Our author Schuhmann says: The debate about Red Dead Redemption 2 illustrates why MMORPG fans are not getting the new games they want in 2018.
This frustrates MMORPG fans right now: In the genre of online role-playing games, there has been a divide between players and developers since at least 2014:
- Many players long for a “classic” theme park MMORPG with handcrafted quests and a focus on leveling, loot, and story – many want a “WoW 2.0”. An AAA MMORPG up to the standards of today’s technology.
- However, developers are working on other games: Little story, little PvE, no theme park – they focus on PvP, sandbox, and self-generating worlds. They want to develop MMORPGs where players are the main characters, not the NPCs.
Many players do not understand why no one is making the MMORPG they are calling for so loudly and persistently. Instead, they say about new MMORPGs that they are doomed to fail because they do not meet what the market wants today.
The conflict over the massive overtime during the development of Red Dead Redemption 2 allows us to take a new look at this MMORPG issue.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is huge: To achieve the 65 hours of story in Red Dead Redemption 2 and a lifelike world, Rockstar needed a script of 2,000 pages, 500,000 lines of dialogue, 300,000 animations, and 1,200 actors for motion capture. This was proudly announced by Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser in an interview.
The game has approximately the dimensions that MMORPG fans desire from their dream MMORPG: a living world with many NPCs, numerous quests, and adventures.
This is behind Red Dead Redemption 2: However, RDR2 required a massive effort. Four teams in various studios worked on the game for Rockstar for years. It is said that over 1,000 employees were involved (via Eurogamer).
Only a studio with a worldwide mega-hit like GTA Online can even afford such a risk.
However, even such a giant studio has employees sharing horror stories about how they had to work 60-hour weeks for months to manage the massive project. Testing the game seems to be incredibly time-consuming.
Rockstar, as one of the largest studios in the world, is only able to develop a game of this magnitude by pushing its employees to the limit. Reports say that employees collapsed and “went on vacation” from which they did not return. An MMORPG that would be like a “modern WoW” today would require at least as many man-hours, if not many times that amount. Clearly, no studio can afford that today.
Personnel problem: In addition, the number of available workers is limited. There were rumors that WoW: Warlords of Draenor in 2015 was so low on content because Blizzard had hired new employees for the WoW team, but their work was not usable because it was not at the level required.
Therefore, it is said that an increase in staff at that time resulted in less content for the expansion: the existing, fit employees had to spend time training the new hires.
Only with this lack of competent work hours can the disappointing Warlords of Draenor be explained for many.
The special problem with an MMORPG: With MMORPGs and games-as-a-service there is another problem. One cannot work towards a release date and push additional hours for a short sprint. Because an MMORPG is a marathon.
In a conversation with Eurogamer, anonymous employees who put in overtime for Red Dead Redemption 2 report that in the past such violent periods eventually came to an end. This “crunch time” occurred only in the final phase of a project and ended with the release.
With GTA V, this was no longer the case. After the launch, the employees had to work on content for GTA Online and put in more overtime. Because players demanded new content and DLCs.
This is also expected for Red Dead Redemption 2: Because the online version “Red Dead Online” is to be supported with further content.
Content is expensive: We see from the example of RDR2 that the pure working hours are the decisive element. The hours it takes to develop and test “game content” at the level players are accustomed to in 2018 and that they demand.
This prevents large PvE MMORPGs.
While game systems only need to be developed once and can theoretically continue running – as is the case with MOBAs or PvP games like Fortnite – scripted game content consumes an immense amount of working time.
The effort seems to only be manageable at the cost of the employees with current capabilities.
Can there be solutions?
- Many studios make do by outsourcing assets and producing cheaply in Asia. Horizon Zero Dawn was supposedly created this way (via theoutline). A small team in the Netherlands made decisions while much of the laborious work was done by Chinese workers.
- Large studios like Rockstar or publishers like Ubisoft are relying more and more on employees in various studios around the world to significantly increase the workforce. However, this requires a lot of additional coordination work between the teams.
- In China, NetEase is working with the wonderful technology of SpatialOS to allow even small teams to populate large, living MMO worlds. A special server technology is being utilized here.
However, we will likely have to wait even longer for a large PvE MMORPG. It simply seems that working hours form a natural limit in this case.
And when so much effort is being put in, one would rather want to invest it in a “safe project” rather than in an MMORPG – a genre that seems to have fallen out of favor.
