Ok here is the question that Im sure has been asked by a hundred 14 year olds and everybody is fed up of hearing.
Would it be possible to make an mmorpg using unity?
I do have a fair amount of experience with programming and making games but Im new to unity and would like to know its limitations in this area before I start building stuff.
Thanks
Can you make an mmorpg in Unity? Yes.
Can YOU make an mmorpg in Unity? No.
That is the answer that is 99.9% probable!
Not exactly the questions is more like “Can I make an MMORPG in Unity” then the probable answer would be .0000001 out of 10000.
Cheers
The Non Super-Hero
Khelton
Sure you can, I make mmos in unity every day. I get so much money one of my bank accounts got blocked because they thought I was scamming someone.
Drop one of the Ms. (That is, make a MORPG instead.)
–Eric
Best advice.
I wonder how many times we’ve seen that statement. 
Cheers
The Non-Super Hero
Khelton
If you’re new to game making, etc, you might be better off using a tool such as Realm Crafter which is specifically for creating MMORPGs.
Hey Grindalf, Been a while… (unless I’m remembering the wrong person from TKZ)
Either way, possible, yes, probable no. kind of like those that asked the same thing about the RPG toolkit. Thing is, you’d have to write your own networking system to support that many people, and it’s not easy to do that, hence, not likely.
We are working on an RPG Package and an Networking Package, with alot of tweaks you could have an MMORPG.
Cheers
The Non-Super Hero
Khelton
Wait guyz! Can I make a uber awesome zombie FPS MMORPG? I has like no program experience and is 13, but I love World of Warcraft! Tell me how to do it!
this pretty much sums up all the 14 year olds on here…
Now why is this? is it because you assume I have no skill with making games or is it because its ridiculesly hard to make one.
@drewradley Im not new to game making but I am quite new to unity. I looked at Realm Crafter a good few years ago now but didnt like the look of it.
@Caliber Mengsk
Hey dude hows it going
One, If you have zero skill in Unity that will make your life a hell of a lot more difficult, even if you do have experience in other languages. You also better have an expert understanding of networking and optimization in order to get your game to run smoothly.
Two, an MMORPG is not a one man job by any means. Once you start digging down into the nitty-gritty details of making databases that are 1000’s of lines of repetitious code just for items, equipment, stats, etc, you will realize this.
Three, balancing and testing an MMORPG with a no budget or low budget team is going to be damn near impossible for you to get to a polished level.
Four, The sheer amount of assets you need to make for an MMO will cost you thousands and thousands of dollars or man hours.
Five, there are very, VERY few qualified people in the Unity forums who will even consider helping you make an MMO. The vast majority of collaborators will be 14 year olds who will quit after a few weeks when they realize how tedious coding an MMORPG is or modelling 100 different kinds of rocks/plants/trees.
Like another guy said, make an MORPG. A nice little 4 player coop open RPG is much more manageable as you can keep it on a smaller scale. You will give up on an MMORPG, I can guarantee it. Especially if it’s your first project.
this is my biggest concern, as I am quite skint.
I don’t really like working with other people much anyway
There would be no point in getting help from them anyway
I have no interest in making a 4 player RPG so I would end up giving up on the project pretty quickly.
Nice. I like you too Darknuke.
and no its not my first project and not my first attempt at an mmorpg. I played around with one in blitz3D for a while.
I had working
players could log on
players could see each other
players could move around
chat box worked
Didn’t work so well when there was allot of players on but that was the shortcomings of blitz3D.
It’s nothing against you. It’s just the stats of game development. You kind of proved me right by saying you’ve tried this before and quit. Go look in the Unity forums and try to find a person or company who’s successfully made an MMORPG. I’m not sure you’d find any.
MMORPGs are extremely enticing to create on paper. They are fun projects that you can really go all out on creatively. They are just not feasible for one person to create. If you continue on with your MMORPG, best of luck, I hope you finish. Just know that your road will be treacherous and you will get little to no collaboration from the people here. I haven’t been a Unity user long, but I can already tell how tired the community is of people saying they want to make an MMO.
It probably wasn’t the short commings of blitz3D, it was the shortcomings of your architecture. Networking in an MMO is an entirely different ballgame than networking a game w/ 32 or 64 players in it. You have to be a lot more careful what you send to who, and how you keep your clients sync’d. You have to manage bandwidth, add in anti-cheat features, make a lot more stuff authoritative to the server. You have to start worrying about load balancing, sharding and clustering your database, disk I/O limitations on your database servers, etc.
The limit isn’t going to be Unity. It’s going to be you. If you don’t want to work with anyone then you’re going to have to do everything yourself. If you want hundreds or thousands of players on at a time (the first M is for Massively) then you need enough content to keep them interested. That requires a lot of assets. High performance networking and backend server work isn’t easy or quick, so you’ll need to do that yourself, or buy systems that do it for you. But since you said you are broke, buying them isn’t an option, is it?
And Unity won’t do it all. It’ll work fine as a client, but you need the supporting systems.
What everyone is trying to tell you is that an MMO isn’t feasible for a single person to do. It requires a huge amount of knowledge across a wide variety of domains, immense quantities of assets, and a metric f*% ton of man hours.
While it is true it’d be a heavy undertaking, speaking from experience, most people would tell you don’t try to make any type of video game. It’s for the professionals to do, but that’s not really what Unity is about. It’d be a pain in the patootie but it is possible. As stated before, you’d have to make your own network system.
I’d also like to point out to those neigh sayers, even professional MMO’s tend to only allow just over 1000 users on one server. It’d be a stressful massive project, but I see no reason as to why one person couldn’t do it with the effort.
Now, all of that said, I wouldn’t suggest doing it, at least not without a mmo engine already. I haven’t messed with it, but you may want to look at ideasys. http://www.ideasys.com/ They have an MMO engine that’s free upfront and takes 30% royalty, but they host the servers for you, and give you the engine, which isn’t a bad deal at all. I don’t know anything else about it though, since I haven’t used it at all, but it’s worth looking into.
Good luck with whatever you decide.
@ niosop
The problem I came across with blitz3D was that it uses DirectX7 so any characters that have bones are not handled by the graphics card but are rather computed by the cpu, this puts allot of strain on it when there are more than 8 characters with bones(its actually the amount of bones, not characters) I figured that even with allot of trickery and awesomeness I would struggle to double everybody else’s figure. even if I did double it 16 characters on screen is not great. So rather than spend a year or 2 working on something that would not work correctly at the end of it I quit.
I had only been working on it for a week anyway 
@Caliber mengsk
that looks pretty cool, thanks for the link.
@everybody
I can see what everybody is saying.
Here is the question that maybe I should have started with, has anybody ever successfully made a finished mmorpg using unity.
and a question that is probably more relevant, how many people have tried, and I don’t mean 14 year old noobs, but real experienced unity users?
14 year old noobs always quit their first, second and probably third project so they dont count but if experienced users have tried and failed I can see the merit to your comments.
You could look at it this way Grindalf.
Take a gander around the pro/elite art and coding forums on the net. The places the top of the line talent will frequent. Many of those are usually unemployed or have tons of time on their hands, the reasons for that I don’t feel the need to get into as it’s all well documented and known and not the point of this post.
The point of this post is however… Out of ALL those pro’s, people who can do practically anything, with very little effort, and could run rings around most other talent… How many are actually making MMO’s? I’d wager less than one. It’s not because they can’t do it, or don’t want to (I think most people doing this kind of thing has our MMO idea’s we’d like to make). It’s because they know full well how difficult, expensive and time consuming such a task is.
Now, people like you think you can make supermegaawesomemmo. When people like that wont even touch it. Can you see my point? They have the means, the talent, the experience and the contacts. They’ve a list of REAL commercial games to their name, not the appstore crap but real games people have heard of, they’ve the best training, they sell training DVD’s, they do talks at the big shows and are well known names in the industry, and even they wont do it. You have, compared to them, absolutely nothing.
So it’s nothing personal, nobody here CARES if you make it or not. But we do feel it’s important to at least warn you that you probably will fail, and that’s a sucky feeling when you do. Putting so much work and money into something, only to watch it fall apart around you. It’s not nice and not deserved.
There’s just so much involved and required to make a decent MMO. It’s a hugely daunting task. Heck I once saw a musician, with no knowledge of the video game industry or what goes on behind the scenes, actually telling someone how difficult such a thing would be to create. If a musician who’s life revolves around Bob Dylan knows this, then yeah. 
I’m sure there will be links to “well this guy made this MMO, and this indie team did this so it is possible”. But here’s the thing, yes with tons of time and work, it can be done (talking many years of development). But what’s the point of a practically empty and unknown MMO? It’s just single player with less to do. You want it to be popular, but with that comes expensive hardware in data centers to run it, expensive security, backups, advertising, protection, bug fixing, updates, hiring more staff, dealing with payments, offices, accounts, dealing with the IRS, customer support and so on and so on and so on and so on. None of it actually fun or really part of the game itself.
And I’ll stop here before I continue into the many pitfalls of actual MMO gameplay. Needless to say, there’s more work involved than you realize.
Stick with something far simpler (compared to an MMO), like a single player RPG. Or a small co-op RPG, Those can be fun, and far less hassle to make. Heck I’d consider a complex huge sprawling co-op MORPG to be easy compared to a successful MMO that doesn’t resemble some early Everquest beta.