Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

C H A P T E R 8
First, this is not a licensed title. There is no Major League Baseball Player’s Association
(MLBPA) license attached to this game. As you might figure, these licenses
are cost-prohibitive to say the very least. Several high-profile baseball titles by large
game publishers pay for these licenses for their franchise baseball titles. The resultant
effect is that UBO cannot use well-known players, teams, or stadiums in the title.
Many players take access to these factors as a given for single- or two-player games.
However, this is an MMOG title. Part of the fantasy in playing the game is to
role-play up your own characters into the big leagues. In the recent past, if you made
a solid game, titles could perform quite well without the “license factor.” Today, for
many reasons, this just doesn’t seem to be the case.
Building a 3-D game engine with sophisticated client/server architecture capable
of handling synchronized real-time baseball events proved, not surprisingly, to be a
Herculean undertaking. Resolving latency under different player connection scenarios
was the premiere issue. Of course, we also had to build in all of the game functionality
recognized as the rules and play of baseball.
Pure engine development costs were sizeable, and the heavy support and maintenance
costs put further pressure on budget details. Sony’s Everquest and Microsoft’s
Asheron’s Call have Sony and Microsoft behind them. This makes it extremely difficult
for the independent developer to compete in this area, and extremely risky for everyone
but the largest of publishers capable of taking multimillion dollar charges against
their bottom lines.
For many reasons, including cost, development of the game engine was done in
Korea. This created many production challenges, language barriers, and localization
factors for a game destined to be deployed in the United States. Note that
sending entire game titles overseas for development is a trend on the rise. This can
be compared with sending animation projects around the world in an effort to
save production costs.
Remote development is always a challenge, even with experienced teams, clear
goals, and adequate resource support. It can be done successfully, but regularly
involves significant challenges. However, when trying to innovate an entirely new title,
it becomes a decent burden. I would not recommend remote development on such
an innovative title, in a new content category, even for a team with solid MMOG
creation experience.
Since the developers of UBO had enough challenge on their hands just implementing
the basics for such an aggressive title, tools implementation tended to suffer.
Without great tools, or great and constant programming resources, the play of your
game will suffer. Plenty of necessary tool modifications were planned, but those
plans were left on the backburner as more pressing mainline engine challenges would
not relent.
In terms of resources, MMOG development is not for the faint of heart. After
all, the MMOG is the most complex and sophisticated kind of gaming experience
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Design Considerations for Massively Multiplayer Online Games