MMO Development Lesson #7
No MMO that came before yours was perfect. Even if that game has 5 or 10 million subscribers, it is not perfect. Never directly attempt to clone another game, and don’t be afraid of little innovations even if you are making a similar game. Blindly copying even specific features of a previous game is a fallacy; instead, you should determine why it was done the way it was, figure out if there is a better way to do it, and make that feature your own.
This also applies to the making of chocolate bars.
Listen up, you confectioners!
MMO Development Lesson #7
It is usually used by large companies who go ahead and copy all 7 levels of abstraction that makes a normal mmorpg. They dont understand that making changes in the first abstraction levels invalidates the design they import for higher abstraction levels, which does result in massive whining from the players once they reach these wierd and to their perspective undesireable designs.
It always seemed simple to me: Find what works in other games, and change it to make it work with yours. Not to copy, but to work off what has come before. As the old saying goes “No need to reinvent the wheel”. The saying says nothing about improving the wheel.
Funny thing about the “reinventing the wheel” line… the truth is, when it comes to program design, often times reinventing the wheel is exactly what you need to do. You look at someone else’s wheel and say “Hey, we need a wheel.” But you shouldn’t copy their wheel, you should start back at square one with a design goal of “wheel” and then implement the wheel yourself.
The trick is defining what the “wheel” is, and then figuring out how to get there. Usually, problems come from a lack of understanding about what it is they are really wanting that hurts them… some people will look at WoW and their quest dialog system and walk away with “Question marks and Exclamation points, with scrolling text.” Other people walk away with “Easy to navigate quest indicators and dialogs.” Your goal, your “wheel”, should be to design a quest interface that is easy to use and melds well with your other design elements… simply plopping in WoW’s quest interface might introduce more problems than it solves.
Yet you’ve still not reinvented the wheel (ie you still have implemented a dialog system (The Wheel), just modified the structure of the wheel to suit your needs).
*note: this seems to come down to what your definition of “reinvent” is lol
Saw LotRO (briefly). It’s like they learned from WoW - but only partly. It didn’t really strike me as a ‘whole game’ in and of it’s own right. Kind of like a half-ass version of WoW. Interface and Gameply still a little clunky, and graphics WAAAYYY to resource intensive. I’ll be surprised if it does much better than Vanguard or EQII in the long run.
Right. Hence one of my favorite phrases: I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, I want to change it from wood to rubber.
You don’t have to completely come up with completely new things, given that the wheel already exists, as do procedures for creating one. But just because there’s a wheel it doesn’t mean you can’t make a better one.
Okay okay, I agree…
I think the essential qualities of MMOs tend to filter out the gimmicky ones as time goes on. The nature of the MMO has devs changing their own game with time. If they don’t catch it, the next game developer will, and it won’t be a problem.
Sure, there are some problems that are perpetual, but I feel like those are mostly due to technical or budgetary constraints.
Sooner or later the domain-squatter types are going to come to our little town and start buying up the vacant lots. What are we going to do when people start patenting their MMO-gameplay-design innovations to stop other people from building on them? If someone had thought to patent the Quest Journal, where would we be today?
Extremely good at memory games?
“If someone had thought to patent the Quest Journal, where would we be today?”
Playing with an Adventurer’s Diary that does the same thing.
Patent, not trademark