Is it possible to create an MMO with UDK?

[Alienated Phreak]

Hello, so, as crazy as it may sound. I want to make an MMORPG with UDK. I remember an awesome informative thread on this, but it god deleted. So I was wondering if anyone could let me in on this, if its possible to make an MMO and anything I might want to know about first.

Thanks in advance.

PS: If I may, I would like to possibly turn all of the information given into a guide on MMO's, just a central source of MMO...stuff.

[Solid Snake]

It is, but it's not particularly easy if you don't understand how MMO's work in general. It's not cheap.

There are certain types of MMO's that are possible in UDK, but generally one with thousands of players all in a single one game instance isn't going to work.

[Alienated Phreak]

Would that work if I did level streaming?

And I know, its amazingly expensive, my dad has a server that he got from an old job that he had, it wasn't great, but it was pretty good, it couldn't do an MMO, I'm not suggesting that, but it was $150,000. Plus there's the service to put it on the internet. According to my dad, T1 is the best service for servers, and according to the ad on my Gmail, T1 is $269 a month. But, with loans and a two-year CD at the bank (I'm guessing it'll take that long to make the MMO) I should be good (servers today that are MMO worthy don't cost that much, I know that).

[darthviper107]

Well, at the moment UDK can only do 64 players, so to be able to do more you'd need to buy a UE3 license (hundreds of thousands of dollars) or try to hack it out some other way.

The main thing is you'd need a fairly large development team, and that's expensive.

[ambershee]

If you think you can build an MMOG in two years, you're misguided.

[Alienated Phreak]

@darthviper107

Could you change that in the Settings?

@ambershee

I do recall in the thread that got deleted it said that making an MMORPG would take about +10 years. But I'm not really aiming for anything like World of Warcraft (but I don't know how big that is, I've never played it actually).

[ambershee]

To put things in perspective, All Points Bulletin was an MMOG using the Unreal Engine. It took six years, $100 million (although I seriously question where all that money kept going) and a team of around 150 people to realise.

It flopped less than two and a half months after release, and bankrupted Realtime Worlds.

[Alienated Phreak]

I'm not aiming for a huge game, just maybe 500 people, 1000 if this REALLY works.

PS: Where did all that money go? [shivers]

[Tom Havlik]

Then if you want only 64 players per server, and multiple servers, then absolutely. I have no idea how the networking in UDK works, so I don't know if this limit can be raised.

[darthviper107]

No--there's no setting to raise it past 64 players

I think I read something that people were saying they could change that will DLLbind or something--I'm not a programmer so I don't know, but I would guess you can't.

I keep wondering why people are so interested in MMO's

Yeah WoW makes a ton of money--but any other MMO's don't make nearly as much, the unlikeliness of being successful is staggeringly high.

[Alienated Phreak]

I'm not much of a programmer either, but MMO's, I think its more of a social thing. Gameplay, which is usually pretty big, along with loads of social interaction, but I don't really know.

[Solid Snake]

Thing is, it will cost you a lot of money because if you don't have the necessary skills or experience, you'll just need to either figure it all out (which costs time; which is money) or you need to hire people. The type of people you'd need to hire wouldn't be your random college kid so it'd cost.

To be frank, to do anything with as much content required for an MMO in Unreal, you know you're talking about millions of dollars here.

But it does depend largely on what you plan to do here. There are many kinds of interactions, and Unreal Engine can certainly do some types of massively multiplayer interactions.

Hint: Not everyone needs to be online at exactly same time, but it can feel like a large world as long as you interact with many different people.

[slowJusko]

To quote Stephen Fry — "The short answer to that is 'no'. The long answer is 'f*** no'."

[seenooh]

I don't understand why some beginner-level teams want to create an MMORPG and they haven't even shipped a single game. Worry about the RPG part first, and then try developing a very very very small MMO prototype. That will be the right time to look for financial support given that your concept is appealing.

[Mightylink]

To put things in perspective, All Points Bulletin was an MMOG using the Unreal Engine. It took six years, $100 million (although I seriously question where all that money kept going) and a team of around 150 people to realise.

It flopped less than two and a half months after release, and bankrupted Realtime Worlds.

I don't get that, lots of people where playing it, they loved it, why did it flop?