Wanting to build MMO. Where to start.

Hey guys, im working on a game. top-down view kinda like League of legends. BUT i want to make it an ‘MMO’ (like World of warcraft). In other words i want to be able to have a multiplayer server(s) but with thousands of people on the same server, AND on 2 different factions (again like in WoW) with quests and stuff with dungeons and mini games like pvp.

I know that there is a MMO starter kit out there ( MMO Starter Kit - Content Creation - Unreal Engine Forums ). I was wonder if that IS what im looking for. With that allow me to make my own game with my own world, with different races and classes. etc.???

Or is there something else that is better? Or is there a third party that will be able to allow me to achieve this?

I’m looking for the cheapest route, that provides best outcome. Because i dont not have all that much money. ( I know that not everything is free so dont be an butt head about it).

Thanks guys,
all help/recommendations are extremely appreciated.

Let me give you a nickel’s worth of free advice:

Forget it!

Let me now qualify my statement:

Here is a gameplay video of my game Swords of Vridhan (a ‘Sky Rim like RPG’): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMIjXCTMG88

This video represents approximately 7500 hours (most likely more, but I don’t have an official log) of effort over 2.5 years, time away from everything in my life, family, music, art, vacation trips - everything. And this game isn’t even set up for multi-player, let alone MMO. I created only a small amount of my own assets, mostly architecture, and purchase quite a number of assets and used the awesome, freely available Epic Games assets from Kite Demo, Infinity Blade, Mixamo and a few others. All the guts and workings of the game I did myself (Inventory system, quest system, combat system, faction system, SQLite database system for persistence of world, etc). Sure doesn’t sound like a lot, does it?

I’m going to be working on a much larger post-mortem posting I’ll be posting in the forum here, going into much detail of the efforts I have made as a 1-man team, who has been working like a mad-dog pit-bull terminator to try to supplement my income with a video game. But this is the Reader’s Digest version:

All that work and all that effort amounted to about 10 downloads, 2 donating patrons for a grand total of $11 per month, porn bots in my message boards (which were destroyed by hosting issues), and dissatisfied players whose equipment can’t run the game.

Purchasing any system from the Marketplace will not and cannot be plug-and-play - you need to fully understand what these systems are doing, so that you can modify them to work in your context.

If you love making games, as I do (and I do, or I would not have devoted a HUGE amount of time to this project), then just make a game, or join a team already established and enjoy life.

First of all, hosting an MMO will cost you a lot of money. It will take a lot of time and money to create even the simplest MMO, you would be better off making an RPG or a different game, but if you really want to make one, here are some tips:

  1. Host a team. Working on an MMO isn’t always easy, having an experienced team even with friends or family can help you.
  2. Dedicate time to working on the MMO. This means less time for relaxation, vacation, learning, etc. Make sure you have the time.
  3. What will make your MMO unique? I’m bored of all of the MMO’s being similar. Many, many people would want something new, and different. Yes, get ideas and base off your MMO from League of Legends or World of Warcraft, but you need to add-on, otherwise you won’t get far.
  4. Use Unity 3D instead of Unreal Engine 4.

IF YOU WANT TO SPEND NO MONEY ON MAKING A GAME:

  1. Try making an FPS or 3rd person game. It would take you less time, effort, and no money.
  2. You could sell the game for money afterwards. Then, you could start an MMO and decide whether to host it or not.

I hope these tips are useful!

  • Pro Pineapple (the tech group)

I totally agree with devlyn811. The main problem is that you have to build everything from scratch and can’t even plug the marketplace packs together.
Thats why i posted this suggestion to approach that general problem by Epic, as they are the only ones who could start solving it:

pitching: Epic Game Modules! - Feedback for Unreal Engine team - Unreal Engine Forums!

This re-inventing the wheel (for even e.g. a sound-menu) for each project causes so much unneccesary workload that it’s the reason why many indie projects die…they just dont realise the immense workload when starting euphoric.

So it goes…

  1. Epic does not give you the features
  2. the marketplace features need as much time understanding and modifying them as if you would make em from scratch
  3. so youre left to build everything by youself, which people cant, even in indie-teams.

As long as Epic does not change that basic approach for gamedevs, you really can forget finishing any medium or larger sized games.

To Llamaking: the only way for you to “make” you’re own game that scale is to mod a existing one. There all the gameplay features (and other assets like 3d) exist already and you “just” have to modify them or replace them with other content.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any moddable games apart from Ark and UT which are both in a sort of “development” stage.

Participate in a Gamejam. I learned alot from when I did.