I don’t necessarily consider myself a “game developer”, but more like an “artist”. I started out 3D art with just animating, texturing, and modeling characters with the hopes of creating something bigger that would get people almost directly involved. Unity is by far the best option for any indie game developer out there to use, as the gaming industry is a new monster with plenty of opportunities!
My overall verdict on the gaming industry:
There are soooooo many bad games out there nowadays and sooo many bad ideas. Destiny, Battlefield Hardline, Evolve, Fiesta Online. These are just a few of many horrendous games in existence today. many of these games while multiplayer, only restrict you to a single play style in other words (cater to children more than adults). I’ll tell you the importance of this later but for now just know that if you create an MMORPG, and make it onto Playstation Network, its “game over” for companies like Bungie and Dice. Learn from games like Dragon’s Nest. Give your game the speed and precision of the newer Call of Duty games.
To the “Nay Sayer’s You can’t make an MMORPG”:
They are wrong. You CAN make one on your own, using “third party resources” of course. You will need a game engine, a real job, a leased server, and a huge community willing to push out specialty scripting tutorials. Just remember that you are a game developer not a coder. leave the coding to the people who like to do it, but remember that game specific function WILL require a level of scripting.
I visit these forums and see threads with people asking "how to make an MMORPG and then we get sad sacks posting garbage they’ve pulled out of their bums with supporting evidence based off their miserable lives. For example:
Dabeh
Making an MMO is difficult period…
MurDocINC
Indie MMORPG is very bad idea, even if you do manage to make it, it won’t sell. Unless you offer something completely new than the dozen of other mmorpgs. Plus lack of singletons in Unity makes this hard task even harder.
Just make a small RPG with great story, it’s much more manageable and profitable.
forgottenmindset
No.
This is impossible. Seriously.
If you had to ask, you have to read a book or two.
This is what you call PVP (Player Verse Player). This way a server isn’t needed since each players pc does work sending and receiving data to all other pc’s or game systems. It’s more labor intensive for the game, and if there are thousands of players, it would lots of lag and a bad frame rate. The slowest system could bring the whole thing to a crawl if I’m not mistaken.
PictonicStudio
It takes hundreds of thousands of hours to create an MMO. Please for your own sake, please do not create an MMO. Create something your team can handle, it is way more complex than you can possibly imagine.
Glader
Just logging into an account for an mmo serverside should be several thousand lines that include;
- a forward facing entry point to the collective serverside
- Proper authentication of remote endpoint for the client’s connection; you don’t want your client’s connection to somehow connect to something other than your server and pass such sensitive information to that party.
- n many multithreaded authentication servers/services that sit behind that forward facing point and have authentication requests routed to them. The value of n should be decided at runtime dynamically by the current load of logins being experienced. Using well made hashing algorithms for passwords will require relatively large and blocking computation so it’s likely more needed than it initially seems.
- Proper authentication for connecting authentication servers to the forward facing entry point. You don’t want parties to establish themselves as an authentication service when they are very much not so.
- A method of encryption for which only authentication servers/services should be capable of decrypting. Whether or not they share a key is up to you. You need to protect your clients to the full extent of data privacy laws. I’d recommend RSA. Neat implementation of it in .Net.
- A database.
- Some way to securely connect to the database from your authentication servers.
All this completely ignores the requirement of needing a decent foundation of code to even begin to implement those features. Meaning your highest level code shouldn’t be you using a binarywrite to write bytes to a socket. Recommendation is to use existing libraries. If you’re going to write an MMO. You’ll want absolutely the industry best, whatever the hell that is, otherwise you will be mired in unexpected issues with no fix from anyone other than yourself. Be prepare to pay for licensing and support from said company.
Once you do that all you have the first step down to your mmo down. Authenticating a connection request to your mmo. Now you’ll want to go back and protect yourself from your own code; you will have potential DDoS/DoS attacks at the application layer, trust me. You can address them as you implement the above features, that’d probably be best.
Edit: Or you could write your own custom libraries, as many major MMO projects have in the past, but that may set you back a couple months.
It’s taken me over 1 year to properly develop (still in progress) a (MOBA) multiplayer game that hosts 6 players (3 vs 3) in a single game session… and you want to develop a MMORPG with 100’s of players with a small indie team? I’m sorry to crush you dream but it’s not going to happen. I’m not trying to be mean or anything, just being realistic. Try creating a small Multiplayer Game first before venturing off into an MMORPG. Small Multiplayer game is possible and realistic for a small indie team using Unity Networking, Photon, and maybe some other Unity Assets that make Multiplayer possible and easier to achieve, but MMORPG, na…
and since you are very passionate about the subject, why not develop an Unity Asset that helps people create MMORPGs. Lets put all that Passion to good use… and show us all how easy it really is by developing an MMORPG Template. 
For people like this… yes MMORPGs are impossible for them…
So i may be abit off in stating that MMORPGs are impossible by indie teams, so your right… but it really depends on what kind of quality MMORPG we are talking about here, and as mentioned above i’m pretty sure most of these people asking how to create MMORPGs are not looking to re-create “Realm of Mad God” 2D, Pixel MMORPGs.
Glader
Someone who is capable of writing an MMORPG isn’t going to ask if they’re able to or if it’s possible in general. They may ask how difficult a certain aspect is but I don’t think they’d go on a forum and ask if they can write an MMO. So by others on the forum responding that it is impossible is justifiable as, if they asked, it’s very likely not possible for them to write it. Whether or not in the future, after learning something, they’re able to is irrelevant I think.
Such toxicity! Don’t come to this forum with an MMO question!
The “Yay Sayers” (People who want to make an MMORPG)
Make an MMORPG. Just realize that it won’t be nearly as powerful as the true thing simply because you’re one guy! Do you know what people used to do when they wanted to keep a Halo CE server up 24/7? They leased out a 3rd party server and hosted from there! You can do the same with a Unity multiplayer set up, just make sure you know how to use windows server 2012. (its pretty much windows but there are tutorials online). 3rd party servers can cost around 400$ a month on lower end and up to 1400$ a month on higher end with a large bandwidth, gpu, and 8-16 cores. They’re tough but not invincible.
I suggest that if you have a setup that you test it on a virtual private cloud server which is limited. They will give you free usage with a small amount of space and bandwidth. A well thought-out setup for multiplayer games is GTGD. This is a non authoritative setup, but allows you to use 3rd party resources as you wish. You might be at risk for being hacked by dumb kids, but hey that’s all a part of a game developers life. (More on that later). The last and most important thing to remember if you do plan to make a game after reading this: (Do NOT cater to children. Do NOT! Make games for young adults, as they will fund your game and children will follow adults in order to feel “special”. Children will beg parents to buy your game because the older crowd are playing it.
Why I decided not to make a game.
My favorite 3D artists are Pixar and Square Enix. They have hands down the BEST 3D models and textures around. Since 2009 me and other artists have been attempting to mimic their style and thanks to a few experienced teachers and (hackers) online, I’ve reached my desired effect! I wanted to make a pvp game people could enjoy with these amazing graphics, until it dawned on me just how unsecure games were. There are 3D models and textures for every popular game on the internet right now (I figured out what the rule 34 site is all about). One could use an authoritative game setup, but then game performance tends to suffer. I’m going to head back to my original idea of creating 3D random short clips based off events many can relate to, similar to “college humor” on youtube . Maybe I’ll include the gaming industry life when i get started.
To all of you more “dedicated” game developers out there, I wish you luck. Just expect to see your art pieces on rule 34 every now and then. Funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to where i am with my own characters without hackers. At least I can thank them for something!