Everyone complains about MMOs, but nobody does anything about them. The Guardian reports today about Multiverse, a platform for developing your own MMOs.
Now, making a MMO is a massive job. Art assets, customizable UIs, game balance, quest design, encounter scripting and AI… these are all really, really hard things, and while Multiverse may make it easy to make an empty world and run around in it, that’s pretty much the easiest thing to do of them all (and there are already plenty of engines that do just that — the Unreal engines, for example).
The meat will come with what other things they offer. A basic skeletal MMO, with dungeons, combat, magic, effects, avatars, cities and so on that you could then extend through some sort of cut-and-paste mechanism… similar to Neverwinter Nights’ constuction set… where 95% is given and it’s your job to add the 5% that makes it your own… now, that would be worth looking at.
And perhaps that’s exactly what they give… I don’t know… I know other places are working on very similar things, and one of them is mentioned in the article that (alas) I cannot talk about… it’s worth a download to see if it’s anything more than an empty world that would require a concerted team effort to make anything usable.
Â
4 thoughts on “Want an MMO? Roll your own.”
Comments are closed.
I can’t see it being much different that something like neverwinter nights. What would be very cool is if they give you an API to use – so – you could use their API to add things more complicated than writing scripts.
My cousins BF is currently attempting to do this, although it isn’t sounding too promising yet.
I wish it was as easy as that Lishian. It seems a lot less wieldy than those tools though. I’d love to create an online game for me and my friends to enjoy… but I don’t have the talent, or the time.
Anyone want to fund me? :p
It would probably be a far better idea to use a construction set, such as NWN or WC3, to gently ease into game design. I had a little measure of fame in the 80s for making two player boardgames that ran over BSD using sockets. You’d think that would be the easiest kind of multiplayer game to do, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but it was tough… one of the players had to become an ad hoc server, and then what if they left, what if more than one person tried to connect at the same time, or if they just wanted to play vs the computer… all these things stood in the way of actually writing the ‘fun’ part of the game. Though it was incredibly educational and relevant to where I worked at the time, it was clear that expanding this to, say, a version of Nethack where multiple people could play, would be a real effort.
My son started designing levels in Warcraft 3… it’s a very low barrier to entry and a quick way to build chops. I think I’ll probably avoid things like Multiverse which are likely nearly impossible for a single person to manage to produce a worthwhile game.