MMOs don't need 'to be 200 hours of unique content' at launch, says industry vet

It's hard to make a new MMO nowadays—sure, if you've got over two decades of expansions to back you up, you can keep your players entertained by using every bit of the buffalo. But if you don't have that? Good luck.

MMO design veteran Jack Emmert, who recently returned to Cryptic Studios and has worked on multiple games including City of Heroes, Neverwinter, Champions Online, and Star Trek: Online, says hounding after scope is part of the problem in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.

But there's also an issue with developers not using what's already there to its fullest potential: "It's not that I need a gajillion number of dungeons. What I need is to make sure the progression is worth it.

"In fact, I enjoy doing things a gajillion number of times, because each time I get a little bit better, and then all of a sudden I'm an expert and I'm telling other people what to do. But other people will say, 'Well, that's impossible, people get bored or whatever'. That misunderstands the point."

I feel this on a personal level—Final Fantasy 14 has struggled with this for years now. Its latest Variant Dungeon is excellent, but doesn't have the rewards to back it up, like almost every Variant Dungeon before it, and it struggles with meaningful reasons or progression contributions that might encourage players to go back to it.

Just like every other bit of beautiful but ultimately DoA content in that game. Heck, sometimes Square Enix gets it wrong in the other direction, making something so unavailable that it's basically for nobody.

Emmert's point is "don't go nuts … You just start with something, and if you have a committed live team, you can grow it into whatever the players want. In fact, it's even bad to launch a game with one million features and a ton of content, because you don't know yet what the players really want, not really. So you're wasting a whole bunch of time and energy on stuff which they might not ever touch.

"The launch does not need to be everything with an MMO. It does not need to be 200 hours of unique content. It just flat out doesn't … the key is that the game launches, and then three months later there's something new, and three months later there's something new."

Emmert says this sort of thinking is what's made his games successful, and look—I'm not personally a fan of a lot of the games he's made (Champions Online's content droughts have stung me before) but I do have to admit that they're all still around and kicking.

Even my favourite of the games he's worked on, City of Heroes (which did get shut down) was so popular that a fan revival managed to get permission from the current IP holders to keep operating, and if that's not a sign you know how to capture a loyal group of fans I'm not sure what is.

Of EA and Microsoft, Emmert quips: "I think I'm going to eat their lunch, because I know how to prototype quickly. I know how to make stuff inexpensively. I'm not trying to be everything in a box of rocks. I know who I am: I make niche games," then, as a chaser to the shot, "There's probably a reason why EA never wanted to hire me."

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