MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER
ONLINE GAMES
In This Chapter
• Differences between MMOs and Other Games
• Pre-Production
• Production
• Post-Production
9.1 I
NTRODUCTION
A
Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO) is a game that hosts
hundreds of thousands of live players at any one time. The players can
interact with each other in a real time persistent world, meaning events
in the game world continue to occur even when the player is not logged in and
actively playing the game. The games are built on client-server architecture
and are constantly in use because players are enjoying the game 24 hours a day,
7 days a week. MMOs present some unique production challenges, especially
during the post-production phase when the game goes live and real people start
interacting with the game universe.
While it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the production chal-
lenges in detail, it is important to highlight some of them so that they can be
planned for in the game development cycle. Todd Keister, a producer working
at ZeniMax Online, contributed to this chapter. He has extensive experience
producing MMOs and agreed to share his knowledge on the topic.
Chapter 9Chapter 9
146 THE GAME PRODUCTION HANDBOOK, 2/E
9.2 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MMOS AND OTHER GAMES
There are several key differences between and an MMO and a traditional
console or PC game. While a console or PC game may include online features,
the features usually limit the number of players that can be online and the game
world is not persistent. The hallmark of the MMO is persistent character data
in a persistent world. This, coupled with the player character’s long-term pro-
gression and the amount of content necessary to populate the vast game world,
requires much client, server, and data management—much more than a tradi-
tional PC or console games with an online component.
Many MMOs do not have a traditional box release. The web handles an
increasing percentage of distribution versus the traditional brick and mortar
retailers. Many players still buy the box at their favorite electronics chain or
game store, but more and more are paying to download the entire game to their
computers without leaving home. Many game companies or publishing groups
provide portals to facilitate the communication of their players while also push-
ing new games and new products to the audience via the portal.
Most MMOs employ some type of subscription model to generate revenue.
Some models are built around the players paying a monthly fee, while others are
based on a free-to-play model where money is charged to access extra content
and features in the game. The simple monthly subscription model has evolved
to digital object models, episodic content models, and others, and consumer
habits have changed to support these shifts. iTunes demonstrates how readily
people will pay for a digital object ($0.99 for a song), and NetFlix illustrates how
readily a consumer will pay for the a service that lets them frontload content (for
example, select three videos ahead of your current one in a queue). More and
more games are leveraging these emergent trends with huge financial success.
New game content is also released on a regular basis to keep things fresh in the
game so that people will continue to play the game. Sometimes the new content
may be a few new weapons or items, while in other cases the content may be
a full blown expansion where new levels, characters, quests, and features are
added to the game.
Early in a game’s lifecycle, patches are often need-based to address criti-
cal bugs or system flaws that became apparent with the flood of new players
entering the world. Regular upkeep in terms of bug fixes and gameplay balance
changes occur at constant intervals—about once a week. You also have free
content updates that tend to be larger patches and come with much less fre-
quency. Because of the massive number of people that the game supports, it
is important to address a critical issue as soon as possible so the issue does not
get worse as more people encounter it. For example, there might be a quest
that mistakenly hands out a cash reward of 10,000 pieces of gold instead of the
intended 10 pieces gold. And, it just so happens that this hypothetical quest is
MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAMES 147
early in the main story questline that most players hit when their character is
around level 8. Quickly, the economy that was painstakingly balanced for months
by a systems team is now destroyed because all the players are buying all the top
of the line gear and killing the progression curve.
Finally, the production team is not finished with the game once it ships.
There is no chance for them to take comp time at the end of the project to
recharge their batteries. Instead, the team is very busy for anywhere from
30 to 90 days after the game is released. The team must monitor the game when
it goes live and be on hand to quickly fix any issues that may be uncovered with
gameplay balance, unexpected bugs, billing and authentication issues, and so
on. In addition, a customer support team must constantly monitor the game to
ensure that everything is up and running correctly and the players aren’t experi-
encing any issues that prevent them from playing the game.
9.3 PRE-PRODUCTION
As with other games, pre-production is a key phase in MMO development. The
stakeholders in the project need to agree on fundamental principles guiding the
vision of the overall game. One example is the financial model—will the game
support micropurchases or be based on a subscription model? From a design
standpoint, decisions must be made about whether the game will focus on player
versus player (PVP) encounters or player versus environment (PVE) encoun-
ters. In addition, technology decisions have to be made about the pipeline, tools,
game engine, art specifications, and so on.
Technology Issues
Because of the game architecture, the technology needs for an MMO are much
different than for other games with online components. Some general things to
consider are technology level you will have at launch, as in how cutting edge will
the technology be in the game. For example, what are the minimum hardware
specifications for the end users, how detailed will the graphics rendering be, and
how will be physics interactions be handled. Keep in mind that overestimating
the target technical landscape can be detrimental to product market impact and
sustainability.
It is critical to define a scalable model for the client-server-data architecture.
In an MMO, the game has to juggle a massive amount of data. This includes a
huge number of assets from animations, to textures, to particles, as well as links
to all of the data to messages from the server to coordinate positional data, per-
sistent data giving information about who can have which skills and how many
points were spent on them and the player character’s general inventory. All this
148 THE GAME PRODUCTION HANDBOOK, 2/E
information must be completely tied into the client, and give the players the
feeling that they are absolutely in the moment of the gameplay with all of their
actions seemingly taking place immediately when they push a button. Simply put,
all of your game data, character data, billing data, worldspace data, and player
inputs are activating and propagating based on the messaging layer between the
client and server and the data management system (commonly a database). The
client is the player’s window into this new world, and it has to be smooth in its
rendering and message priority handling so that the world environment appears
seamless and immersive and the controls appear to give instant feedback to
actions in the game.
On the server side, you need to define how you are handing the game data.
For example, how is player data being distributed across the network? What is
the best way to send a minimum amount of data to the player in order to keep
the player status correctly updated in real time? Small data packages are key to
minimizing the amount of bandwidth used and preventing latency issues with the
server. Other things to consider include what types of messages you will send the
player and how often you will send them. You don’t want the memory buffer to
fill up with messages that are not truly important for the player.
Another important issue to address is how the game will deal with server
latency. Latency is basically a delay in the time that it takes a packet of data to
transmit from the player’s computer to the game’s server, and for the server to
transmit a packet of data back to the computer. A developer will want to design
the game systems so that the least amount of information needs to be transmit-
ted between the client and server. This ensures that message buffers do not
overfill and drop packets, and that other generally negative issues don’t influ-
ence the game experience. Server latency impacts the overall game design, so
keep this issue in mind when designing the animation systems and other areas
where the player may notice latency issues while playing.
It is helpful to agree on the subscription model in pre-production. Everything
is built around what this model is going to be so that the back-end hooks can be
built during production. This includes decisions about how to handle the account
tracking, player tracking, and user reports, and also what systems are needed to
provide the ability to tweak gameplay values easily. It is important to have these
systems running before you get any humans into the game, so that you can
resolves issues sooner instead of having them grow into bigger problems later on.
Without many repeated efforts to test the gameplay systems and streamline how
the game collects data, processes data, and presents data to the other teams (who
will react to it), you could easily create a situation you are ill equipped to resolve
in a timely fashion. Using bots to test these systems can provide months of useful
data toward towards resolving any issues that human players may encounter.
While there are some middleware options for MMO, there are limitations
to using them. Each product has strengths and weaknesses, so it is important
MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAMES 149
to evaluate these options carefully during pre-production. Some middleware
solutions provide excellent content-creation tools but may lack aspects of the
network layer. Others may provide an amazing renderer with amazing visual
potential, but have shortcomings in other areas. There is currently not a one-stop
shop for the perfect MMO creation package.
Design Issues
Games like World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 have formalized the standard
features expected to be in any top-quality (AAA) MMO. If these features aren’t
in the game, it will directly impact the sustainability of the product. This set of
expected features expands as each new MMO arrives in the marketplace and
adds more features or more polish to the existing features. For example, tools to
enable players to look for their groups or to plan raids have evolved considerably
in a relatively short time. The core feature is very dense and includes such fea-
tures as: Chat functionality and versatility, friends list, search for friends, support
for guilds, quest system, mail and auction house systems, and fast travel systems.
The main goal is to keep the player logging back into the game, so you will also
need to include some features that set the game apart, as well as the core fea-
tures that the player expects. Keep the barrier to entry low, and this includes
support for low-end machines or you risk alienating a technical demographic.
Some games that actually intend to be “high-end” with regards to technology,
can fall short of the critical mass of players needed to perpetuate the title for
years and years. Simply, if your game cannot run on systems with minimum
specifications, you alienate a huge market share and thereby limit the game’s
potential success.
When defining the core gameplay concept, create a strong character devel-
opment template early in the process and build the gameplay around how char-
acters will interact and work in groups. This is basically an overall guide of the
abilities of a class, how the class advances over time, how the class is balanced in
comparison to the other classes, the distinct role of the class (if applicable), and
the end-game role concept. It is a good idea to also include ways that other play-
ers can understand the strengths and weaknesses of each class, so that players
can easily understand which classes to include in groups and large party raids.
For instance, someone playing a lumberjack character needs to be able to easily
figure out what type of characters and classes would be useful to add to a group
in order to undertake a particular quest. A player needs to be able to recognize
the benefit adding of another character type to his party, as well as understand
what to do when battling with a specific character type. Building these early and
iterating on the basic gameplay and balance will provide a strong foundation for
the game, and then systems and features can be built around this base to aug-
ment the gameplay experience.
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