Title Clarification
EverQuest (1999) is listed alongside WoW because World of Warcraft (2004) is, for all intents and purposes, EverQuest with none of its weaknesses. Pause this video (retrieved 3/26/2025) from Ion Blaze Gaming (retrieved 3/26/2025) to see an example.
It looks like Orgrimmar, doesn’t it?
Lastly, in ‘post-EverQuest and World of Warcraft,’ I don’t mean departing from their design principles but explaining the fantasy MMORPG genre in the wake of their success. Also keep in mind that some of the design concepts that are featured in WoW didn’t exist for its earlier contemporaries. Though EverQuest also had raids (Lady Vox as an example), they weren’t ‘instanced’ or given as much structural design and interface tools like in WoW. Another example is how Ultima Online (1997) is a ‘sandbox’ and therefore doesn’t have a preset line of progression like dungeons or raids.
Introduction
As a kid, one of my favorite things to do was perch on my father’s leg like a parrot and watch him play World of Warcraft in the eveningtime. He became interested in the game upon seeing the Ozzy Osbourne commercials on one of his increasingly boring lunch breaks. Being left with nothing else to do, presented with an innocuous interest, having a mind that I inherited, and influenced by his appreciation for the eternally eccentric Osbourne, he gave the game a chance. His first character was a Dwarf Warrior, but his most successful was a Night Elf Hunter named Saedorim. In Wrath of the Lich King (2008), he had full sets of Epic PvE and PvP gear, which was typically used in Wintergrasp, along with some other dungeoneering and raiding. One of the most vivid memories I have of those times was seeing him riding into The Crossroads, an enemy town, at about ten levels below the guard’s levels just to make us both laugh; he knew full well that his Level 30 Hunter on his fancy white tiger wasn’t going to make it out. He also had success with a Human Priest named Sanador; once he realized healers aren’t supposed to get attacked and stopped running around like a moron, he was a proficient enough healer to do some raiding, like The Obsidian Sanctum and Karazhan. Seven or eight-year-old Origen walked in on him playing the game and asked, ‘What’s that?’ Upon climbing into my old man’s lap to watch his adventures with his tall purple ranger-dude, once I saw the lofty achievements and gear others had, and especially when I created and deleted my first chain of Level 7 characters, adoration bloomed in my ignorant childhood mind. None of my characters ever succeeded, of course, but at least baby Origen proved that he was unusually good at naming characters.
I haven’t played too many MMORPGs in my time, having some spats with Rift (2011), Path of Exile (2013), and Lord of the Rings Online (2007)1 in my young teenage years before falling out of love with the genre, until World of Warcraft’s resurgence in the mid- to late-2010s. I have always, however, been an MMORPG enthusiast, and as I’ve been somewhat possessed by my own inborn fascination with western high fantasy, I figured my meager expertise could be of some use to traditionalists who want to create something which isn’t just another political statement. I will be offering a list of pointers and objectives and use a wide variety of MMORPGs that I have since researched as examples for them. World of Warcraft will remain my primary reference, as it’s the game readers will be most familiar with. I won’t get into technical specifics, as no two games in this genre have the same code, but I will discuss game design and its technical execution more generally as is appropriate. As the title suggests, I’ll mainly be discussing the concepts and ideas behind an MMORPG and how to do them well.
As always, further examination is required, like looking into the developer commentary about said games and prudentially studying their industry. Remember that neither I nor the average reader have any training or experience in their business. Someone who possesses above average intelligence and is very fond of a certain field or product, but has no training or experience in its actual business and work, can become a great historian, but they have the urge to make objective statements about what the best and worst ways to conduct said business are with a clueless lack of reference, inevitably turning them into toxic fanboys. This is the Meltzer Law, named after infamous wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer. Lastly, any MMORPG with a committed fanbase and an in-game currency will have a black market, though the intricacies of this are also beyond my scope.
#1: The Basic Idea of an MMORPG
The idea of a massively-multiplayer online roleplaying-game, where the acronym MMORPG comes from, is that your players are people in a fantasy world where most concerns of life don’t exist and they can be heroes. This establishes one thing before all others: because you’re marketing a product to people, you must reasonably cater to their vision of what a good game in the genre is; a game exactly to your liking will only have an audience of one. Then we find another invaluable truth: you should never pander to fans. A good game will attract attention organically, naturally, insomuch as it’s evergreen and has merit in itself as it’s supposed to as a product, while a pandering ‘attention-grab,’ ‘cash-grab,’ or ‘slop’ game is worthless.
Being a derivative of old-school roleplaying games, the setting of most MMORPGs is contemporary western pulp-fantasy. Science-fiction MMORPGs exist, as do modern apocalyptic MMORPGs, but the western fantasy ones have been the most successful, and though the majority of gameplay and social mechanics are translatable between each aesthetic, fantasy is the subject of this discussion. I say ‘pulp’ because the MMORPG, like the tabletop RPGs before it, don’t take faithful inspiration from any particular kind of cultural storytelling or canon, instead watering down Tolkien’s works (Tolkien himself taking an almost infinite amount of inspiration from European storytelling and history) and throwing in a bunch of themes, characters, and ideas from medieval English, steampunk, Asian, Amerindian, Victorian, Irish, and natural-spectacle aesthetics, look, and myth, typically used to differentiate certain characters, peoples, areas, and parts of the game. For example, Dwarves typically have Scottish accents but retain the majority of their Norse character. Most races in general are based off of real life ethno-cultural groups, like this race is ‘the British people’ and that race is ‘the ancient Chinese people.’
The objective of such stories is to be innocent, enjoyable, and unburdened with the senselessly horrific things that occur in real life. Therefore, while they almost always feature gruesome and terrible things like murder, devils, and inhumane experiments, this is all taken in good fun, while subjects like sexual assault simply don’t fit. MMORPGs can sometimes be serious, but these moments and themes occur within the context of the fantasy.
Because you’re looking to make another fantasy franchise and are marketing it to players for them to play in, you must make your players important by giving them a story to take center stage in. Within ambition perhaps juvenile and childish, combat is the most significant action due to its unparalleled risk and danger. Because of this, and the moralistic bent of mankind in general, true fantasy is centered around special heroes battling the forces of evil. It has the glory and validation of combat in story and rarely any of the tribulations of real combat. As they play, the story within which players are the protagonists is the most consistent central canonical focus. When players play second fiddle for other characters, i.e., characters you create, they can become annoyed. This is like a dungeon master making his own character the star of the show, like he’s playing with dolls, while his players merely play along in what should be their game. A rule of thumb is that they’re play-ers, not play-along. Players will only accept being sidelined for other characters in two cases: when said characters are good and popular, as their presentation will reward the players enough to make their relative irrelevance a non-issue, and when non-player characters are needed to progress an essential sequence of events, like a dialogue exchange before a fight.
Being a game, the MMORPG is an exercise or portrayal of a fantasy made for players to personally advance through; some kind of action has to be taken, otherwise there’s no game. Being a massively-multiplayer online game, there’s no concentrated story, save/load feature, or ending. The game can never change without an established reason and organized execution, because it’s being sold to multiple people who can arrive and leave as they please and must therefore be completely standardized. Non-player characters have to respawn if killed, borders have to remain the same, quests and their rewards must be consistent, the game has to be more of a business than an ‘interactive story.’ For instance, a restaurant must always offer the same menu so all customers can get what they want from the brand that they associate with certain kinds of food, so it’s up to the customer to order different items rather than the same ones over and over. Therefore, the action and resulting change must occur entirely within the players’ characters, hence, along with the fantasy theme, players must grow more powerful and proficient in the game’s interface. Here, we can recall how the idea of ‘magic’ is, in traditional culture and therefore humanity in its only real form, taken from the idea of a divine science with which religiously aligned practitioners can enact their beliefs on the world around them with supernatural abilities. The term ‘power-fantasy’ is crude, but not entirely wrong. Similarly, the game’s world is effectively a obstacle course wearing lore and a plot.
On a gaming level, players will optimize their character’s playstyle, complete goals, and, at higher levels of play, speedrun, challenge-run, and compete against each other. Remember that there can be no goal without an obstacle, no players or items or powers without something to use them on, no fantasy or awe of the world without a presence more significant than the players that not only isn’t like them, but is more often than not hostile to them. Something big to aspire to. In an MMORPG, players are killing enemies, bettering their ability to kill enemies, or going somewhere else to kill other enemies. Furthermore, there can be no fantasy world without a wilderness that makes itself meaningful to players through the infliction of consequences, and powerful and unknown rewards to find. As is well-known, the un-known remains the most profound provoker of attention and imagination for people, both in happiness and in horror. Remember also that there’s no unknown without the known, no abnormal without the normal; the mountain is only impressive because of the ground around it. An MMORPG can be neither too mundane nor too hectic. It must remain grounded. Here we get to the general theory of action within story: beginning modestly, and slowly rising, with peaks of action and palette-cleansing inaction along the way. Given that player activity doesn’t vary much in an MMORPG, the action within their story only truly begins peaking in the very late stages, where the frontline heroes are fighting the important battle. That doesn’t mean the game is boring, though, because consistent player advancement can keep the player chugging along almost indefinitely.
Being a video game, an MMORPG is a network of interactive and responsive code wearing a costume. All things in the game, from the code which must be hidden to the character statistics your players must be able to see, are numbers, some to be raised, some lowered, some limiting the degree to which another can be raised (think a ‘population cap’ in a strategy game), all of them interacting with each other in some way or another as cogs in a machine. As can be seen with idle games or grind-heavy games, the game’s numbers tend to be separated between repetitions of a certain formula, invariably represented as currency or a certain resource because that’s exactly what it is. Bigger, easy numbers working towards increasingly smaller, harder numbers, until the whole thing resets, like ‘ascension’ in an idle game. If that sounds abstract, think about players farming one particular resource for some kind of exchange for a more important resource or currency. Aside from the ‘exchange’ interaction with these numbers, there’s also the ‘bounty,’ where the better you perform in a competition of some kind, the more of a reward or higher of a number you can get, be it in official competition, gathering resources from certain kinds of enemies, or looting players. Problems like bugs and glitches are solved through small and regular updates called patches. If a technical problem in a game is more severe, immediate action must be taken. Furthermore, patches can be larger, insomuch as they go past fixing some bugs or glitches and make larger changes to the game. Most patches, however, are simple bugfixes.
The most important of an MMORPG’s metrics are the players’ ‘levels.’ In roleplaying games, levels denote the general range of power that something is in, from a player to an item; it’s the largest-scale, most determinant number. In almost all cases, a higher level means more power. Its numbers, health, damage, etc., are bigger than something that’s lower-level. This range of power must exist for two reasons. Existentially, the range of power is what allows the fantasy reality to exist. Practically, given that the personal advancement that players play for happens almost entirely within their own character, because the world must be constant so all people can play, there needs to be a ladder to climb. As levels dictate practically everything a player can do, increasing their level is the first and most important kind of progression they can achieve. It’s only sensible to have players start at the bottom of the ladder, with only the bare essentials to work with, and have them grow from there, working on their progress as they play. This maximizes how much they can do and keeps the game from devolving into constant spectacle. The second most important number is ‘experience,’ the currency with which levels are increased. Experience, named after the real-world accumulation of understanding through practice or observation, is a meter that tracks how much productive activity the player has done with their character. It can be gathered less slowly depending on how optimally the player plays, but never too quickly, otherwise you trivialize the game. Small amounts of experience can also be gained by safer tasks, like earning an in-game achievement, gathering a resource, winning a competition, discovering a location that’s new to that character, killing an enemy in a particularly stylish manner or perhaps without taking damage, or logging into the game consistently. Keep in mind that having easy ways to gain experience in your game is a sign of desperation and low-quality.
This ‘productive activity’ takes two inseparable forms for the first chapter of a player’s playthrough: killing enemies around their level, and completing tasks given to them by NPCs. These tasks are called ‘quests.’ The purpose of quests is to get the player along while still bringing the world to life. The most basic kind of quests are leveling quests, which are completed to increase your level. They reward the player for completing some objective with a considerable amount of experience, a small but not insignificant amount of currency, as it’ll add up over time, and occasional choices between a few pieces of equipment, the latter becoming increasingly frequent as the player levels higher and equipment standards increase. Occasionally, quests will reward the player with some nicety like a consumable, food, or niche item that might make the player’s journey a little easier. After they’re max level, players will then work on other, more niche and specialized modes of progression, whose quests are usually rarer, longer, and more esoteric, in other words, more like a traditional ‘quest’ in pre-Christian heroism. Leveling quests are normally found among a concentrated group of static non-player characters, whose purpose is to offer players quests conveniently and in bulk. These groups are the dots along which a player’s leveling must trace, going from one to another, steadily growing in power and level as they do. Quests and enemies that are too far below the player’s level either have significantly reduced rewards or none at all, because this would allow players to exclusively focus on the easiest quests available and severely exploit the game.
Normally, quests can only be done once. The majority of quests, leveling or not, direct players to an area full of enemies at least reasonably close to the questgiving group to do some variation of the same thing: kill a certain number of them, loot things off them, go into their territory to get or interact with a specific item or person, inevitably killing some enemies along the way, et cetera. Either way, they’re sent into an assigned wilderness zone for a little while, and then they come back. Quests can also have players safely gather specific items to bring back, though this can get boring, or go to another NPC for some specified reason, like directing them towards a service that’s in their interest to use. Given how easy these tasks are, barely anything is rewarded; in other words, quests operate under the labor theory of value, because it’s fantasy.
The last quest in one of these groups tend to direct the player to the next area; we can therefore see that the puzzle of designing these zones or hubs is to increase the player’s power, but not too much, and to do so with difficulty, but, again, not too much. The quests each of these groups give the player must cover all the bases, as it were, with all specific types of task being given at least once; even if it’s all the same kind of ‘go to this place and kill these critters’ task, remember how big of a difference it is to have quests which phrase it differently, like one telling you to go gather some story item, and another telling you to kill a specific enemy, and another telling you to rescue someone, rather than just ‘go here and kill enough dudes to level up, then come back and move along.’ Players may not express much focus on setting, story, and how the game specifically executes it, but they care; the main reason players tend to favor one MMORPG over any other is because of its unique blend of colors, characters, and chores.
Most of the questgivers will send players on one or two quests, while a certain few will have ‘quest chains,’ where a questgiver has players do multiple errands one after another. This is where most of the story of that particular section is told, and it’s usually given by its primary authority figure. A frequent model for a quest chain story is that players have been undermining a certain enemy’s power base and are now ready to attack him directly, the attack being the final quest. Quest chains allow for quests to become different or slightly more difficult and rewarding until the chain ends, albeit at the cost of having to run back and forth between relevant locations and the questgiver multiple times. This is why most MMORPGs give the player a certain item or ability that allows them to skip a bit of travel once in a while, usually by teleporting to a town, their modest utility compensating for the rarely-noticed nonsensicality of how these things exist, how everyone has them, and how they’re mysteriously only used by the players. Depending on how these items work, players can get inventive, like running around and completing content far away before hitting the ‘go home’ button and maximizing its benefit.
After at least a handful of quests, though advanced chains can have several, normal quest chains end in one of three ways: they simply end, with no special final task, the last quest is to move to the next area, or the last quest is particularly large and difficult. Outside of areas where teamwork can’t be expected from players, like starting zones that have to account for noobs or areas where the player is isolated, the final quest in a quest chain is usually a group effort that would be too difficult for a single player to do, typically going into an area with otherwise normal enemies of noticeably higher level, greater number, and/or a special status that boosts their combat abilities significantly. This ‘status,’ whatever form it takes, is a smart way to avoid having to make the enemies too high level, to have too many of them, and to make them repetitive, because an ‘elite’ enemy can be made different in appearance, design, etc. to those around it.
When a character has a large enough amount of experience, this causes them to ‘level up.’ Leveling up increases their level by one, as is sensible, makes them a little more powerful, and, most importantly, unlocks a little more of the game for the player to pursue, like new character abilities, quests in more advanced areas, and more powerful items. The leveling grind and combat-oriented quests are indeed repetitive, but these are the only MMORPG institutions that keep players playing the game as intended; for a tame example regarding quests, if your quests were primarily those of older games and consisted more of puzzles and bringing very specific items to very specific places or people, there would be no way to maintain progression, as players would simply figure out what to do, circulate the information, and finish them within minutes or even seconds.
I have two examples of games that demonstrate what happens when roleplaying games fail to maintain the sense of personal progression: Sid Meier’s Pirates! (2004 remake) and Mount & Blade: Warband (2010). Both are single-player RPGs in which you’re a generic adventurer in a romanticized version of a famous historical time period. Both let you do most whatever you want in the open world, though swashbuckling is overwhelmingly favored, as there’s no other way to progress or, frankly, to find entertainment. In both, you marshal an increasingly imposing military force and assert your will on your surroundings. The open world is fought over by multiple factions who, outside of aesthetics, starting situation, different troops, and different equipment choices, are all the same. Neither has a specific end, instead having a general goal of personal advancement. I describe all this so the next fact is more understandable: in both Pirates! and Warband, once you max out your character’s progression, like reaching 126 Fame in the former and achieving a world conquest in the latter, there’s literally no other reason to play. The more you do, the less there is. With Pirates!, the game becomes noticeably emptier as you vanquish the other Top 10 Pirates and reach Duke rank with two of the four European powers. You might as well be the only ship on the water. With Warband, the game becomes noticeably emptier once you overcome the beginning stages of your playthrough, which is to amass an army or fulfill your character’s general combat strategy, becoming a repetitive series of formalities that would likely be better off playing itself. At that point, Warband comfortably pulls ahead with a wealth of mods that can rival that of any other game, while Pirates! only has graphical or texture mods. MMORPGs, meanwhile, are able to keep the direct sense of increasing personal power much longer and more satisfactorily through abilities, items, content, and, most importantly, the presence of other people.
This cannot be overlooked: community allows MMORPGs to be 90% of what they are. Played solo, they’re overly big, overly empty, and overly-reliant on standardized, watered down gameplay.
Now for practical considerations. Firstly, let players know what they’re supposed to do. For an MMORPG, this typically means using roads to indicate pathways to relevant locations, making the final task in one area be to travel to the next, using context clues in NPC dialogue to explain what something is if players have no reasonable way of figuring it out themselves, and having new characters spawn either right in front of their first questgiver or in a location with only one way out which inevitably meets the questgiver. Secondly, as difficult to finely describe as this is, you must also balance the game. If a game is exploitable, its design doesn’t work, and will inevitably become uninteresting due to being trivialized. For instance, you must keep players balanced on their road to power by only allowing them to use equipment, fight enemies, and complete tasks that are for their level. In single-player open-world RPGs, ways in which equipment, companions, and/or money are gained are both more linear and more immediately powerful, while boss fights typically have the player fight an enemy that’s much tougher than them, but only has a limited amount of attacks. Therefore, players that understand the game can become powerful far sooner than they’re supposed to, bypassing general stat requirements with game knowledge and making massive leaps in power. This is okay for a single-player game because this overpowered player is isolated in their own world, but the consequences of this in an MMORPG can be, and have been, devastating.
We’ve discussed players and the general role of enemies, but what about everyone else? The faction leaders, the merchants, the questgivers? I’ve named them ‘non-player characters,’ the pretend-people of the world. NPCs are designed and placed in the world to be beneficial to players and serve certain purposes, like bartering, guarding points of interest, giving them quests to do, and many more roles both mundane and specialized; they hardly ever exist for their own sake, and when they do, it’s almost always an external reference to something. NPCs can be anything from a villager to an archmage, and serve as a large plurality of your world’s set dressing. NPCs can be hostile to players under certain circumstances, like if a player attacked their faction before or belongs to an opposed faction, but in order to serve their purpose as friendlies, they need to be amenable to at least some. Enemies are also NPCs, as they’re AI entities that interact with players, but I’ll refer to them as enemies to avoid confusion between the boss monster and the milk vendor.
Next, there’s world design. MMORPGs are universally open world. The core principle of good fiction is to make unrealistic things act or exist as realistically as possible. In a fantasy MMORPG, the world you design must be a scaled-down version of a realistic terrestrial planet inhabited by sentient, humanoid life. Roads, towns, peaks, valleys, harbors, cities, et cetera. It must be scaled down, however, to accommodate a relatively miniscule population compared to real life, and given that they’re player characters, they don’t need homes, garages, grocery stores, et cetera, and their models can pass through each other. For a spacefaring MMORPG, it’s best to imagine the significant areas of your game as islands surrounded by water, only the water is outer space. Worlds that are more condensed versions of real human landscapes are the only environment which can sufficiently accommodate the large number of players you’re looking to get without, of course, including the travel time of real life. Whatever form it takes, no one likes a world that’s ‘video-gamey’ insomuch as it’s not useful to normal people and obviously made for a video game character to run around in.
An MMORPG world is pieced together with six kinds of zone, each fulfilling a major need for your players, and there shouldn’t be too many or too few of them. The first kind of zone is the city, a pillar of the game’s world which has anything and everything the players need. They typically have multiple districts or sections for various kinds of needs, like places for different classes to train their abilities and accept specialized quests, places for characters to learn different professions, and its own ‘auction house,’ a market where players can list whatever they want at any price they want in the hopes that someone will buy it. Auction houses are critical to any MMORPG, as they allow economics to develop in an organic, non-toxic way to the benefit of all. Players will always be looking to exchange things with each other, economics is part of human nature, so unless you standardize and formalize exchange yourself, it’ll be completely left to the scammers and gold-sellers of the world. Cities typically have few quests, as they’re inconvenient to complete and there’re no mundane enemies around them, requiring these quests to be more specialized. Cities are heavily guarded, completely safe from all threats except a full-scale assault from an organized group of dozens of powerful enemy players; given how refined today’s players are, it would only take a few minutes for the Discord call-to-arms to amass dozens of defending players who are just as good and overpowered as their attackers. Cities should have a certain zone of influence in their location, as if it’s forbidden to place a city within a certain distance of another or within the same theater. Practically, you don’t need many of them, as the playerbase will eventually fixate on one or, if the world is enormous, two or three cities as being the cities to go to, flocking there and mostly neglecting the others. On a technical level, cities demand a massive amount of land, not only for them, but for everything around them to be made thematically fitting, logical within the contexts of their world, and safe for players of all levels to get to them unimpeded. A mountain peak rests on a mountain, and the mountain itself rests on all the ground around the base. Have your cities obey the logic of real life cities as far as placement, function, and role in your world as best you can, but don’t get pedantic. The second kind of zone is the village, a hub that’s significantly smaller and less advanced than a city where players can get quests and basic goods and services from groups of NPCs. The aforementioned groups of questgivers that players arrive to and move on from are typically made into villages, where guards can protect the hub from external attacks, players can be served by other NPCs, and which allow the world to be more developed and alive in general; why have questgivers just be some random gaggle standing around when you can make so much more out of the hub they represent? Villages have general store NPCs that sell things like basic food and materials. They also typically have points of interest for player professions, like a water source so players can fish, presented as a nearby lake, a river that cuts through town, or an underground pool. If there’s cooking in your game, all villages will have at least one applicable fire or oven. Another mechanic you can use is the mailbox, which players can use to send items to other characters for a small postage price. Today, this is considered a rudimentary quality of life feature, and all villages have one, usually put outside a building players are likely to go to. Lord of the Rings Online allows players to send mail whenever they want without the need for a mailbox or similar appliance. Depending on how relevant a village is to a player’s leveling journey, it could have all the class and profession trainers or none of them. The first few villages players go to when leveling will always have every relevant trainer, because every player goes to them. In the late-game, villages have few trainers if any, because the world has decentralized and most players just go to cities for whatever they need. Finally, each village, from Level 1, will have a “tavern,” an area where players can log out and gain bonuses for, according to the game, resting in a designated rest area. Cities have all the amenities mentioned thus far, plus anything else a player could need. In World of Warcraft, anywhere in a city is deemed a rest area, even the very entrance of the city and its random alleyways. Occasionally, villages are involved in more advanced quests or plotlines, typically with certain NPCs that are out of the way and serve no apparent purpose before then, or major events that change the in-game world for everyone. Outside of this, they’re left alone.
The third kind of zone is the passive instance. Passive instances are specialized areas which are loaded separately from the rest of the world; a character inside an instance can’t be seen by someone outside, and a character who’s chased by an enemy inside an instance who gets out is usually safe. I call these instances ‘passive’ because they serve no purpose to the outside world, only those inside. The point where the outside world ends and the instance begins is typically marked with a portal or similar symbol. Passive instances are usually specialized locations for a specific questline or for group content, like dungeons. They aren’t supposed to be wandered in by just anyone. Passive instances are typically tucked in or under another kind of zone, painted as dens, lairs, hideouts, or enclaves. They can even be placed in a city, which should not be commonplace, but if done properly, it makes dungeoneering very convenient, as all the services of the city are right outside. However, this comes at the cost of having to make up an excuse as to why this threat was just allowed to be under one of the most civilized and heavily-defended areas in the world. In WoW, Ragefire Chasm is a conspiracy, and for The Stockade in Stormwind, it’s a prison break. The fourth kind of zone is the island. The island is an out-of-the-way place that serves a very specific purpose. Islands are perfect for class quests, special factions, and group efforts which aren’t an instance. The most natural landmark for this secluded zone is an island, hence the name. Islands are rarely in early-game zones, because early zones are universal and need to have a wealth of content.
The fifth kind of zone is the starting zone. The starting zone is, as the name implies, where some players will first spawn in upon entering the game with their character. I say ‘some.’ It’s common sense to give each race its own starting zone. Giving an area to each race is critical for creating in-game racial identities, portraying story, and giving players more variety in their characters. Having multiple starting zones also works to prevent too many players from having to coexist in the same zone. Starting zones and everything in them are finite, so overcrowding will make completing quests almost impossible because everything keeps getting killed and taken. Starting zones have two parts: the inner starting zone and the outer starting zone. The inner starting zone is where players first hatch from the loading screen. As established, they typically pop up right in front of a questgiver, who will start them on the questing route. The inner starting zone has a variety of simple quests to get the players’ feet wet. Early progression is normally very fast for two reasons: firstly, fast leveling gets players invested, and secondly, the players are too weak to access 99% of the game, so the one road they can take must get them there both quickly and effectively. Inner starting zones are sheltered and heavily guarded to ensure that fledgling players and their environment aren’t messed with, and they have all the services a player might need. The sheltered nature of starting zones also makes sure that those who leave are given as much direction as possible; usually, it’ll be one single road that quickly leads to a village. After a character advances a few levels and sorts out their business, they can leave the inner starting zone and go into the outer starting zone. The outer starting zone is where the game opens up, looking more like its normal self. Here the players will find their first true village and fully explore the game for the first time, although still at an accelerated pace. Inner starting zones never have specialized instances like dungeons, that’s counterintuitive to their purpose as basic tutorials. Outer starting zones sometimes do, but they’re never meant to be played at lower-levels. Dungeons made for very low-level characters could be doable, but the main problem with this is how to design a dungeon around characters who have almost none of their abilities unlocked. Instances within starting zones are always far out of the way so low-level players won’t be bothered by them. Traditional MMORPG design wisdom has cities within or near each starting zone. Cities are accessible early in expansion packs too, because making major hubs quickly available for players as a base of operations is a convenience there isn’t any reason to withhold. The sixth and final kind of zone is the wilderness. The wilderness is outside civilization, and is where normal enemies are located. There are two kinds of wilderness: specific wilderness and general wilderness. Specific wilderness is designed for a specific use, typically for players to quest in them. Players are sent here to do some quests, and when they’re done, the players are either told to go back with more quests or directed to another specific wilderness. General wilderness is, put simply, the land between everything else. It doesn’t have anything particular in it, and players aren’t pointed there for any reason except if they want to gather resources or kill enemies undisturbed. General wilderness should always have enemies in it to give players something to do and so the world never looks empty. In this diagram of Dun Morogh, you can see the different zones.
#1: The city, Ironforge.
#2: The village, Kharanos.
#3: The passive instance, Gnomeregan.
#4: There isn’t an island in this region; Dun Morogh is a starting zone.
#5: The inner starting zone, Coldridge Valley.
#6.a: The specific wilderness, Frostmane Hold.
#6.b: The general wilderness between Gnomeregan and Ironforge, where there isn’t anything in particular.
Now we get to the planetary level. MMORPG zones are confederations of individually different regions that serve different level ranges. These regions are mostly self-contained. They have at least one village, a source of quests, several sections of specific wilderness, usually an instance, and general wilderness everywhere else. Starting zones and cities rarely have instances, so the normal regions carry the vast majority of them. There must be enough to do in each region for players to level up enough and upgrade their equipment enough to move on to the next region. For visual design, games that give each region a significantly different climate and inhabitants to their neighboring regions give players a lot of variety, but also look haphazardly stitched together. Most of the time, it’s best to have each region look related but significantly different to their neighbors. Within each region, players will engage in a cycle of ‘action, management, action, management.’ The civilized world is the only place where players can access half the game, like trainers, vendors, questgivers, and taverns, while the wilderness is the only place where the players can access the other half, like monsters, the vast majority of instances, and resources for professions, like animals that can be skinned and herbs to be picked. As for the paint with which these areas are to be brought to life, anything that can serve its intended purpose and at least makes sense for the story is fine. For a thick and either cold or temperate forest, have wolves as some of the default enemies, and have quests related to survival or guerilla warfare, the people you talk to for this being exactly the kind of people you would find living in such a climate. Most importantly, everything must have a purpose. Because you’re creating such a large game and suffering the inherent costs of development, and to pursue the virtue of efficiency in general, you can’t squander space or resources. A location or group of NPCs doesn’t have to experience much traffic, be necessary for progression, or always have the players’ attention, or be useful to every player in your game. It just has to have some reason to exist.
The question arises: why does a civilized world still have enemies immediately within its borders and between its villages and cities? Why are all the starting zones, basically home, still threatened by the same old threats? It seems completely lawless and unmaintained, yet no one ever gets attacked and no village is ever assaulted by enemy NPCs unless a setpiece is programmed. The answer is that, again, the MMORPG’s world is an obstacle course, cloaked under the guise of a world.
#2: Classes
In RPGs, characters function like tools, made in preset molds and used for different things. Not all characters can be identical. Making all characters generic would both be uninteresting and impossible to design around.
This established, you’re inevitably going to have four basic classes:
The heavily armed and armored melee specialist whose purpose is to distract enemies that would otherwise threaten more frail allies.
The shifty melee specialist who can inflict high damage under the right circumstances. Arguably the best class in player-versus-player combat.
The sorcerer with a wide range of magical abilities, from damage to utility. Arguably the best class overall, and normally the easiest to play.
The holy man who can heal allies and bolster their abilities. Arguably the most important class due to their stressful role and relative lack of offensive ability, which make them less appealing to most players.
You simply can’t go without them, a stricture made evident inter-player relations. When fighting powerful end-game enemies, you must have ‘tanks,’ characters who can protect allies by keeping the enemy’s attention and resisting damage as best they can. Tanks have a litany of abilities at their disposal to either force the enemy to attack them or convince them to through maintaining what is often called ‘threat,’ the metric by which enemies determine their targets. The name ‘threat’ is a bit silly because a boss would obviously go after the healers and DPS first and break up the cooperation-reliant party of squishy mortals wouldn’t be difficult, but such semantical issues are a constant in basically any field. Speaking of, you must have ‘DPS,’ characters who can deal sufficient damage to the enemy to dispatch them, ‘DPS’ meaning damage-per-second. Finally, you must have ‘healers,’ characters who can maintain their allies’ condition, especially the tanks. To keep DPS from being obsoleted, make enemies engaged by such groups have an ‘enrage timer,’ where, after a certain length of time, their speed and damage output increases significantly, ideally too much to handle. This will make quality DPS imperative. There are usually far more DPS characters than tanks or healers in an average group of players, and this is normal. For every boss monster, only one or two tanks and a couple of healers are necessary, with every other role in the group filled with damage-dealers whose job is to gun down the bad guy as efficiently as possible, among some secondary roles. There are outliers, of course, like The Four Horsemen in vanilla World of Warcraft Naxxramas, which required far more tanks and healers than usual due to there being four boss monsters, all equal in stature. MMORPG tactics are to subvert and overwhelm, the only route for your players, as they are, at the highest level, combating enemies who are far stronger than them but predictable. This class structure also applies to player-versus-player combat, but to a limited extent, as other players are smarter and aren’t affected by threat.
You can, and should, have more classes than just these, however, including classes that are effectively hybrids between one and another. For instance, a paladin is a mixture of a fighter and cleric, a heavily armored holy knight. Also commonly included are wizard-type classes who use darker magic, like the Necromancer Calling in Rift. Practically any kind of magic-user can be made if the class is well-rounded, defined in purpose, balanced, and fleshed out. All you have to do is theme their magic around an idea. Druids are themed around particularly European naturalistic purity, like terrestrial life and the Moon, and shamans are themed around naturally-occurring elements like fire and lightning. Both are naturalists, but have different emphases. Mages are practically blank slates; fire mages, frost mages, death mages, illusion mages, et cetera. Shaolin-inspired monks are also a common sight, like in Dungeons & Dragons (1974-present), as are corrupted paladins called death knights, like those in D&D and EverQuest.
The defining, make-or-break soul of a class is that class’s purpose and identity. A fighter class must play like a fighter, specializing almost exclusively in mundane or melee weapons, able to wear all types of armor but only ever wearing heavy armor, not being able to use magic, et cetera. However, keep in mind that a class like this will be more difficult to level than most others. Yes, it’s tankier, but it doesn’t have magic to leverage, is completely reliant on the quality of its equipment to function, and actually takes more damage than other classes due to its specialization in melee combat; enemies will always hit a fighter, but not always a wizard. Wizards, meanwhile, if given a wide enough variety of magical powers, will find character advancement much easier than others.
Furthermore, establish what is called ‘class fantasy.’ Have players perform tasks that are specific and thematic to their class. Fighters typically have to travel to a location to be subjected to a challenge meant to test their mettle. The class fantasy for darker magic users is typically comprised of the stereotypical thing villains do to gain in power: skittering across the world, outside the auspices of any social presence or law, to prepare for a secret ritual, like looking for specific reagents or killing certain targets, before returning to their n’er-do-well enclave and doing the deed.
However, most importantly, you must ensure that each class can get players results. Classes are, at their core, different ways in which players can fight the game. A class that takes too much investment to make good or seemingly isn’t designed with the game in mind isn’t worth the player’s time. In Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), for instance, the stealth archer build is by far the most viable for what I think are three reasons. Firstly, you don’t have to face enemies head on, get near them, or even alert them like you would with a mage or melee build. Secondly, you don’t have to invest nearly as much into a stealth archer build as you do a melee build or especially a mage. With the former, you must keep your equipment up to date at all times, having little bag space as a result, and specialize in a certain kind of weapon to the detriment of all others, only to be left with an inflexible character that, though a little tougher than normal, doesn’t have the tricks of a mage or archer and is useless against anything they can’t overpower. With the latter, you must sacrifice absolutely everything to make yourself better at magic just to be combatively viable against some enemies. All a stealth archer requires is a bow and some arrows. They can still use armor and some limited magic while not suffering any particular weaknesses in their game, including not having to run around as much to either get a better melee engagement or twiddle your thumbs waiting for your Magicka to recharge. Thirdly, stealth archers are effective in all situations and contexts, whereas melee builds are impotent against anything that can beat them in hand-to-hand or that they can’t reach, and mages are impotent against anything that’s unaffected by whatever magic they’ve specialized in or that can pin them down. Here we see the player not being incentivized to play the game, but to get around the game, otherwise they’ll perform suboptimally, and obviously so.
#3: Class Abilities
Characters can’t only have damage-dealing abilities or they would all feel the same. Though every wizard class has a basic magic projectile attack, only differing in how good it is and what color it is, and every melee class has a ‘hit the enemy right now’ button, all classes must have useful utility powers unique to them. Fighters typically have abilities that increase their defense, useful for tanking, but they also have abilities that disable or neutralize the enemy in some way, like disarming them of their weapon. Rogues, being assassin-type characters, almost always have and rely on a stealth ability to enable most of their playstyle. This is also silly, because they just crouch a little and somehow turn invisible, but that’s how it has to work. They also commonly have poisons, useful for debilitating enemies and perhaps something they could give to other melee fighters. You can get rather creative with these unique powers, particularly with magic-using classes, as magic requires no explanation. However, you must be careful with how powerful the abilities you give to the players are. A tabletop example of this would be the common banning of any ability which allows players to fly or climb walls, because that’s extremely easy to exploit.
Also, in any context, but especially in competition, if automation is possible to any extent, like a form of electric machine, it will dominate your game. See Redstone farms.
#4: Making Items
MMORPGs run on items. All items have a certain format, typically related to something in real life that translates to the fantasy world and can have some use in gameplay. The best example of this is food. Food restores health and/or gives certain buffs, while drinks that aren’t potions serve to restore mana or some other resource. The most common kind of loot dropped by enemies is junk with no use that’s only made to give players something to loot and sell to a vendor. This also fleshes out the world, because enemies you kill and get nothing off of feel strangely hollow, and remind you that you’re in a game; a deer puking out a magic sword doesn’t, no, that’s perfectly normal. The way things drop loot are called loot tables, charts where, whenever the enemy in question dies, some currency and one or two items are randomly selected, some items having a higher probability than others. Money will always drop, as will any relevant materials or, as mentioned, something valuable like an uncommon item. If you’re fighting a soldier, maybe you loot a bent spearhead or some debris like that. It doesn’t make sense for vendors to pay for any of this trash, because it’s trash, but that’s one of the many things players allow themselves to forget, especially when they count their money. There are also materials for various different professions, like minerals, wood, and leather, gathered from specific nodes or dead creatures across the map, and spawning more often where it makes sense for them to. For instance, minerals spawn all over the surface of the map, which is, again, unrealistic, but this is done so players don’t have to go too far out of their way to get what they need. Going to the fantasy equivalent of Pittsburgh and buying some would just be lamer, and remove something for players to do, so into the hills we go. That said, minerals still spawn more in mines and quarries, as is sensible. Among the most prized items in the game are the consumables, like potions and special food, that give the player’s character different kinds of enhancements. The value and power of items that aren’t equipment correlates to how difficult they are to get, like if enemies only rarely drop it, if it requires a high level of crafting skill and is expensive to make, or if it can only be gathered with a tool which is itself difficult to get. For instance, food sold by a vendor should be rather mundane due to how easy it is to acquire, while food that the player has to go out of their way to cook should be more powerful; this is why food you buy from vendors never boosts your stats, while most foods players make themselves give some minor but noticeable buff to Strength or Intelligence or what have you. The most common design flaw MMORPGs commit with their consumables, particularly potions and like effects, is to have too many of them, especially as player performance is concerned. Some are almost comical with the amount of potions, elixirs, and tonics their players have to use to maintain optimal performance. This problem is mostly avoided by categorizing potions into a few types, and only allowing one of any type to be active. It’s still a pain, but at least alchemists won’t have to spend every second of their spare time harvesting dandruff and buying mouthwash in bulk.
The most important of the players’ items are the pieces of gear they use. Sword, shield, robe, et cetera, but weapons in particular are crucial, because either most or all of the character’s offensive might is derived from their weapon. Each style of character in the game has its own kind of equipment which is literally tailor-made for them, and while fighters can use leather armor, doing so is laughable because that’s not their specialized kind. MMORPGs tend to categorize certain ‘tiers’ of items by different colors, like the color of its name text, which defines how powerful an item can be. In all RPGs, grey text means poor, and white means average, white being the default color for text because text bubbles have to be bordered and shaded dark to read against the colors of the game. In most RPGs, green is uncommon, blue is rare, purple is extremely rare or ‘epic,’ and orange is “legendary,” i.e., the best. This isn’t a hard rule, however. In the Fate (2005 - 2011) series, purple is uncommon, teal is rare, and yellow is legendary. In Diablo 4 (2023), blue is uncommon, yellow is rare, orange is legendary, and gold is ‘unique.’ Tiers of items become more normalized the higher level a character is; while a common piece of gear might be amazing for a low-level character, especially a weapon. they’re increasingly given uncommon gear as they level. Then they’re given some rare gear. At higher levels, rare is the standard, again, semantics. Then, if they access the most advanced content in the game, epic gear is the standard. Then, if they achieve the greatest feats in the game, they can get a legendary or other such item. Legendaries can never be the standard. That would devalue your game. Epics should already be something to get excited over, and the only limits, exclusivity, and consequences make creation worth anything both in-game and real life.
There are four ways in which equipment is acquired: questing, mundane looting, advanced looting, and crafting. As mentioned, quests will give better and better equipment the higher level the player gets, and though quest rewards are rarely the best gear they could theoretically have in that moment, sometimes players get something special for a special task. When making quest equipment, keep in mind that players can plan for it, as quest rewards don’t change. Secondly, mundane looting, which refers to how enemies have a very small chance to drop a powerful item for their level, usually 1% or lower. A low-level enemy might drop a green item, a mid-level enemy might drop a green or, even more rarely, a blue item, and a high-level enemy might drop a green, blue, or even a purple item. When normal enemies only rarely drop any equipment of note, but the chance exists, the game’s economy, highlights, and incentives are nourished with a trickle of loot from the general world. Sometimes, a player will be out collecting bear kidneys and one of the bears happens to drop a hellaciously powerful item. Again, when very limited but still possible, occurrences like these are nothing but good for the game. Thirdly, advanced looting, which refers to dungeon and raid farming. Fourthly, crafting, where players spend some of their own money and capital to give themselves access to what’s essentially their own personal loot table. Given that this can be accessed at any time and with little real difficulty, this personal loot table has to be slightly more scarce than that of the general world, and can come nowhere near dungeons.
Now, anything that is meant to apply or resist any amount of force can be used as a weapon, from a brick to a mace. However, ‘improvised weapons’ like table legs or bricks must be rare, as they’re silly and not to be taken seriously. Naming items can be difficult, and you’ll have to keep a thesaurus handy. There’ll be many of the same kind of item for each general level bracket, so you’ll have to make unique names for a lot of the same kind of weapon. For instance, swords. Sword, blade, broadsword, rapier, cutlass, longsword, shortsword, falchion, khopesh, xiphos, gladius, flamberge, two-handed sword, claymore, zweihander, bastard sword, arming sword, cavalry sword, sabre, officer’s sword, and on and on it goes. Most fantasy items are given a name like ‘x of y,’ like the ‘Helmet of Shadow’ in EverQuest. This is a basic naming format that can be used ad nauseum. Special items are given more unique names, like the ‘Hydre-sceld’ in Lord of the Rings Online. For swords, names could involve blade-related words like ‘razor,’ ‘cutter,’ and ‘serrated.’ Names can also be made to just sound good, like ‘Sickened Songbird’ or something like that. So long as a item’s name isn’t ridiculous, offensive, or inappropriately related to real life, the vast majority of players couldn’t care less what it’s called.
#5: MMORPG Content
MMORPGs begin with a leveling process, where players work to level up their character. This leveling process is as follows: spawn in your inner starting zone, work through it, leave, start walking along the road directed to a village, accept all the tasks there, complete them, go to the next village, et cetera. Depending on the amount of available quests in an area, a village just needs to not be a waste of time. As mentioned, they ideally give a character enough levels to upgrade their skills, and at least one or two pieces of equipment that’s better than what they had before, assuming they don’t have better gear than usual. Typically, questgivers that reward players with equipment offer one of multiple different kinds of items to accommodate multiple classes. A typical set of rewards like this would be a bit of armor for a spellcaster, a weapon for a melee class, and a generically above-average ranged weapon, choosing only one. Furthermore, these items have to be designed according to what the player was given by previous quests, so if the last quest had a robe for a mage, a knife for a rogue, and a shield for a fighter, the next set of rewards can’t be a robe, knife, and shield; even though you don’t have to give gear rewards back-to-back, still, no doubling up on things you already have. Once the player has done everything in that area, they’re given the final task: go to the next village, with directions towards it. In practice, each village is different and each set of quests are different. In other words, some are just better than others. Oftentimes in older MMORPGs, a quest will simply be too difficult or too high level for a character to do, as if the quest chain or the area in general has outran the player’s level. Perhaps they need to go to another region that serves the same level and progress there.
Indeed, your world can’t only have one single chain of regions for players to level through, going from A to B to C, all along the same line. In fact, things are only that simple in the first few hours of play, where each race or faction has their own one or two regions, and even here, there are several different routes to choose from. After this, the MMORPG world quickly begins branching together, like individual threads which were once isolated being spun together into one rope of multiple potential routes with which a player can get to max level. The specifics of how your world will look after the starting zones are impossible to determine, but the linearity of the leveling process will like begin to fade, as players can now jump from one region that serves their level range to another if they want or need to. In fact, in Lord of the Rings Online, players can pay a small fee of in-game currency to be sent to any race’s starting zone, and continue however they want.
When given a variety of locales and breaks to do something different, like fulfilling a bit of class fantasy or working on character skills, this cycle can be repeated endlessly without your core fanbase getting burned out. Leveling up constitutes the first wall of content, and all players should be able to do it on their own. Avoid giving your players too few quests, directly-given objectives et cetera, as you don’t want to leave them to their own devices. This isn’t hand-holding, this is making sure your design holds up its end of the bargain.
However, there will need to be breaks in this leveling cycle, and when working on character skills just isn’t enough, some more specialized content for player-to-player cooperation is perfect to flesh out your game’s world, story, characters, and multiplayer experience. These are the peaks of their respective locales. Group efforts usually consist of either group quests, or dungeons, the most common kind of passive instance. Group quests can ideally be completed by a mostly random assortment of players within their level range. Aside than that, they’re normal quests.
Dungeons are unique areas filled with enemies that are far too powerful for one or a few players of their level to handle, but who possess great items for players to loot. They’re representations of a specific theme, happening, faction, central character, conflict, et cetera; dungeons are concentrations of something, which each of its various components must cleanly represent. Dungeons consist of five components: the area running up to it, its interior, its normal enemies, its boss fights, and its rewards. Firstly, the area running up to a dungeon is typically a less threatening version of the dungeon itself. The absolute basics of this is not having a spooky haunted tower surrounded by la-la land. This haunted tower might have some sentries outside it; perhaps they can be made especially formidable given that the area around the tower would be small, and perhaps only inhabited by them. A lumber camp that’s desolating a weald could have mercenary guards and mobs of muscled, grizzled laborers armed with foresting equipment. The workers could be somewhat fragile due to their lack of armor, but many in number, and able to hit fairly hard given their laborer strength and their experience with tools that are only one or two steps removed from being dedicated weapons. A slave camp could house slavers and their victims. Perhaps by healing the slaves or giving them food, you could win over these unimposing but eager allies to your side against the slavers, armed with weapons and magic that cause a lot of damage-over-time effects, as inflicting pain without causing significant injury is the most common method for driving on slaves. Shortly outside these camps, hidden in a tree hollow or something like that, there can be some NPCs offering quests and, if it’s truly called for, a station where players can repair their equipment and restock on supplies. A dungeon instance can be left unguarded or barren, but this really shouldn’t happen; it wastes opportunities to develop the dungeon with some excellent and organic storytelling. The second part of a dungeon is its interior. Naturally, low-level dungeons are the least complicated in the game, lending themselves towards being simple gauntlets with minor twists and turns but no true nonlinearity. Because of this relatively diminutive size, it’s easy to make low-level dungeons hideouts of some kind, like caves, outposts, city blocks, et cetera. On the contrary, high-level dungeons can even rival cities in their size, breadth, and development. The third part of a dungeon is its normal enemies. Given that dungeons are meant to be taken on by a dedicated kill-team of players, normal enemies in dungeons must be extremely powerful for their level. Their health and damage should be on average quintupled and tripled, respectively. I say ‘normal enemies’ because not everything in a dungeon has to be a special enemy, these are the rank and file. Common enemies will need to be standardized, abiding by a certain average in strength, numbers, and abilities. Mundane or standard enemies in the MMORPGs we have today, both in and out of dungeons and raids, have two or maybe three abilities just to add some basic variety, but no more than that, because monsters shouldn’t have the capabilities of a player. As with any kind of enemies in a location, there can and should be multiple different kinds of dungeon enemy. Humanoid enemies, for instance, are typical modeled after player classes, although with much, much fewer abilities. Making normal enemies use powers on players that should be or need to be addressed makes fights more interesting, but don’t do this for low-level players, who’re just trying to scrap up some good gear and don’t even have all their powers unlocked. Normal enemies in dungeons are arranged in small groups known as ‘encounters,’ but they’re also called ‘pulls’ because players usually engage them by alerting one of them with a ranged attack and ‘pulling’ the attacking enemies back towards them, isolating them from other enemies. As mentioned, there should be a sort of average power level these encounters work off of that increases slightly as the dungeon goes on, the standard challenge curve. You shouldn’t put encounters too close or too far away; fill any space to which this applies with enough encounters for it to be worthwhile, so to speak, and, critically, make sure that players can engage these encounters one at a time if they want to or need to. We see in role-playing games that enemies who are fast and enemies with combination attacks that can stunlock them are both unnecessarily frustrating, and those that are both and also grouped in large numbers are a personal mark against the developers. In your MMORPG, there will be similar abilities or conditions that can easily be leveraged to shut down players, typically attacks that allow the enemy to do burst damage, like they have their autoattack (their default swing) and can also use a melee ability after that to hit the player again. Keep this in mind when balancing the challenge of the various encounters in your dungeons. Finally, if you’re going to give some normal enemies a very powerful ability, make sure it’s the central focus of any encounter it’s in, that it can’t be spammed over and over, and that players can account for it if they know what they’re doing. Keep in mind that normal enemies are meant to be the grass players mow, not the tree they chop down. The fourth component to a dungeon is the boss fights. Boss fights are encounters with especially imposing enemies. They’re meant to be harder than normal enemies, ‘cooler’ as well, and are one of the primary reasons why players do dungeons. Depending on what the boss monster is, it should have seven to fifteen times the health and do three to six times the damage of a normal monster its level, give or take depending on their design, abilities, and gimmicks. Bosses, named so because they’re always figures of authority and influence, are given their own specialized room or arena so players can fight the boss on neutral ground undisturbed, though boss rooms sometimes play a role in their mechanics, like with environmental hazards. Boss fights are structured like all RPG combat: stat sheets throwing numbers at each other. However, normal boss fights have two or three core abilities and at least one secondary gimmick around which the fight is structured. These can center around inflicting a lot of debilitating effects, like by deactivating players’ powers or being able to stun them, calling allies to their aid, changing targets erratically, bombarding certain places in the arena with high-damage attacks, turning the players’ abilities against them like reflecting spells back at the caster, or, most simply, by just doing a lot of direct damage. That latter kind of boss, the more brutish kind, is the most effective at killing players. Bosses kill players best not through spells or gimmicks, which are slow and easily countered, and therefore usually only effective against a group that’s playing poorly, but through efficient attacks that players can do little to nothing about. Melee attacks are typically best for this, as they deal the default kind of damage, usually named ‘physical’ damage, which can only rarely be countered or neutralized, and never consistently or for very long, as such abilities would be overpowered. Brutish bosses specialize in winning the fight, especially when they attack quickly. Frills, spells, and fancy mechanics are to a certain extent playing with your food, the boss accepting its role as a game. Brutish bosses, meanwhile, just beat their health bars down as quickly and ruthlessly as possible. Brutish bosses are normally the most intimidating for players to fight, especially if they have a spell or gimmick along with their offensive might. Don’t lean too heavily on brutish bosses, just for the sake of variety, but when you do use them, make sure they’re neither too weak as to be impotent nor too strong as to be unfair, unless you want to make a rather tough final boss out of them. The final boss is the magnum opus of the dungeon, towards whom all has been building up towards. The final boss is, for all intents and purposes, either an overpowered spellcaster with omnipotent power over their environment or a brutish boss with the varied powers of a spellcaster or summoner. The final boss is the dungeon, encompassing the dungeon as its creator or avatar, the core themes of the dungeon and the previous bosses being taken up to their maximum reasonable level. This could mean using the abilities of the previous bosses, but more quickly, though it could also mean channeling the theme of the dungeon more purely and severely. Final bosses should never be easy or uncomplicated.
Fifthly, there’s the rewards. Low-level characters dungeoneer the instant they can due to how impactful the rewards are for them. Dungeons reward the player in three ways. The first is through the quests players complete within the dungeons, which give excellent rewards for their level; those that offer equipment give much higher quality equipment than normal. The second is through the accumulation of money, experience, and materials through killing the dungeon’s normal enemies. This isn’t ever flashy, and no one focuses on it, but its total value comprises a considerable portion of the players’ profits. The third is from killing bosses, which drop one or rarely two high-quality items from a list of potential drops they have. These items are made scarce by the fact that multiple players are present, creating competition. In vanilla World of Warcraft, when a dead enemy was looted and the loot menu was closed with items still within it, it was then open for all other players in the group to loot. High-level items tended to be ‘bind on pickup,’ meaning they couldn’t be traded to other players once picked up by one. This meant that after a dead enemy was looted to see what items it dropped, and the group was deliberating over who should get what item, a player could just walk up to the dead enemy and steal them. This created some of the most famous instances of ‘loot ninjaing’ in MMORPG history. In more recent versions of WoW, however, a ‘greed/need’ system is present, which displays an item to all the relevant players and allows them to either ‘roll greed’ for items they don’t need, or ‘roll need’ for those they do. If anyone rolls need, that roll is given primacy over the greed roll. It’s still possible for players to steal by rolling need on items that they don’t, but so-called ‘loot ninjaing’ isn’t nearly as much of a problem.
Equipment scarcity sounds like a negative thing, and it can be if items are too rare. However, as I mentioned, these dungeons are primarily being visited for the loot. The experience is nice, as are the friends you can meet and the breaks from the occasionally monotonous leveling, but the items are the primary justification for it. Therefore, remember that, in an MMORPG, where progression is the main reason for playing, players are only happy if they’re growing. Once they’ve capped out, there’s nothing else to do; in this genre, the chase is better than the catch. Therefore, high-priority items can’t be plentiful, otherwise they’re devalued and the main purpose of the dungeon is failed.
In most MMORPGs, there are dungeons for every level range, and their recommended levels occasionally overlap. They can also give different pieces of loot that are relevant to different characters; a militant, industrial-themed dungeon can have a slight bias towards heavy weapons and armor, while a magic-themed dungeon can have a slight bias towards spellcaster equipment. The same applies to normal enemies; perhaps in the former example, fire magic is used by hostile metallurgists to inflict damage on a player based on how much armor their equipment pieces give them. Generally, however, this ‘specialized loot’ idea is only welcome in high-level dungeons, as players who are still leveling are hungry for progression and want anything they can get; making things too convoluted will only frustrate them. Furthermore, abilities like the ‘metallurgist’ example would specifically punish heavy classes, so unless there’s also something for classes who use lighter armor, this would be an example of imbalance. Quests for going into a dungeon are among the most profitable to complete due to the difficulty of the task and the resulting quality of the rewards, though because these quests aren’t guaranteed to be completed due to the teamwork required, you shouldn’t rely on them.
Whereas low-level dungeons serve to give progressing characters some good items and something to do, and therefore should be kept openly accessible, high-level dungeons can sometimes require complicated entry rituals to be accessed. This is a theme in high-level content: the more advanced the dungeon, quest, or class fantasy component, the more complicated it’ll be, because the more esoteric it is. All dungeons can be described as a sequence of hallways connecting increasingly challenging, important, and rewarding rooms, but lower-level dungeons tend to be more linear. A good example of this would be the various caves and hideouts in Skyrim, which usually conclude with a shortcut back to the entrance. Higher-level dungeons, meanwhile, are richer and grander. They can be structured like their own little ecosystem, like a university campus, and, due to being bigger, they have much more enemies and require much more running around. There can even be non-hostile factions within a dungeon, like the Shen’dralar Night Elves in WoW’s Dire Maul. This allows for more immersion, worldbuilding, and fantasy-realization for a player who, given that they’ve worked to get to this point without complaint, has shown they like the game, and can therefore be trusted with more ambitious ideas. For quests, the highest-echelon quests are totally esoteric in their requirements, often making the player travel around the map more and foray into more dangerous or complicated areas. MMORPGs also make the players complete convoluted tasks to access certain specialized areas, like the key needed to access the shortcut in Blackrock Depths and the hammer needed to summon Gahz’rilla in Zul’Farrak, both being in World of Warcraft, and both being hidden enough that most players to this day have no idea how to get them. Someone else in their group always has them.
There will come a point in any given version of an MMORPG where a character’s level caps out, and they can’t level up anymore. This is necessary, as each level needs to be a consistent and meaningful part of the game; it’s therefore obvious that making a game with an infinite amount of levels, and therefore an infinite amount of good content, is impossible. Once players get to the max level, they’ll only be able to get more powerful by getting better equipment and similar effects. Therefore, max level is when the hardcore content officially begins. They can no longer progress their character alone, so they must now look to these dungeons for equipment and other boons. This naturally leads them towards socializing with other players, as the optionally-multiplayer game now turns into a fully multiplayer game, and you never want to play a fully-multiplayer game with people you don’t like, as you’re stuck together and have to rely on each other; here we see once again that richness and substance comes from constraint.
Once the dungeons are conquered, the players are met with raids. Put bluntly, raids are dungeons on steroids. They’re much harder, require better coordination from a greater amount of players, universally require lengthy tasks to even access them, and give proportionally superior items, typically the best in the game. The needs for a raid are so great, only player-organized clubs, normally named guilds, have the logistics, chemistry, and management to do raiding content. In most versions of World of Warcraft, a dungeon only requires five players: one tank, three DPS, one healer. This central format has rarely varied, which is interesting because this composition isn’t technically required to complete a dungeon. It never was, things just turned out that way. Said group usually just mows through everything with some effort but little difficulty, though they can get shaken up by boss fights that are either too difficult or too well-designed to just be ran over. Yes, there is a difference. A raid, meanwhile, takes dozens of players, all of whom need to be in active vocal communication and to play by a plan to succeed. Player vocal communication is usually done with a third-party service. In days gone by, this was Teamspeak, and today, it’s Discord.
Both dungeons and raids are connected to the game’s story, especially raids, so don’t just plop down a spooky castle in the middle of nowhere, fill it with bad guys, and say the laws of reality work in mysterious ways or something. Make them make sense within the plot of your game, even if you have to invent a plotline to allow their existence. For example, the final boss of a raid is almost always a highly lore-important character that was either important before the raid or made to be so through the raid. Where most dungeon or raid bosses have no backstory except for whatever can be inferred from their person and their environment, the final bosses of raids are always recognizable names.
#6: Knowing Your Audience and Making Characters
Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are.
- Aristotle. Poetics as part of Ten Great Works of Philosophy. Edited by Robert Paul Wolff, Signet Classic, 2001, pg. 67.
Every piece of media has two demographics: the one they intend and the one they get. As can often be seen with adults liking children’s media and children liking games made for young adults, the two aren’t always the same. Pieces of media have a general community of fans whose kinship derives from certain idiosyncrasies exclusive to them. The purpose of understanding the audience your game will capture and whatever form it may take should be clear to see. When trying to maintain audience approval, you’re effectively waging a war on their will to dislike you, and wars can’t be won without intelligence. What demographics are they made up of? What quirks does your audience have? What subjects or characters might be disagreeable to them? What game mechanics fit their taste? What kind of difficulty do they want? Puzzle, RPG tedium, DPS test, PvP? What pacing do they like? What can you do to keep your creation genuinely inspired without going a direction your fans may dislike? What can you do to give your fans what they want without making your game pandering? If you’re not making the most interesting parts of your game’s setting, characters, and plotline the end-game of this expansion, why not? But then again, what interests your fans? Should you speak to them more frankly or try to maintain pretenses of subtlety? It must be said, however, that if you go public, you’ll have to bow to people who know nothing about your industry or creation more than the fans.
I lump audience awareness and character work in the same section because they’re connected in two specific ways. You must know what the audience will like, and know what the audience will find profound. This will become clearer as I discuss some principles of how to make characters.
Firstly, you can only make good characters if you have at least a moderately comprehensive understanding of both the different individual natures of people and the human experience in general. You can’t paint a picture of something if you don’t know what it looks like. Setting your game in any historical period also requires a good understanding of that time’s history, and as history is literally the study of the human race, it’s good to have an enthusiasm for history in general. A large example is J. R. R. Tolkien, whose very on-the-nose style of naming things, like ‘Mount Doom,’ follows the very authentic ancient, human, and particularly English convention of naming things after their most obvious traits or characteristics. Naming characters is easy to be fine at, but difficult to be good at.
Secondly, there are two general kinds of character: main characters and side characters. Most people have some idea of what both types are, so a longer explanation isn’t necessary. Establishing good characters in an MMORPG is difficult because the primary focus is always on the players. Therefore, you don’t have as much screentime or available techniques for character exposition. There are no monologues in an MMORPG because no one’s around to see them, and you can’t have prolonged sections of an MMORPG be played as someone else. The latter in particular is how most games tell stories. However, you’ll still have a fair amount of opportunities to craft action scenes for your characters because your players need them. Players can’t progress an MMORPG’s plotline alone because said plotline needs to follow a predictable pattern. Players instead need to interact with major NPCs, either following protagonists or fighting antagonists. Players can’t be expected to read every word of quest-text or dialogue, but they can be shown the occasional cutscene and be given a little character exposition through action scenes, typically those before, during, or after battle or a quest. Main characters in an MMORPG simply don’t have the room to be complex, they have to be simpler. This isn’t necessarily bad. Simple characters are easier to make inoffensive. You don’t have to sanitize your heroes, but you must make sure they’re inoffensive, like not annoying, not consistently stupid, not saying anything that personally insults the audience, et cetera, because players will have to be around these people for at least a plurality of the game. That said, you’ll have to compensate for the somewhat textbook craft of your main characters with good aesthetics, good execution, and, most importantly, a brand that defines them. This brand must be unique and recognizable on a basic level, it must express and be the channel for a story on an advanced level, and it must say everything about the character’s appearance, and about the person behind it, who’s often somewhat the opposite of what this face implies. It’s human nature that someone’s true self simply is, and that any effort they make to be something would therefore invert some of their character in an act of subversion. For instance, Darth Vader is a fairly standard martial, imperious, dark overlord when looked at through his actions and dialogue alone. However, three things made Vader: the voice acting, the suit, and his character arc. If any of these were missing, Vader might’ve failed as a character. For another Sith, Darth Maul should’ve been a cripplingly limited character. During fights, most Sith lords use their proficiency with Dark Side powers and constant talking to fulfill the needs of their character, whereas Maul refuses to attempt psychological warfare, and is mutely serious in combat to the point where he only so much as flinched when he was cut in half. He doesn’t have any particular abilities aside from basic Force powers and being a talented martial artist. His adherence to the Sith religion, while genuine and fanatical, is also straightforward and uncomplicated. But there’s the saberstaff. The saberstaff excites the audience with something they’ve never seen before, isn’t flat or uncanny valley, allows Maul to demonstrate his formidable martial arts prowess, and, as a result, transmutes his expressionless character into the realistic bearing of a warrior who has a solid grasp on the realities of combat and wants to go again. It made Maul. For a real life example of branding, we have radiation. Radiation has no sight, smell, taste, or signature feeling. When the Geiger counter became famous after the first phase of nuclear threat in the mid-20th century, its dull, lifeless, staticky, high-pitched but deeply-tuned clicking became the sound that has, for decades, defined powerlessness to a malignity invincible, so godlike that it doesn’t kill like a weapon, but rewrites life itself to become impossible. The gas mask has also become a staple of radiation, just like the plague doctors preceding the Renaissance defined the Bubonic Plague with their bird-like masks, blank eyes, heavy black robes, and canes. To continue with the effects of aesthetics and setting, we have two specific characters: Anakin Skywalker, and Lü Bu as portrayed in the 2010 Three Kingdoms television series. Both are prodigally mighty warriors from humble backgrounds whose skills earn them a high standing in their respective orders, wherein it becomes clear that they’re not suited for the tumultuous political intrigue present in their courts, and the politics soon begin taking a mental toll on them. Their lack of cunning and reliance on mentors cause them to have crises of confidence and of an existential nature. These ravenous insecurities, embodied by their genuine and legitimate but legally forbidden affection for a noblewoman, cause them to become more and more stressed until they violently and abruptly change sides by annihilating the order they once served in an act of destiny, thereafter leading self-destructive lives centered around war and violence, serving as subtly unsubtle escapes. While Skywalker’s and Lü Bu’s second halves are different, the former being redeemed and the latter dying as a petty warlord due to his brutishness, their first halves are almost identical. However, their respective settings, aesthetics, and character executions differentiate them just enough.
This is how characters are made well. They don’t have to be complicated, they have to be convincing. We also see this with the mainstream comic book movies from the last two decades: almost all successful comic book movies had perfect casting for their characters, without which they would’ve all fallen flat. The heroes in particular weren’t very complicated, but were excellent at being themselves. This is the first of two major differences between EverQuest and World of Warcraft at the time of their respective releases: the latter had a significantly stronger foundation of story and characters to paint the game with.
Your side characters have even less screentime, but this affords a certain opportunity. One of the most skillful ways to portray a character is to use their limited appearances to make everything they do communicate something about them. Side characters rarely contribute anything interesting to the plot, so they have to be interesting people. Therefore, it’s good to make them profound, at least to some extent or another. The most profound characters are made in either one or both of two ways: those who exemplify life’s journey, and those who embody everything the observer isn’t or everything they dislike, yet are everything the observer thinks such a person can’t be. This isn’t to say you should make a sex-offender a protagonist to swerve people, that’s obviously a misstep, or that you should make your characters walking political statements like progressives and mainstream media always do (yes, irony). Instead, I stress the potential value in kindling some humanity where someone or some group in your audience doesn’t think it’ll be found. As a general example of an effective side character, take an empath or seer who’s deeply dedicated to her husband, but after he tragically dies, she has to keep avoiding contact with specific objects, places, and even a few people due to the anguish that the flashbacks and memories of him cause her. This character wouldn’t need any significant importance to the plot, her character would be compelling enough by itself. The most famous real example of a side character is Joshua Graham from the Honest Hearts DLC for Fallout: New Vegas (2010). Graham, the one half-decent portrayal of a Christian to ever come from modernity, has become wildly popular, universally acclaimed by all who know about him. Graham is so beloved that, where the recent glut of refined text-to-speech programs have almost always been used for memes, fans use replications of Graham’s voice to give reassuring messages and life advice, written in his stoically matter-of-fact cadence. These videos often earn hundreds of thousands of views, along with some previous rumors that Graham has even caused some people to become religious. Because of this, it can be argued that Joshua Graham is the greatest video game character ever.
#7: Further Mechanics
Some more mainstays of MMORPGs include character skills and faction reputation.
The former gives your players a limited degree of self-sufficiency by teaching them the skills of a certain job, like blacksmithing or cooking. These skills can be improved and maintained as a character levels, just make sure that a character’s aptitude stays permanent once it’s earned. You must make the items accessed with these various professions useful enough to be worth making, as they all take time and resources, but don’t make them overpowered. Character skills also tend to overlap with each other. For instance, those who can make metal items need ore and gems that you get from mining. Skills that have the player gather resources are the easiest to perform, give the player resources that they can sell to other players, and are therefore normally the most profitable; you’re killing a lot of animals to begin with, why not learn how to skin them?
There are two formats for character skills: the Warcraft format and the RuneScape (2001) format. World of Warcraft allows you to have all of the ‘secondary professions’ at once, like fishing and first aid, but only two ‘primary professions,’ like leatherworking or enchanting. RuneScape, meanwhile, allows all characters to level all skills present in the game; this is the entire premise of playing RuneScape.
Then, we have faction reputation. Normally, there are one or two factions which an MMORPG character is automatically a member of as determined by their race or class, and the player can’t ever attack them. For instance, if one faction has five playable races and another has five, then the corresponding races belong to their respective factions. This serves to include some character variety instead of just having each race be their own faction, though this idea could have potential if done well. However, there are also neutral, non-player factions who can be worked for. These neutral factions are much smaller than player factions, but they typically offer one or two exotic products that can’t be gotten anywhere else. These products can be anything from an exclusive vehicle to a piece of armor. These factions can never be made a player faction, instead all players can individually work to increase their reputation, i.e., their relationship bar, with them. This is typically done by, as you can imagine, killing enemies and turning in items. Working to increase a faction’s reputation is can be boring if the faction is small, making their content limited and repetitive.
#8: Story Isn’t Written In A Day
9. Then went all the powers
to their judgement-seats,
the all-holy gods,
and thereon held council,
who should of the dwarfs
the race create,
from the sea-giant’s blood
and livid bones.
10. Then was Mötsognir
created greatest
of all the dwarfs,
and Durin second;
there in man’s likeness
they created many
dwarfs from the earth,
as Durin said.
11. Nýi and Nidi,
Nordri and Sudri,
Austri and Vestri,
Althiöf, Dvalin
Nár and Náin,
Niping, Dáin,
Bivör, Bavör,
Bömbur, Nori,
An and Anar,
Ai, Miödvitnir,
12. Veig and Gandálf,
Vindálf, Thráin,
Thekk and Thorin,
Thror, Vitr, and Litr,
Núr and Nýrád,
Regin and Rádsvid.
Now of the dwarfs I have
rightly told.
- Author unknown, Poetic Edda. Retrieved 9/15/2023.
Your mythmaking is going to be laden with inevitable challenges. The first is how to address the ‘humans, elves, dwarves’ formula which J. R. R. Tolkien took from Norse, Celtic, and Western European and Scandinavian paganism in general, and modernized in his Legendarium; orcs seem to have been his idea. Most efforts to use different races either result in animals turned into humanoids, like the Pandaren race in the WoW expansion Mists of Pandaria (2012), both of which got a mixed reception, or in slightly altered versions of the tried and true Western fantasy races, like in the Pillars of Eternity duology (2015 - 2018). These ‘different but not really’ races can actually be worse than keeping it simple, because it looks off-brand. Generally speaking, so long as each playable race is balanced enough and has their own player identity, they should be fine. Different races can have slightly different stats, but their effects must be minor. Otherwise, you risk making a race too overpowered or exploitable. Not every deviation from the norm is so doomed to fail, however. The stereotypical villain with the aristocratic English accent was avoided in the The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001 - 2003), despite the fact that all the villains, aside from some of the Uruk-hai, still had British accents. Christopher Lee’s portrayal of Saruman doesn’t truly count as Sir Lee’s signature cadence was unique to him, and Brad Dourif’s portrayal of Grima Wormtongue was too sniveling to be regal. The Nazgul and Sauron spoke in whispers, and the Orcs’ British accent was a thick-voiced, wicked cockney drawl (retrieved 8/27/2023), being the English equivalent of deep-voiced rednecks.
The different identities MMORPG races have is primarily determined by their aesthetics and respective lore. For a personal example, one of the few highlights of playing on the Darrowshire vanilla WoW private server was in Hillsbrad Fields in Hillsbrad Foothills, standing next to the far entrance of the blacksmith building. I was joking with an Orc Warrior about how he was the type of guy to yell ‘INV’ (invite me to group) when someone was killing a rabbit, impulsively treating a harmless animal like a super-serious enemy, while I, an Undead Warlock, was the type of guy to report my own faction to the LocalDefense chat, basically calling the police on my own team. This joke reflects the stereotypes of Orcs as being stupid, and the people who play them as being incompetent jockish elitists, while Undead are stereotyped as being only loyal to themselves, and the people who play them as having more surreally questionable personalities. Despite how toxic stereotypes can be, their presence is a sign that the identities of your playable races are forming well.
In response, the Orc player called that joke poetry.
The second story challenge is rooted in the fact that story can only be grounded, and therefore appealing, if it’s a partial mirror of the real world, but not too much of one. If you fail to keep your story grounded, you lose all sense of stakes and richness, like is common among fantasy anime, where nothing is organically developed or compelling. This is also common among newer players of tabletop RPGs, who jump into the game without actually establishing who their character is, nor by necessity the world and environment that they come from, and who therefore have nothing to say or do and fall completely flat. Conversely, if you fail to keep far enough away from the real world, you’ll blatantly shoehorn something from real life into what it should only somewhat be, like how Voldemort and the Death Eaters in the Harry Potter films (2001 - 2011), the Daleks from the Doctor Who franchise (1963 - 1989, 2005 - present), and the Norsefire party from V for Vendetta (2005) are all Nazi allegories, as blatant as they are uncreative, reflecting the dullard, mediocre, Nazi-obsessed progressivism common among the western world at the moment. This is a major problem with the Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil alignment chart common to tabletop RPGs. In truth, the value of an adult human being is based around whether you agree with their beliefs and actions, even for those who would claim to be humanists or unjudgmental, because they always make exceptions for those they don’t like. It’s very easy for you to make your villains petty analogues of people you yourself don’t like, and fiction has somewhat changed into glorified public service announcements in the wake of this. Another potential pitfall comes when expanding your story. If you stick to real life logic too much, then as you expand your story more and more, you’ll be compelled to create an unnecessary past and make it a necessary future. Put plainly, you’ll start having to explain everything to justify the media. Time and again, this has resulted in something novel and enthralling in its relative realism, lack of grandiosity, and cryptic richness being turned into generic, sub-par dark fantasy, as happened to the Call of Duty: Nazi Zombies series (World at War to Modern Warfare III (2023); 2008 -2023), the Payday series (2011 - 2023), and the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise (2014 - 2023). When you get through the first third or half in each of them, there’s a very sudden shift from a game masterfully set in its beginnings, contained in its scale of excellence, to a property whose need to make more media results in it being the same watery cast of characters, magic, and bland spectacle as anything else. As we can’t map out the entire life and times of God, so too can you not make a fully coherent narrative for your setting beginning-to-end. All fiction begins with there being some God or God-force, and fictionalizing anything before that is impossible. For Nazi Zombies and Payday, it’s something-something-Lovecraft. For Five Nights at Freddy’s, it’s something-something spooky magic.
The third story challenge is to not focus solely on highlights, and instead keep worldbuilding and organic storytelling your foremost priority. Plenty of aspiring creators arrange vague ideas for characters and big moments, but all they can think of are highlights. They have no idea of how to get there or what to do afterwards. This is because you can fantasize about highlights, but not about everything before or after, hence fantasy is a primary animus for deep existential corruption in humanity, and poor writing. An example of media that lacks substance are the Disney-licensed Star Wars (1977 - present, Disney canon: 2008 - present) programs, which tend to poorly rehash ideas and characters from so-called ‘Legends continuity,’ and rely heavily on tearjerking moments and fanservice set pieces for audience approval. A real-life example of a story only consisting of a highlight is the return of CM Punk to professional wrestling in All Elite Wrestling in 2021. Ever since Punk left WWE in 2014, and presumably left wrestling altogether, fans had been yearning for his return, as he had gained considerable celebrity as a top-level wrestler, personality, and Chicago icon. Then, all those years later, after many rumors and allegations, on the August 8th, 2021 episode of AEW Dynamite, when Punk’s intro played and he walked onto the stage in front of his hometown crowd, the world heard arguably the most ecstatic crowd reaction in pro-wrestling history (retrieved 3/14/2024). However, once Punk’s return ceremony was over, so too was any hope of him making a large impact, as AEW subsequently experienced as much success with Punk as they did without him; given Punk’s perceived stature as wrestling royalty, this was a disappointment, and a financially deleterious one at that. As it turns out, fans tuned in to watch Punk’s return and enjoyed doing so, even resulting in Punk’s new T-shirt becoming the most popular product on any website which offered it, but they weren’t convinced to watch anything further. Because of this, Punk’s return, almost a decade in the making and with undying fan anticipation, lasted only one night. Or, perhaps two (retrieved 3/14/2024).
The best example of ‘organic storytelling’ in this context is the Warcraft (1994 - present) franchise, which began with Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994, thirty years ago at the time of this latest edit. It established not only the trademark’s foundation, but also Blizzard’s penchant for ambition. Keep in mind that in 1994, ambition was making a real-time-strategy game which establishes the story of what would come to be known as the First War in the WoW mythos, worldbuilding which is both bold for a new intellectual property and entirely minute to Warcraft today. We must also understand that this story would come to be known as the First War; at that point, none of the names listed, from Orgrim Doomhammer to the Swamp of Sorrows, meant anything yet. It was just one single RTS game with one single story about some green guys with funny clown voices (retrieved 5/20/2023) attacking a generic medieval kingdom. Only over the next decade, from 1994 to 2004, would the groundwork for World of Warcraft be laid, and it was only able to be laid this quickly due to the success and cutting edge innovation of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995), its expansion pack Beyond the Dark Portal (1996), Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos (2002), its expansion The Frozen Throne (2003), and World of Warcraft itself.
This is what is needed to create a truly exceptional project: the stars must align, so to speak, and you have to work at it. You can’t simply get excited because you think you have talent, or because someone else says you have talent, because unless they’re of a verifiably high station and you hear it from multiple different people, it’s merely the eyes of the mundane seeing what looks like talent and getting excited. For World of Warcraft, it was the unsustainably successful ambition of Blizzard, the game design and setting inspiration from EverQuest, and the fertile groundwork of the preceding Warcraft trilogy. The Lord of the Rings only became the greatest fantasy franchise of all time because both J. R. R. Tolkien’s literary work and Peter Jackson’s film adaptations were spectacular, the latter due to its effective release scheduling and the removal of wackier aspects of the books, like the constant singing in the beginning of Fellowship. Likewise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe only became the mass man’s favorite trip to the movie theater because the comic book setting provided inspiration and the casting made it work.
This is not to say that you will somehow need to become the next Tolkien or build the next MCU to become successful, but instead to give proper warning to those who feel driven to create something. You need to be faced with hardships, doubts, and a certain normalization of your craft, to be able to put yourself a cut above what’s even above-average, let alone average, and a needful interest in the genre or subject you want to make something great within. There are no good writers who don’t like reading someone else’s work, or good musicians who don’t like someone else’s music.
As far as traditional morality goes, MMORPGs stick to T ratings more often than not. Any deviation from this is a deliberate choice. They also don’t tend to be as insipidly struck with surface-level progressivism as other genres. Because of this, so as long as you aren’t obtuse about it, refusing to conform to their expectations should be fine. Even for those who aren’t opposed to progressivism, there are certain poor writing conventions among them, like trying to make things adorably magical and colorful for no reason and with no justification, banally ironic names like naming a horror demon ‘Mr. Hugs’ or something like that, and “representation,” which typically takes the form of egregiously vomiting progressively political fetishes and wannabe-moral messages all over the work.
#9: Necessary Story Concessions Across Franchise Installments
If you have two installments in an intellectual property, one old and one new, the only way to connect their plotlines is for one or more characters to do something stupid. The most well-known example of this is the common criticism of Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005): ‘Why didn’t Obi-Wan kill Anakin?’
Because if Anakin died, Darth Vader couldn’t happen.
An MMORPG example would be the transition between Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. In Warcraft 3, all the central characters, Arthas, Tyrande, Thrall, et cetera, were characters of action. They were never idle, taking the initiative in most situations and staying near points of interest, because they were the players. In World of Warcraft, meanwhile, where the world of Azeroth is hardly tamed and several existential threats lurk around the corner, none of these characters do anything but sit in their capital city. More tellingly, in Wrath of the Lich King (2008), Arthas Menethil, who had previously been a villainous version of Alexander the Great and now has the power of a lesser god, sits on his throne and allows all his minions and territory to be conquered just for the trite opportunity of converting the kill team of heroes sent to dispatch him into Undead servants (retrieved 12/22/2022). This is both a boneheaded plot and irreconcilable with his portrayal in Warcraft 3.
Why were these characters so heavily sidelined? Because they’re not the players anymore. Why would Thrall, who, along with Grommash Hellscream, redeemed the Orcish race from their corruption by and enslavement to demonic magic, allow warlocks to operate in the underbelly of the Orcish capital city, Orgrimmar? Because otherwise, players wouldn’t be able to play as Orc Warlocks, and wouldn’t have a convenient place to do Warlock business outside of Undercity. Why would Thrall, who is renowned for his sagacity, shamanic reverence for the elements, and experience with combating foes of godlike destructive power, not personally oversee a raid into Molten Core to manage the mortal races’ relationships with the elemental spirits? Because this would take away from the players. When Thrall was given a prominent role in the Cataclysm expansion (2010), he was mockingly named ‘Green Jesus’ by players for his ubiquitous goody-two-shoes perfection. Why would the Orcs, Humans, and Night Elves, who had overcome their tribal and racial conflicts to unite and beat back an existentially threatening demonic invasion of their planet, suddenly resume hostilities with no casus belli? Because that would make the Alliance-versus-Horde player-versus-player mechanics untenable, which would hinder the players. Why would The Burning Crusade expansion center its final raid around Illidan Stormrage, a central Warcraft antihero, not villain, who did absolutely nothing to provoke any hostilities from the factions the players serve? Because Illidan is a recognizable name, and therefore makes things more enticing for the players.
Therefore, if you create an installment in your IP long after the last one, don’t be surprised if you have to resort to something less than sound to make everything work, especially if this newer installment is of a different genre.
#10: Decide Early How Hardcore Your Game Is Going To Be
Games have gotten more streamlined as the years have gone on. One of the best examples of this is the vaunted and thankfully immortal Age of Empires series (1997 - 2021). In Age of Empires (1997), the only references players had during campaign missions were a basic debriefing that established the setting and listed one or two overarching objectives, along with an optional explanation of the mission’s historical background and a few hints. Besides that, players were left to their own devices. In Age of Empires III (2005), campaign missions have simple step-by-step objectives whose solutions are railroaded through proximity of completion and character dialogue; AoE3 even having hints is pointless.
To begin, it isn’t worth discussing an MMORPG being streamlined, because MMORPGs are not casual. Games like Guild Wars 2 (2012) and EverQuest are able to be played theoretically forever, require a large investment of time and effort to progress, and can paradoxically peak in either the first few hours, when progress is easy, or in the mid- to late-game, where the game gains more substance. There are casual players of MMORPGs, plenty of them, but the medium itself is inherently hardcore. This is reflected in the usual subscription fee of MMORPGs, which is charged to cover server costs and other regular fees that single-player games don’t need to manage. Due to this subscription fee, playing an MMORPG for a few months is as expensive as buying a copy of a different game permanently.
But how hardcore do you want your game to be? How would we measure something like that? I believe that there are two kinds of hardcore in a game: difficulty of play and difficulty in experience.
For the former, we must establish the positives and negatives of being too shallow or too player-unfriendly. Games which are more streamlined are more accessible, and therefore well-liked among casual fans, but they also tend to lack substance. A premier example of this is the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In its time, Skyrim was one of the best-selling games ever made, and many of the mainstream wannabe-nerd personalities of the day praised the title as if it were infallible. In fact, Reddit threads (retrieved 3/14/2024) still point to Skyrim somehow being the best game ever made, because such people’s idea of ‘quality’ is usually just a more pretentious version of popularity. In recent years, however, Skyrim has been rightfully critiqued for its shallowness. Quite frankly, a naked skeleton is less bare bones. All the non-player-characters look and speak the same, the attempts at making ‘armies’ are little more than the player and a handful of red shirts, the enemies are repetitive, the characters, quests, and plotlines are one-dimensional, almost every line and animation has wooden delivery, and magic, the most expansive toolset in all of fiction, is as linear as archery. For children, who can fill in the blanks with their own imagination and have little to no standards, Skyrim is perfect, but with more wizened eyes, we see the game’s total inadequacy as embodied in the ‘Irish jig’ death animation (retrieved 11/4/2022). The opposite extreme is a player-unfriendly game, a title that would be excellent if it ever bothered to tell the player what to do. Not held the player’s hand, no, simply told them anything. A game like this would be the first Dark Souls (2011). Nowadays, everyone already knows how to beat the Souls series or has a guide for them, which remains the only reason 90% of Souls fans are Souls fans. Imagine playing the first Dark Souls and not having a guide or YouTube series to reference. How could you be expected to figure out how to unlock the Four Kings boss fight? This has nothing to do with “getting good.” This is a game refusing to tell you what to do, to the point where it needs guides to be playable. Bad cartridge games from the 1980s also tended to be dense like this, as many of them were so difficult and nontransparent that they were practically impossible. I would venture to say that most single-player games that don’t have a save/load feature are automatically player-unfriendly, because when the game inevitably treats you unfairly and/or refuses to give you what you deserve, you aren’t able to fix the game’s failures for it. The most unnecessarily low-quality sign of a player-unfriendly game is the fanbase. As has become infamous, Souls fans are often shallow and elitist, the whole ‘git gud’ thing. You’ll likely be told this with an unsubtle hint of self-impressed derision. Even the average smug midwit nerd thinks these particular fans are obnoxious, but thankfully, most Souls fans aren’t like that.
So how do we achieve a happy medium, a complex game? We can determine this through examining how each type of game would handle different game design needs. How does each give the player directions to a relevant area? A shallow game places a big, garish shape over the exact location or direction you need to travel to or in. Many Bethesda games do this, like Fallout 3 (2008) and Skyrim, a choice which has been criticized for being too useful, as these compass markers become all the player looks at. Player-unfriendly games don’t give any indication whatsoever. This lack of accessibility the second major difference between EverQuest and WoW, the latter’s greater accessibility and sense of direction, like how questgivers had exclamation points instead of needing to be sought out and talked to manually, playing a role in its greater popularity; this isn’t to say EverQuest was a poor game, far from it, only to observe the critical improvements WoW made to its formula. A complex game, meanwhile, would use contextual hints, like marking the way to go with a noticeable road or through the dialogue of NPCs. Through this dialogue, directions that are either vague or precise can be given. However, if the player isn’t paying attention to these indicators, they won’t know what to do and that’ll be their own fault. For combat, a shallow game makes everything trivial, whether through making everything natively easy or through offering the now-infamous ‘pay-to-win’ benefits, which allow players to pay more money than others to have a proportionate advantage over everyone else. In this manner, the streamlined game seems like it’s afraid of letting the player’s dopamine index go down, as if said player would instantly quit the game if this happened. This isn’t entirely unfounded, as player retention, i.e., keeping people playing, can be difficult in a highly entitled and short-sighted demographical market, both young and old, which thinks its impulses are God and has an infinite amount of other games they could choose. A player-unfriendly game would, as you can guess, tell the player nothing, so if they have to waste hours figuring out how to fight or go the wrong way and get mauled by enemies too high level to take on, oh well. A complex game makes it so that if the player is decent, they’ll get by, and if they’re good or great, they’ll succeed, but if they’re playing poorly, they’ll fail. A good example of this is the Death Knight opening from Wrath of the Lich King. Early on, through the The Endless Hunger quest, you’ll be tasked with killing an Unworthy Initiate. Later, as you dispatch the Scarlet townsfolk, some of them will fight back, gaining a massive boost to their attack speed and damage that allows them to put up resistance. If you don’t use your abilities when fighting these enemies, they’ll beat you.
Now for the difficulty in experience. Whereas difficulty of play depicts player-friendliness and the negatives of both extremes, difficulty in experience refers to the typical understanding of a game being ‘hard.’ Here we also see a certain spectrum, best detailed by the consequences of dying in various MMORPGs. In Ultima Online, 1997, you become a ghost, and must find a way to resurrect yourself. Though there’re multiple ways to do this, they’re all a little esoteric, and after seven minutes, your non-protected items despawn, protection-from-death being a rare privilege. In the base version of EverQuest, 1999, you lose some experience and must retrieve your items from your corpse. In RuneScape, 2001, you must retrieve all your items, and if you died in a zone marked for player-versus-player combat, your items can be taken by other players. In World of Warcraft, 2004, your equipment gets a little damaged but you’re otherwise unharmed. You can even respawn immediately at the cost of additional damage to your equipment and ‘resurrection sickness,’ (retrieved 3/14/2024) which makes your character borderline useless for a few minutes, unless you’re low enough level, in which case the duration is shortened, and players under Level 10 don’t even get it at all. The virtues and vices of making a game hard in this sense depend entirely on its quality, themes, and design. What must be kept in mind, however, is that there’s a world of difference between hard and unfair. Skyrim’s higher difficulty settings don’t change the game much at all. They just make enemies almost comically difficult to kill while easily one-shotting you in turn. This results in the player being forced to be a stealth archer, with most players finding that each encounter has become drawn out and boring unless they abuse Alchemy and Enchanting, wherein the game is trivialized. Games in general are best played at their second-hardest difficulty, not their hardest. On their hardest difficulty, games go from having some semblance of challenge to flagrantly unfair. YouTubers who play games on their hardest difficulty have videos where they make said games look easy, but what they don’t show you are the monotonously, predictably failed attempts they went through to get the one run where everything went right. Understanding how to win on the hardest difficulties is easy, because there’re only a handful of ways the game can play out where winning is possible, but that’s just it: unless you’re at your best and everything goes right, or you enjoy breaking the game with exploits and glitches, you will neither win nor have any fun.
A longer-term problem as challenge is concerned is maintaining said challenge. As players get better, and they will, you must make the game or series’ content more difficult and, not quite complicated, but advanced to match them. If a game’s fiftieth boss has powers and attacks like its first, fans would see it as a bad boss. If a series’ fourth game is as straightforward and simple as the first game has now become, fans would call it poor. However, this also means that new players have a harder time getting into the game or series in question, as they’re faced with more advanced and complicated content than they theoretically should be. In this way, the games that From Software has released during its recent dynasty aren’t so much standalone parts of a series, but levels in a wider game, necessarily increasing in difficulty as the series continues.
#11: Player-versus-Player Content
Player-versus-player, or PvP, can be argued to be the most important aspect of any multiplayer game. PvE content is limited, whereas PvP content is indefinite, as the latter relies on other people. Inter-player competition can rocket a game to stardom and keep it there for years, such as E-sports games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012) and League of Legends (2009). However, in order to ensure its success and amiability to players, you must keep several things in mind.
Firstly, bad PvP. Most of the design decisions that can hamstring your game’s integrity or shoo off everyone but the most hardcore are found in player-versus-player technics. Chief among them is mandatory PvP. Making PvP mandatory in an MMORPG is a bad idea because not everyone will be playing the game for PvP. Instead, they’ll just be minding their own business doing something else, leaving them vulnerable to opportunistic murder-hobos. The proper way to handle PvP in an MMORPG can be seen in more recent editions of World of Warcraft, which give you an option to enable or disable a PvP status, letting you ignore enemy players if you don’t want to be attacked. The ramifications of mandatory PvP is seen in old-school WoW’s ‘world PvP,’ which forces players who aren’t in tutorial zones or capital cities to participate in PvP no matter their wishes or if they can defend themselves. World PvP as a model has none of the “honor” that its fans claim it does. It results in a pyramid structure where the socially undesirable in your player-base can grow in power far quicker than everyone else, and then promptly slaughter anyone and everyone they find. There’s no gain to doing so, merely gratification for an inferior personality. Those who indulge in mandatory PvP, the same ones who prattle on about honor, will freely admit to killing a player who didn’t provoke them and can’t defend themselves merely because they existed, or ambushing someone on very low health. Such people are a better reflection and representation for this system and those who enjoy it than more “honorable” or idealistic fans because they’re far more realistic than anyone with a few memories of the 1% of times where world PvP worked as intended.
However, mandatory player-versus-player is only a mistake in games where players who can’t defend themselves or don’t want to participate can be preyed upon. For example, Mortal Online 1 (2010) and 2 (2021) not only allow lawless player-killing, but also allow you to loot any player you kill, depriving them of all their work, yet this isn’t a flaw. The reason for this is that games like Mortal Online are entirely built around brutal, dog-eat-dog PvP, there’s no other reason you would play them. Therefore, complaining about the PvP in games like these is like joining a boxing league and complaining about getting punched. In a more traditional MMORPG, though, it’s best to make separate arenas and playing fields where players looking for PvP can do so under more fair conditions. This will upset those who like predating on the defenseless. Good riddance.
Secondly, balancing issues. Players will naturally optimize the fun out of a game, they can’t help themselves, and PvP can and will be broken in this fashion if the game balance isn’t good enough. Achieving a literally perfect balance in a PvP forum is impossible. Instead, most of it is detecting major flaws as soon as possible, like glitches or overpowered things, and trying your best to fix them with as little collateral damage as can be managed. If something is good in PvP, that doesn’t mean it needs fixing. Like real life sports, certain things in multiplayer PvP will have their day, and certain other things will suffer irrelevance. That’s simply the way of competition. As the game changes, so does its food chain, and even if a game is never changed, the natural participant turnover rate will change the game for it.
Thirdly, the parity between player-versus-environment (like dungeons and raids) and player-versus-player. For every alteration to an ability, item, or class, it affects both PvE and PvP. Therefore, if an ability is exploitable in PvP, consider what effects nerfing it would have on that class’s PvE.
Fourthly, in more recent MMORPGs, there’s a great difference between PvE gear and PvP gear. If a character uses different equipment in PvE than they do in PvP, this allows you to alter each side’s items without risking the integrity of the other, but also poses the risk of devaluing equipment and flooding the game with items.
#12: Power Creep
One of the most disliked facts of life in video games is the need to increase its scale, with the sole exception of horror games, which must manipulate the player’s emotions much more thoroughly to be effective. Generally, you need to release better and better equipment to keep players playing and buying stuff, otherwise they’ll either lose interest, as they won’t have anything else to aspire to, or they won’t need to buy anything more because they’re already as powerful as they’ll ever get. Card games are infamous for their need to keep releasing more and more overpowered cards to keep players buying, until they become borderline unplayable.
In an MMORPG, meanwhile, the power creep comes in the form of steadily increasing stats. An item for a character at, say, Level 30 is useless for a character at Level 50. This makes sense, and fits the fantasy setting, but eventually, the levels, stats, damage, health, and all the rest of the influential numbers will become so big that you can’t feasibly scale things any higher. Damage and healing numbers will flood the screen with digits, restricting player vision. When player health begins reaching the tens of millions, you’re reaching that point.
When the in-game numbers become too big, your only option is to numerically reset things; an item that once gave 200 Armor will now give 50. However, mapping out exactly how to downsize players’ numbers, from levels to damage, can be difficult, as you now not only have to rebalance the game, but rebalance a game that’s already in progress. If you start with small numbers and work your way up, you likely won’t have this scaling issue for years, but it will occur eventually. Perhaps downsizing all the numbers like health or damage by a set factor could work, as it affects all players equally. Even still, be wary of urgently-required fixes.
#13: Your Game Will Be Fully Documented Within Days
Now that the internet has made anything possible anywhere, making a game with staying power is almost impossible. Any time a game with buzz is released, guides on how to play optimally follow within the week. These guides are made by players, and though many guides are terrible, those that are good will attract aspiring players like flowers attract bees. There’ll be guides of how to win, advanced guides of how to do one particular thing exceptionally well, guides of how to break the game, and, given the rise of challenge runs ever since Dark Souls released, even guides of how to win and thrive under highly disadvantageous circumstances, all before you can release a single expansion pack. Players want to figure things out and be the best, but they don’t think of what will happen to their beloved game after they make it a job. The premier example is Amazon’s attempt at an MMO, New World (2021), which had guides fully explaining everything about the game while it was still in open-beta. For reference, that’s like studying for an exam during the first week of class.
Another example of this is the re-release of vanilla World of Warcraft, which I was there to both anticipate and witness firsthand. November 3rd, 2017, BlizzCon. I was milling around in Minecraft (2011), once again getting lost in a cave, when I heard the announcement through a YouTuber: Blizzard will finally give us what we want. Originally released in the primordial era of 2004, old school World of Warcraft would be back. No more cesspool guilds, no more mounts at Level 1 or BoA gear trivializing everything. After our hearts came back down to Earth, however, smart players already knew that this re-release of Classic WoW was going to burn its candle at both ends. Long story short, illegal private servers which ran and still run vanilla World of Warcraft and its first two expansions had allowed enough access to the game for to be mapped from top to bottom. Even a speedrunning community formed around it, one so hardcore, they would limit how much they ate and slept to allow more time to play. True enough, written from the perspective of a fairly hardcore player who signed up with the best Horde raiding guild on the Ashkandi server, it only took most players two or three weeks to get to Level 60, and only about one-and-a-half to two months to have all available raids trivialized. Compared to the original release of World of Warcraft, where it took most elite guilds as long to level their characters to 60 as it did for us to have Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair on farm, this made a lightning strike look like erosion. Obeying the meta was also about as boring as erosion.
More than that, I personally began to lose interest in playing the game afterwards. The more a real life mindset seeps into a game, the worse it becomes, as it stops being a game and is instead either a sad exercise in optimization or a watering hole for a certain kind of people. For example, vanilla World of Warcraft’s fanbase is mostly comprised of 40-year-old men who just got off work and are usually quiet and polite, and Zoomer nerds who just want to blitz the game and max their numbers with a general earnestness and a lack of concern for their health. There’s a third group, however, the vocal plurality: thirty-something stoners whose arrogance in their mediocre reveling is only equaled by their smarminess and the datedness of their humor, which consists of little but pop culture references from the late 1980’s to the early 2000’s and a Pavlovian obedience to pornography and lame sexual innuendo. They’re also hypocrites, behaving as mentioned with their friends but then immediately trying to act smugly moralistic towards those who aren’t likeminded to them. In other words, they’re WoW’s version of Reddit users and elitist hippies. My description of this third group may seem rather bitter, and it’s true that I dislike them, but I maintain that this is simply an accurate portrayal of them, direct and long-winded as it may be. Some communities, especially those whose fanbases are comprised of similar demographics, have overlap or are generally similar to each other, like this toxic NBA 2K20 (2019) lobby (retrieved 11/30/2023), frequented by the infamous social media personality FlightReacts, and this montage of toxic Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) lobbies (retrieved 11/30/2023) which took place a decade before the 2K lobby. On the contrary, communities of games where cheating and other issues are rampant will usually accept and help out new players in hopes of improving their fanbase with legitimate players, like Old School RuneScape.
Optimizations like this will spill the beans about everything you ever make, and all you can do is cope. The primary example of a game which thwarted attempts at optimization that I can think of is the Dominions grand strategy series (2002 - 2024), where exploitative strategies exist and a general meta has formed, but the games are so ridiculously deep, this has only started occurring after years of player development. However, the manic buzz that motivates and is generated by exploratory players can be good in the short term; perhaps capitalizing on it is the key. After all, so long as a game’s fanbase remains passionate, the game will continue, both casually and in optimization, no matter its age.
#14: Story Notes in Expansion Design
The base version of an MMORPG can sometimes feel like the ultimate version, like a manifesto more than a rough draft. Because of that, finding anywhere to add more onto or anything else to fix can seem difficult.
The first thing to understand about MMORPG ‘phases,’ as it were, is they all have an overarching theme. These themes can be difficult to produce intentionally, but they come naturally as a result of a focused and inspired creative endeavor. For instance, take WoW’s first four versions. Vanilla was the world itself, with all colors, textures, allies, enemies, victories, and failures being shown and accounted for. It had bits and pieces of everything and of all peoples, from deserts to forests to tundras and all in between. The Burning Crusade, now going from the base game to an expansion, was far more thematically focused. Essentially a fantasy portrayal of nuclear war between belligerent powers, TBC’s core theme is, in a word, chaos, and in a sentence, the worst of power, intelligence, and ambition, both individually and collectively. It has demons and a once-great planet desolated by the use, misuse, and pursuit of power to the point where it’s literally falling apart into the magical version of dark matter, with both the Alliance and Horde’s new races being exiles made refugees by this same pursuit. Wrath of the Lich King was also thematically strong and arguably stronger than its predecessor due to it having what its predecessor did not: a central villain, and a very good one. The presence of the Lich King enabled and fomented the theme of Wrath: the imposition of a single will on all others, even if the needs of MMORPG gameplay contradicts this. Cataclysm was the apocalypse, the end of Ragnarök, the reemergence of all ancient goods and evils in the final battle to reclaim whatever is left, led by an intentional catalyst for this endless annihilation in Deathwing. From here on, each expansion would revisit either the ‘world showcase’ of Vanilla or ‘story beats,’ so to speak, from prior expansions.
As we can see from this examination, the base version of a game has everything. This occurs because this base version is a full game aims to establish an entire world, therefore naturally featuring all its biomes and places. Because of this more general focus, there’s a danger of making all of a base game’s areas feel the same, just with different colors and textures. Due to its scale and inexperience, a base game will lack a certain level of detail and ambition in its presentation, often repeating certain models or motifs numerous times. Expansions, meanwhile, are on a smaller scale, and can therefore be more concentrated and precisely-made. This will usually be seen in more of everything happening, more NPCs and therefore more ‘people,’ a more overt impartment of a hectic or peaceful environment, more environmental features like chairs, desks, armor racks, et cetera.
A non-MMORPG example of the difference in detail between base games and, in this case, micro-games called ‘scenarios’ would be Civilization 6 (PC release 2016). The True Start Location Earth map doesn’t depict the geography of Egypt nearly as finely as the Gifts of the Nile scenario, because the former is trying to depict the entire earth in one map, while the latter is only focused on Egypt, Nubia, and the immediately surrounding land.
#15: Your World Will Age Fast
MMORPGs are built to last forever, but this threatens to prolong your world far past its prime. Players will eventually get tired of the same old stomping grounds, and their limitations will come to the fore. Only the most hardcore players will endure a static world, and most of them can only do so whenever they start hankering for the game again or if they make challenges and competitions for themselves and their friends within the game itself.
There are three potential ways to counteract this.
The first method is to skip the old content altogether and shove players towards the new content. Current MMORPGs are doing this by default, but, as always, the the example people can most easily understand is World of Warcraft. After almost three years of trotting through the same zones and doing the same quests, the game’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, gave players a difficult choice. They could make a new character as the Blood Elf or Draenei races, or they could continue with their current characters into the new planet of Outland. The players who decided to make new Blood Elf or Draenei characters quickly realized that all they got was two or three new zones, and it was back to the old world again. Meanwhile, the players who took their old characters to Outland had a new planet to play in. This might be why the second expansion for World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King, introduced the Death Knight as a ‘hero class,’ a special class that begins at a much higher level than normal. Excellently concealed through the story of the Death Knights, it allowed players to skip a large swathe of content so they don’t have to go back to The Barrens again.
Each expansion reduced the requirements to attain mounts, which made traveling faster. Also with each expansion came heirlooms, also called BoA gear, which are pieces of equipment whose stats scale with a character as they level up, always being overpowered relative to any other item. This equipment was initially earned through playing a truckload of PvP to earn PvP-exclusive currency, but was later allowed to be purchased cheaply with the default in-game gold in Warlords of Draenor (2014). Not only that, but instead of having to carry a single copy of the item around in your bags, you could just bring up a menu and get one on any character. Blizzard also added quest markers to players’ maps, removing the need to follow quest directions and instead telling them exactly where to go; it’s worth mentioning, however, that player-made addons had done the same thing. Later on, after attempting another world-aging cure we’ll discuss shortly, Blizzard accelerated the leveling in the vanilla zones by having them scale to your level, allowing most vanilla-era zones to get you to Level 60, the old level cap, and along with that, the now-infamous Level Boosters, which artificially levels a character up to a certain point. If that wasn’t enough, billboards (retrieved 3/15/2024) were added in capital cities, and a menu was added to make the Dungeon Journal the Adventure Guide (retrieved 3/15/2024) both allowing players to access introductory quests for zones their level. These mechanics were altered in this fashion to make the game easier to get through.
This could’ve also been done to avoid intimidating new players. As an MMORPG has more and more content added to it, immersing yourself in it, looking at all its expansions and raids and various different grinds, can seem daunting to a new player in the same way that people for whom mathematics isn’t a strength find a large equation daunting; they tend to think, perhaps shortsightedly, ‘I have to do all this!?’ By accelerating the player base to the new content quickly, perhaps this bewilderment could be avoided, but this isn’t a worthy reason to sell your game’s soul. Unless, of course, the financial powers that be say so. Yes, as a reality of this or any other industry, you’ll likely have people who have no idea what your job is like tell you how to conduct your business.
However, bypassing the old content makes your game similar to a cigar made of ashes. The majority of the content is worthless and abandoned, and the only people who regularly inhabit it are achievement hunters or rare groups who try to recreate the old experience in the current product. Wrath didn’t do anything to change the still-aging old world. The Death Knight class allowed players to more easily skip everything, but it didn’t address what it skipped in the first place.
By Wrath’s end, the classic world was six years old, and we can safely assume that Blizzard was faced with an array of incentives and tough decisions: keep it safe and change nothing about the old zones, instead adding yet another planet or continent with the next expansion and ignoring the previous zones, or change it up to pursue new ideas and modernize the game to new mechanical standards. Indeed Vanilla was showing its age by now, and though its lack of late game quests (which caused the famous grind from Levels 58 - 60, hence Outland was made open to players at Level 58) could be avoided, other problems like bad quest rewards from mid- to high-Levels and details like how choppy and crude the energy regeneration rate was for Rogues (consisting of periodical ‘blocks’ of Energy being restored rather than a steady trickle to a class who needed to use it constantly) could not. With their third expansion, Cataclysm, Blizzard enacted the second anti-aging cure: the Great Experiment.
In Cataclysm, everything was turned on its head. Player classes were revamped, most notably replacing the talent point system, and different races were made to be able to choose more classes than before as, I theorize, the utility of class-restrictions between races ended when the Alliance got Shamans with Draenei and the Horde got Paladins with Blood Elves. All races could become Death Knights given the story of the class. In the previous three editions of WoW, players traversed a static world whose threats and villains stayed near their lairs and rarely emerged, seclusion that was explained by assuming pettier villains weren’t strong enough to make any kind of move yet, or were under the command of a greater villain, while the major villains were said to be off working towards a grand plan of some sort. Blizzard was likely aware of this sedentary trend, as they sometimes added an incredibly powerful monster to a zone with no story or prior mention who would occasionally wander through otherwise safe territory, meant to serve as a mobile threat to ambush players. The three primary examples of this were the Son of Arugal and Stitches in vanilla and the Fel Reaper in The Burning Crusade. Instead of a pre-established character who sat in his lair waiting to be killed and whose character had to be done very poorly to suit the game, Cataclysm had the best villain in WoW history: Deathwing. Deathwing, a once-noble great dragon corrupted by demonic artifacts and the Lovecraftian Old Gods, is a nihilistic force of nature literally bursting at the seams, held together by machines and madness, determined to literally kill everything. Unlike Arthas or Illidan, Deathwing is a mostly original character who, instead of being hunted, took the fight directly to the players and began wrecking everything. Contrasting the first two expansions, which had players invading hellscapes that were burned out and frozen over, centralizing the action within remote areas, Deathwing’s quest to annihilate all life sent players to various different zones, old and new, all across the old world. Along with the introduction of new zones, said old world was completely redesigned; while questing locations were more war-torn, chaotic, and desperate to reflect the immediate effect of Deathwing and the other existential threats of the time, most tutorial zones and major cities were made more technologically advanced, likely to both show the progress their inhabitants had made and to make things look more “cool.”
Cataclysm also became more intense in its production. There was a zone named Vashj’ir where gameplay took place entirely underwater, and several more where rampant elemental forces fought, showing a tightly packed smorgasbord of extremes in nature, earth, fire, et cetera. For the new races, the Worgen and Goblins, the gothic Victorian and sleazy steampunk themes, respectively, were laid on thick, and their beginning zones were just as hectic and erratic as the higher-level content, filled with constant spectacle and action, along with the proliferation of cutscenes. Even the old races’ zones were remade to feel more like being conscripted into an active and hurried campaign, a campaign against monstrous enemies, additional old foes who have risen up to take advantage of the chaos, and against the ravages of war themselves, like mass homelessness as seen around the new Sentinel Hill in Westfall. Compared to Cataclysm, vanilla World of Warcraft looked as intense as taking a nap in a beachside cabin.
This Great Experiment sounds incredible on paper, but, in practice, there’s a cost to doing away with the old formula. The way which will soon become the way things used to be can only be done once, and no matter how stale it’s gotten, when it’s gone, your players’ discontentment at the old days being over will last indefinitely. Yes, you’ll get complaints whether you replace the old content or not, a textbook instance of players being hypocrites. Furthermore, you’re counting on all these experimental ideas to succeed or at least fulfill their respective purposes, a level of consistency which simply can’t be achieved when going into the unknown; if the experiment fails badly enough, you could potentially ruin your game altogether. Lastly, and most significantly in the long run, you can only really do one Great Experiment for years, as you can’t reasonably upheave your game in such a drastic way more than once, and only after your game has lasted long enough with enough success that your players won’t immediately be turned away by it being made so different. A game like that is a masterwork which few can ever create.
Then, there’s the third anti-aging cure: do it all again.
As we’ve seen with the rerelease of old versions of World of Warcraft, both official and illegal, and the weekly server-wide resets of Rust (full release 2018), a surprisingly effective method of making your game young again is to turn back the clock and play the entire thing once more. This could cause logistical issues; Classic World of Warcraft only arrived in 2019, two years after the game’s announcement (retrieved 3/15/2024), because the game’s code was outdated and had to be rewritten, among other technological updates.
This Groundhog Day (1993) approach sounds like a utopia for those who want to play a game where they can always be playing, progressing, and reaching a goal. On that note, however, there are problems for both potential routes this Groundhog Day idea can take. If your game resets over and over like Rust, many casual fans will be displeased. They’ll see this as having all their time and effort be wasted. You also have to determine how often said game will restart. Monthly, trimonthly? How much time is needed to make sure that players achieve their goals, yet aren’t having to wait around for too long? Finally games with ‘wipes,’ as they’re called because the game is wiped clean, breed impatience and a certain spinelessness in their fans. If things aren’t going their way or the action is fading, they’ll just quit and go to a different server, preferably somewhere with an impending wipe. This leads to a very short attention span and population numbers that rely entirely on how recent the last wipe was. Alternatively, if your game is revived infrequently, you’re faced with the fact that the return can only ever be short-lived, as your returning fans will already know how to beat your game in record time. Sure, not all fans care about maximizing their numbers or optimizing their routes, but these people are uncommon in this increasingly hardcore type of game, and, it being a game, numbers and progressing are the main reasons people play at all.
#16: Content Boundaries
When a game is created, it’s created with a specific model and vision in mind. This model has boundaries; just as a human body can be obese or malnourished, definitively confirming the possibility of it being too big or too small for its own good, the same principle applies to video games. This is expressed when a game sees a countermovement of players who prefer older versions of said game. While nostalgia does play a role in this phenomena, there’s reason behind it as well.
Take Minecraft, for instance. As updates continuously add new content to the game, an increasing amount of players are put off by it. They think it’s too much, yet at the same time too exploitable, too optimized, too streamlined, and too much of a role-playing game with a sandbox in the background instead of a true sandbox. We see this in the swathe of YouTube videos centered around the ‘100 days’ concept innovated by Luke TheNotable[sic]. The players do the same thing in each and every single one of these videos, gather wood, dart off to a structure to get loot, get diamonds, kill the Ender Dragon, get the Elytra, get Netherite, make a bunch of automated farms, machines, and villager hubs that trivialize the game, and make some megabuild made to look more interesting with cinematic camerawork, like putting the terrain of one biome into another, customizing an ocean monument, or making some space or universe build in the End. While the order in which the players do these things can vary slightly, and I’m being a little unfair to a genre in which only so much can be done, the process and its results are all the same. Not all of Minecraft’s additions are bad, of course. Mud brick blocks allow players to differ from the sci-fi, medieval, or modern themes they were previously limited to. Still, the game has become too bloated, players have been given too much, a game that was made from a particularly grounded yet expansive and exploratory substance is trying to contort itself into being more popular and having a bunch of accessories. The same thing usually happens to MMORPGs when they try to modernize.
Therefore, when designing your game, and its future updates and expansions, consider whether an addition would achieve the purposes you intend or instead do the opposite.
#17: Whatever You Calculate Your Optimal Server Capacity To Be, Double It Anyway
From here, we get into more technical advice regarding your game.
This is a lesson taken purely from experience. Despite their best efforts, most MMORPGs have had server issues at some point in their early lives. From World of Warcraft in the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj (retrieved 3/15/2024) event, wherein the release of a massive, server-wide raid event caused many WoW servers such latency problems that they became totally unplayable, to the troubled releases of basically every game today, server capacity has been a serious problem for most multiplayer games in general, let alone those that got an unexpected amount of hype.
#18: Make Bug-Reporting as Easy and Private as Possible
This point seems obvious, but the value of bug reporting can’t be underestimated. A certain section of players, the dedicated minmaxers, will more than likely exploit any bugs they can come across, so making sure that the most recently found bugs and glitches aren’t in the hands of the public is incredibly important. New World is the premier example of what happens when this guideline isn’t followed. Its developers made the mistake of not keeping their bug-reporting forums private, so, predictably, players watched said forums like a hawk, looking for other players to report new bugs so they could be exploited. This was just one of the many causes of New World’s notorious instability and brokenness, but it was a notable one.
#19: Make Sure Fixes and Additions Can Be Tested and The Players Are Informed of Them Before They Go Live
In MMORPGs, new means bugged. Having a test server where changes and new additions to your game can be tested is essential. If you don’t dedicate a server to this purpose, you are forced to crowbar these new features into your game while it’s live, i.e., being played, introducing more bugs to an opportunistic demographic of people.
You must also be wary of any changes or updates to your game which overhaul certain progression systems, such as crafting. These alterations risk wasting hours and hours of your players’ time by, for instance, replacing a tedious system with a more expedient one or replacing a currency. In both cases, players will complain about having all their effort wasted. To avoid this, inform players of changes like these in advance.
#20: You Can Try To Stop People From Having Unnecessarily Crude Names, But Name-Filtering Is Limited
Implementing filters to forbid morbidly crass terms from being something’s name is a viable solution to the jockish humor which can often drive less indecent players away. However, a mechanical filter like this can only block out obviously inexcusable terms, and can be subverted by using euphemisms or turns of phrase. In these cases, you can request a name change, but will otherwise have to deal with it; becoming upset will only encourage your more sleazy players.
#21: The Nature of Player Interest
Lastly, player interest. People enjoy media because it fulfills a fantasy they have. It’s not obvious at first, but you can see this with some aspects of the structure of media and the way consumers express their fondness for it. Firstly, media is controlled. Usually nothing out of the ordinary happens, and when it does, it’s to portray something unrealistic as realistically as is needed. Furthermore, just when the presentation would be reaching its end, it does end. The fact that media has an ending is incredibly important, as the entire draw of a fantasy is the seduction that its utopia will never end; ‘I wish this moment would last forever,’ people say. But it won’t, and then you’re left with nothing. What now? Media rarely does this. Right when it would be confronted with reality, the ‘what now’ moment, it ends. Realize, however, that despite my mention of fantasies and seduction, the enjoyment of media isn’t inherently deviant, only mostly so. Fan-service is only a problem when it’s noticeable, and every imperfect sapient being will have a vision of a perfect or idealized world. If not one of happiness, then one of significance and meaning where people finally understand.
Now for consumer interest. Some people will find a media, food, or music that they’ll never get tired of. When asked how they can enjoy their cherished thing for so long without tiring of it, they often reply, ‘It has everything. It’s perfect.’ Here we see fantasy realization when it’s complete and flawless, and as a result the interest is maintained perpetually because there’re no imperfections to get tired of. For most people, however, no media is completely to their tastes, as it would be termed. Instead, they switch between media that gratifies them in different ways. Hence why no matter what they’re watching, eating, or playing, you’ll notice certain aspects of all their tastes that stay constant, that’re the entire reason for why the consumer likes these things despite their differences. The media consumption cycle usually begins with the consumer either actively choosing different media to the one they’re invested in now or remembering that said different media is available. Either way, and I admit there isn’t much of a difference, their interest in this media is fresh even if they’ve consumed it before, because the specific way in which it pleases them hasn’t been experienced for a while and now addresses something their previous media was missing. For a television show, the consumer might enjoy all the interpersonal relationships the characters have, the idiosyncrasies of which being colored by the show’s setting, the exact nature of the characters, and the specific roles the characters fill within this setting. The parlay between characters is the one ultimate reason to enjoy traditional fiction, as it’s the fantasized version of the human experience. For a game, the player plays it because within said game, they’re able to do exactly what they want to do, which most or any other games at all simply can’t cater to because of its exact design. For sports, we have the theatrical sport in American basketball and sport theater in professional wrestling; while pro-wrestling is clearly athletic theater, the NBA is a certified sporting league, yet its presentation has gravitated around the chemistry and personalities of individual players, turning them into characters and constantly entertaining concepts like ‘legacy’ to denote how the stories of their careers are playing out. Even still, no matter how similar two pieces of media might be to each other, it’s the differences that matter. Hence why dedicated fans of two shows or games, or dedicated fans of one bit of media who’ve found the other wanting, will take issue with the idea that both products are the same even if they’re indeed very similar; those little differences are, to them, more important than any similarity. This is why I’ve repeatedly emphasized the exactness of things. Every last detail matters, and they’re normally engrained in the viscera of the product.
What does this mean for a creator of an MMORPG? I return your attention to my observations about an MMORPG’s world eventually aging and needing to be changed. Firstly, there’ll be reasons that players will like or dislike your game that won’t seem describable and that you can’t do anything about. These likes and dislikes can feel nebulous or even philosophical. Sometimes, a player will dislike something within the very skeleton of your game, like how movement works or what a certain character class can or can’t do. Catering to players often implies an upheaval of your game, and whether minor or major, it’s never something to take lightly. In this case, you shouldn’t feel like you’re 95% of the way there but this one thing ruins it. Instead, such a player would have something particular in mind and your product simply isn’t it. Oh well. Secondly, some amount of player burnout is normal. It’s uncontrollable, and shouldn’t be compensated for. Sometimes a player will just lose interest in your game and leave. You didn’t necessarily do anything wrong, and neither did they; it’s a video game, not a marriage. Materially, you shouldn’t actively try to keep them around. Burned-out players are only placated by making things expedient for them. Doing so will water your game down and only slightly delay their departure.
Further on player burnout, there exist definitive causes of it, the most significant of which is aging, consumers entering a different stage of their lives. With hindsight, it’s no surprise that games which are wildly popular with children and young teenagers like Minecraft (2011) and Fortnite (2017) only experience this success for a few years, followed by a malaise for several more, before having a chance to reemerge for another few years if the product is good enough: their reliance on young fans partially binds them to the generational cycle. All hobbies and escapisms are bound to the generational cycle to some extent due to the nature of time as the experience of entropy, whose negativity and destruction creates the possibility for change, as perfection would be unchanging. Said change spreads to these activities, but child-centric media is hit the hardest. A large number of this media’s fans, along with the professionals and media personalities they enjoyed, simply grow up and move on, and if they ever reach their previous heights, it’ll be with a new generation of fans and a whole new roster of professionals and media personalities. This media has an almost bipolar cycle of peaks and valleys, and that’s assuming the first valley doesn’t end it outright. Hence the ultra-immediate nature of trend marketing.
To return to MMORPG creation, we reach the most important point, one which has been partially stated but not fully addressed as of yet. An MMORPG is effectively an attempt to emulate a fantasy world with a realism that is both serious, i.e., consequential, and reasonable. This is why when MMORPGs start relying on conveniences to appease players, something gets lost. That ‘something’ that people can talk about but never name specifically is socialization. Suddenly, you don’t see the same people more than once or twice anymore, you don’t have organic social moments like running alongside someone else on a painfully long trip and striking up a discussion. You don’t see people peddling their fledgling character skills in the village everyone else is going in and out of, you don’t come to rely on each other for mundane things, you don’t need to talk to others or treat this world like a world, and so you won’t. Indeed, more socialization between players and less streamlined gameplay, i.e., un-convenience-d gameplay, has quite a few practical problems, the former seen in undesirable people and the latter in being very easy to make purposefully unfair and player-unfriendly. However, so long as you toe the line between challenge and punishing your players for playing the game, so long as you focus on the purpose of an MMORPG rather than shallow profit-hunting, and so long as you keep the inevitable troubles of this lifelong creation in mind, you can make something worth remembering even in a sea of hopefuls and disillusion.
These games are mostly related, either to each other or through their relation to other games. Practically all games are continuations of some bloodline of inspiration; D&D inspired the Wizardry (1981 - 2023) series, which many designers at a young and ailing Japanese software company named From Software loved. From this inspiration, they made the King’s Field (1994 - 2006) series, and after that, Demon’s Souls (2009). After that, Dark Souls. The rest is history. Wizardry is also cited by Wikipedia as being a founding inspiration on the Final Fantasy (1987 - 2024) series.