Designing an MMO part 1

Designing a New MMO, Part I: Get Rid of Classes!

Everyone wants to make an MMO. They're fun games, and with WoW pulling in over a billion dollars a year it looks like an insanely lucrative market.

Except, of course, for all those failures. Like Tabula Rasa, which cost a hundred million to make and only brought in a sixth of that in revenue. Unless you've got 84 million dollars you don't mind never seeing again, jumping in should be done with care.

I like thinking about MMO design. I think it's like talking politics. It's not like me and the rest of the crew at the water cooler are going to run for office. Ultimately, the only effect each of us has is one vote -- out of millions. Does it really matter what I think about politics? At most, I'm influencing a dozen people. And I haven't yet converted any of them to the One True and Proper Political Party, so what does it matter?

It doesn't matter. It's fun, though. Likewise, us scrubs talk MMO design. It's an entertaining exercise.

Usually the first topic to come up is something like "classes are lame" or "levels are boring". I think this is a fairly fundamental discussion.

But I'll skip it, because Lum did a much better job than me. Go read that.

(There's no guarantee that I'll ever write a part 2.)