Dance emotes are important. It’s important not to limit yourself to just one /dance emote as well. The more the merrier, and the more hilarious, the better. This isn’t just important for in-game fun, but it’s tremendously important for out-of-game fun, not to mention it’s a wonderful marketing tool you can empower your players with. It’s the root of some of the best grassroots marketing I’ve ever seen related to massively multiplayer games. Continue Reading »

Technology doesn’t sell. The FPS genre is well-known for creating the most cutting edge games using the most cutting edge technologies. In fact, you might say that an FPS can do pretty well if only it is technologically superior to others. This is absolutely not the case for MMOs, particularly because of the large number of people that have to be able to be on the screen at once. If you’re relying on your cool technology to sell your MMO, get ready for failure, because any cool technology you incorporate into an MMO has more than likely already been seen in another genre. Sure, cool tech in an MMO can help sales, but not that much.

Quality is paramount. In today’s market, and the market of tomorrow, quality is becoming more and more important. There is so much competition that creating a product with the assumption that quantity (of features, landmass, etc.) is greater than quality, you will almost undoubtedly fail (especially if you attempt to follow the same business model as other games). Polish the hell out of your product, and don’t make any small sacrifices or they will pile up over time. And, never say that quality is what matters most without following through.

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.

There’s an interesting effort that I caught wind of from a coworker who went to MIT called The Restaurant Game Project. The reason I mention that he went there is that this is being run by someone at MIT, hence his wind catching and my resultant wind catching. Anyway, the project aims to algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of many players to create a new game that will be submitted to the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Continue Reading »

Resist the desire to make frequent, minor tweaks. Any small tweak you make to a spell, an item, or anything will be perceived as a nerf if that tweak is downward, and will be perceived as negligible if that tweak is upward. Things don’t have to be perfectly balanced as long as they’re nearly balanced. For those minor tweaks upward, bundle them together as part of your major patch and the effect will be felt more significantly, and that’s also the time to make tweaks down if you have to. Note the word “minor.”

Your company’s reputation matters. Really, really matters. With the amount of involvement communities of players have with one another and with communities of other players, every time you take a reputation hit it reverberates throughout a huge chunk of your potential user base. How do you preserve your reputation? Don’t do things that are disreputable. It’s as simple as that. The internet has a permanent memory, so anything you do that can harm your reputation will not be forgotten, whether you like it or not.

Design the game for your audience, not for yourself. This is the hardest one in the world to follow, because all developers have opinions and preferences. Determine your game’s intended audience, and design the game according to what they will like, not what you will like. If you want to make a game for a broad audience, this is especially important, because game developers are generally extremely skilled and experienced gamers, and we are a limited audience.

No feature creep. It’s better to have a short list of tightly knit features than a long list of features that don’t play nice together. Even if you have 100 awesome features, if they don’t all work well together, they will actually make the game worse (not to mention less accessible, because it’s hard to learn that many features). It’s much better to focus on a smaller set of features, make sure they all play nice together, and polish the hell out of them.

Two of the really tough decisions you’ll ever make when creating a massively multiplayer game are: how many people should be in a single game world, and how much space should that world cover? Do you make one massive, seamless server? Do you make a massive, instanced server? Do you make a bunch of worlds? It’s a tough decision, and there isn’t a heck of a lot of formal research to base such a decision on. Continue Reading »