name but a few. Of these, I have fairly high hopes for SW:TOR as it’s being developed by Bioware, formerly of Neverwinter Nights and Mass Effect fame.  They’re used to developing role-playing games with a high level of content (particularly with NWN, which also featured a high level of online capability). I would also really like to see Jumpgate Evolution succeed, but it feels like Codemasters are going down the same roads they have before. They haven’t started a beta phase yet they’re proclaiming a release window of Spring 2009, which goes back to my point earlier about betas being used as a pre-release demo. I’d also really like to see Otherland succeed, but I’m concerned that RealU (the developers, based in Singapore) may have bitten off more than they can chew with an MMO being the first title they’ll release. I’d hate to see this turn into another Flagship.

Will games companies treat the MMO concept as something that requires a unique design path and strategy, respecting what players wants are in order to make a game with true mass-market appeal? Or will they cave to the demands of their publishers and stockholders to produce games that ship within a rigid release window, but ultimately fall flat? Is it possible for a developer to achieve both of these goals? Is an MMO the right thing for a newborn developer to focus on, or should they earn their stripes by pushing out some easier to develop but still hard to do well traditional role-playing games beforehand? It seems that as long as we have studios willing to venture into MMO territory, and as long as we have publishers to finance them, that we’ll see developers going over the same classic mistakes and fail to gain any meaningful market share. Blizzard has already demonstrated there’s a huge mass market out there waiting for the developer that gets it right. It’s just up to the developer to figure out what the right moves are.