Why do I feel like our new studio can make something as titanic as an MMO faster than the big boys can make? The three things that take the longest on big games are in my experience: making a new engine, making a shit load of content, and stabilizing the design. 1/ - ThreadSky

ghostcrawler.bsky.social • 66 days ago

Why do I feel like our new studio can make something as titanic as an MMO faster than the big boys can make? The three things that take the longest on big games are in my experience: making a new engine, making a shit load of content, and stabilizing the design. 1/

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libertyogre.bsky.social•65 days ago

Greg, do you think that “Go fast, break things” is the way to make an MMO?

ghostcrawler.bsky.social•64 days ago

I like the go fast part. There is a time to try a lot of crazy experiments and then there is a time to assume everything is shipping. I've been on too many games that hit this point where they need 12 months to "go build it for real now" and that just kills momentum

libertyogre.bsky.social•64 days ago

Thank you so much for your answer. I’ve played a bunch of your past work and loved it so it’s kind of an honor, sir.

rikuharkonen.bsky.social•66 days ago

Is it ok to ask what kind of resources you had for learning making an MMO in Unreal Engine? Was everything just, sorry for bad English, but "close enough". For example there are tons of resources for Multiplayer less so for MMO. Or did the people you hire already have experience in this?

ghostcrawler.bsky.social•64 days ago

We hired people with Unreal experience and often MMO experience. We had to do a lot of the server-side of things ourselves. Unreal does the cilent.

tymage.bsky.social•63 days ago

rooting for ghost!

ghostcrawler.bsky.social•66 days ago

We aren't making a new engine. We are using Unreal. This is probably the right answer for most new games these days. 2/

ghostcrawler.bsky.social•66 days ago

We will have shit loads of content, but we'll be smart about it, knowing how it bogs down game dev. For starters, a lot of our content is systemic. This isn't the same as procedurally generated (though that's a tactic we will use). PvP is something systemic, because it provides "endless" content. 3/

ghostcrawler.bsky.social•66 days ago

Our Blue Zones provide a lot of content in an efficient way and are (ideally) fun to explore as well in a way that static levels are not always fun to explore. 4/

ghostcrawler.bsky.social•66 days ago

Beyond that, we are building tools and pipelines to parallelize art development. (When I was on WoW, we couldn't make bosses until the dungeon art was done for example.) That way when we are ready for art, we can make a lot quickly, including using outsourcers. 5/

ghostcrawler.bsky.social•66 days ago

That leads design churn as our big risk to delay. It's impossible to reduce this risk to zero because frequently playtest just goes in different ways than you expect. Ideas turn out to be bad and so on. But we are going to be vigilant about constantly pivoting on the creative direction. 6/

ghostcrawler.bsky.social•66 days ago

Our vision is locked, and it's my job to ensure that doesn't waver. We also don't have stakeholders who suffer from "Elden Ring syndrome" where someone plays a new game and then demands games in progress immediately pivot to chase that game. 7/

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