6 legends tell us why it is so hard today to make a successful MMORPG

Theme Park vs. Sandbox – the solution lies somewhere in between

MeinMMO: Players consume content today faster than developers can ever produce it. At the same time, production costs and graphic standards for AAA titles have exploded. How can the endless hunger of the community for new content be sustainably and healthily financed and satisfied today (without massive developer burnout)?

Benjamin Zuckerer: I believe you inevitably lose this race if you try to deliver new handcrafted content every week. The answer is also not procedurally generated content or “User Generated Content,” as the quality simply varies too much.

Sustainable MMORPGs therefore do not primarily rely on content but on systems. A functioning economy, conflicts between players, territories, social relationships, rivalries, or cooperations can create new experiences over years without developers needing to build every single situation.

A good example is PvP. As a developer, I can design a castle. The actual stories only emerge when players defend or attack it. When they form alliances or commit betrayal.

That’s why we focus on persistent worlds where decisions have consequences. This scales significantly better in the long run than simply producing more and more content. At the same time, it is healthier for developers, as one does not try to satisfy an infinite hunger solely with new assets and quests. However, building a large persistent world is also difficult and challenging, requiring many years of development time.

Persist Online is the new MMORPG from CipSoft that throws you into a zombie apocalypse – here is the trailer:

Greg Street: I don’t believe it’s possible to create content by hand faster than players can consume it. Honestly, I’m not sure that it was ever possible. The better approach is a more systemic one, where the game rules naturally interlock in such a way that they deliver content to players without the development team having to define and design every single possibility beforehand.

Here are three examples of what I mean:

1. Physics-based simulations: If your game has rules – like that walls can be destroyed – it usually gives players another tool. When they try to break into an enemy base, they can, of course, try to defeat the guards at the gate, but they can also simply tear down the walls. In a game like WoW, the only walls that can be destroyed are those explicitly marked as destructible by the developers. Things like oil that allows ignition or water that can extinguish fire fit into the same category.
2. Roguelike variance: I think this is an area that is still completely untapped. Loot used to be one of the few sources of variance in MMOs (e.g., “What will this boss drop?”), but even that has become increasingly deterministic over time. MMOs could do much more with creature affixes, wandering monsters, or even variable world states so that players have to react more to the current situation rather than just focusing on achieving perfect execution in a dungeon or boss fight where everything is the same every time.
3. Leveraging the unpredictability of other players: PvP is the most obvious example here, as human opponents (at least for a few more years) are much less predictable than NPCs. But I also think that developers can focus too much on PvP, even though we know that not every player is interested in it. How else can we leverage the fact that MMOs are inherently social? Perhaps auction houses should be more based on player interaction (finding someone who has that rare recipe or enchantment) instead of just clicking a button in an auction house interface, which is more an interaction with the game’s UI rather than with other players. […]

Greg Street has been in the gaming industry since 1998 and lists the IP Age of Empires as his first credit. In 2008, he made the switch to Blizzard and WoW. There, he served as Lead Systems Designer as well as a spokesperson, as he consistently sought direct contact with the community.

Street has remained true to the MMO genre ever since. First as Creative Lead of the team from the LoL MMORPG, then with his own studio Fantastic Pixel Castle, where the MMO project Ghost was supposed to come into being. Unfortunately, last year NetEase cut off funding, which forced the studio to close and the project to be discontinued.

Jack Emmert: I play the same content over and over again – when the rewards are worth it. In my own MMO, I have played the Neverwinter Dungeon well over 100 times to get the complete gear set for my fighter! Of course, the content must be fun so that players don’t mind playing it repeatedly.

This has always meant to me incorporating elements into the content that create interesting new twists. Small random elements – that could be the boss’s attack cycle – it could be the adds – it could be environmental elements.

I also prefer mechanics that do not force players to complete content for hours on end. Instead, I think that limiting content to daily and weekly tasks means players do not have to grind constantly. That’s a recipe for player burnout.

As a developer, I find it crucial to design the game with these concepts in mind. This way, the team does not have to frantically produce content at an unsustainable pace.

Cryptic has concrete plans for each of its MMOs – here is the current roadmap for Star Trek Online:

Moritz Bokelmann: Honestly, it was also impossible in the past as a developer of a theme park MMO to develop content as quickly as players could “complete” it. How often were new World of Warcraft raids already “solved” on the first day? Sure, those were ultra hard-core groups – but still: day one.

That’s also one of the reasons why we chose a sandbox approach. We were a really, really small team when we started – and by comparison, we are still a small team today. So we always had to act cleverly and develop systems that allow players to find their own content – or to be their own content.

To make it work for theme park MMOs, you as a developer have to cleverly develop replayable content, accept that you can never, ever, ever keep up with the content hunger of players and also accept that during the inevitable slower times, players will also play other games. But if you do your job well, they will come back for the next content drop.

Moritz Bokelmann has been the Game Director of Albion Online since November 2024. Previously, he worked as Head of Production and UI Designer at Sandbox Interactive. He has been part of the Berlin team since 2018. Through his roles, he was able to significantly shape the successful path of Albion Online.

The sandbox MMORPG from Germany was released in July 2017 and has become one of the most successful games from our country – with increasing player numbers, winning the German Computer Game Award in 2022, and reaching new target groups (most recently through the release on Xbox).

Raph Koster: In the case of Stars Reach, we rely on a few core strategies: emergence, simulation, and enabling player creativity.

The first two points go hand in hand. When you design your game based on rules rather than handcrafted content and one-off solutions, you get a simulation-based design upon which you can layer handcrafted elements.

Rules can interact with each other and therefore create emergent behavior – things that were not predictable. This makes everything in the game deeper and more consistent. The area where we have embraced this the most is, of course, our world simulation.

Creating a world of rules also means it’s much easier for players to influence it. The largest cities in Stars Reach were not built by developers but by players. They develop and change. It’s not about “letting the players do all the work” – we still build and design content by hand.

But all of this is based on the rule system, allowing players to build, reshape the world, and change things. After all, it’s their world. And they possess incredible creativity and contribute greatly to the player experience.

Elder Scrolls Online is one of the currently best MMORPGs for consoles. Which online role-playing games on PlayStation and Xbox are also worth recommending, this is discussed in this video from MeinMMO’s YouTube channel:

Rich Lambert: If I’ve learned one thing in my 30 years of game development, it is that players will always consume content faster than developers can produce it.

That’s also why studios are increasingly discovering modding for themselves and why more and more games are focusing on user-generated or system-driven content. Content that players can repeat, reshape, or extract different outcomes from has a much longer lifespan than something you play through once and then check off.

Implementing this in MMOs is more difficult because everything is interconnected. You have to think about the economy, balance, progression, moderation, and fairness in a shared world. But we are increasingly seeing systems that offer high replay value or give players more freedom in what they create.

The housing system in Elder Scrolls Online is a good example of this. Players get a space that belongs to them. They can build it however they want, decorate it however they want, and share it with others. That’s why it’s one of the features with the strongest player engagement in the entire game.

The trick is to find the right balance between well-written stories and systemic, emergent behavior. You still need great content. You just can’t rely on “one-time content” alone to carry the whole game forever.

On the next page, it’s about the competition with other service games, but also with social media, streaming services, and other offerings that all want a piece of our precious free time.