World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer roleplaying game (MMORPG) that reached twelve million subscribers at its peak. WoW’s lore, massive world, and cultural impact make it a significant milestone in gaming. The game offered the character building and specialization of a class based RPG, the exploration of an open-world game, and expanded on the social elements of online games that predated it like Star Wars: Galaxies and Runescape.
Building a game like WoW is a massive undertaking, requiring a large team and substantial budget. To make a MMORPG, create a game design document (GDD) outlining the core vision of the project. Next, build a team with the specialist knowledge required. MMORPGs require game designers, engineers, and programmers that know how to build and troubleshoot the specific systems of the genre.
Note: There’s a reason there are so few successful WoW-like games on the market. Not only are MMORPGs time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive to make, but they also must tap into a limited market of players who must be drawn away from competing experiences. Many of the items listed are much easier said than done. Take all of this as advice given to someone with an unlimited budget and a surplus of time and energy. Read on to learn about the steps required to make a game like World of Warcraft.
1. Create a detailed Game Design Document (GDD)
Create a detailed game design document (GDD) to define the type of experience the team is working on. A GDD helps to outline the vision across the large team necessary to create an MMORPG. A GDD acts as a central reference point, helping teams minimize the effect of different members interpreting ideas differently. An MMORPG is typically on a multi-year (or decade) development cycle, so a written document helps keep the project coherent as time passes. Without a solid GDD, ideas are patchwork and focus drifts away from the original, central vision.
The complexity of the MMORPG genre involves overlapping systems of combat, crafting, leveling, economy, class build, PvE, PvP, and more. An effective GDD must outline how these systems interact, define rules, conditionals, and contingencies, and help designers avoid unintentional exploits and balance issues. The scale, complexity, and cost of developing MMORPGs mean that a measured plan is better than blind improvisation. That said, many studios developing MMOs opt for a living GDD – where there’s room for expansion, addition, or amendment of the document as the project develops.
2. Assemble a large and skilled team
Assemble a large and skilled team to make sure the scale, content, stability, balance, and live support are all up to standard on release. An MMORPG isn’t a single product, but a persistent service and experience with specific requirements created by the format and its conventions. The player scale of a WoW-like game requires a complex backend and infrastructure. Recruit developers with knowledge of distributed server architecture, character databases, load balancing, anti-cheat measures, and live-patching capabilities that don’t wipe player data necessary for an MMORPG.
The volume of content required for a WoW-like game is enormous. Artists, animators, level designers, writers, character artists, sound designers, and more are required to populate the game. MMORPGs demand specialized roles focused on PvP, social systems, and encounter design. An MMORPG is a service provider. Users of the service expect stability. Team members with knowledge of live bug-fixing, server maintenance, customer support, and data analysis help to deliver this stability. Balance must be determined through systems design, testing, and QA. Players always find unique exploits and ways to game the system. MMORPG teams must be agile in their response, balancing play across all styles and classes.
3. Secure a substantial budget
Secure a substantial budget to ensure the project has the resources for a multi-year development cycle and ongoing live support. MMORPGs have long development times of between 4 and 7 years. Pair this with the large team necessary to create an always-on, regularly updated ecosystem, and development costs are inevitably high. A WoW-like MMO requires hundreds of developers, office costs, software licenses, management, HR, legal, IT, and production teams. Even a smaller team of between one hundred and one hundred and fifty members reaches tens of millions of dollars annually with these costs.
MMORPGs require large, specialized teams for network and backend engineering, server architecture, tools engineering, systems balance, and QA at a much larger scale than single player games. This scale creates the need for large teams of writers, artists, animators, level designers, and environmental artists. Every item, spell, creature, weapon, armor piece, or other in-game object must be created and refined from scratch. Custom tools for anti-cheat systems, deployment pipelines, and analytics and telemetry systems must be built for an MMORPG. Server hosting, customer support, and community management place additional financial strain. Marketing is also a significant budgetary requirement in the crowded MMO market.
4. Select a powerful game engine
Select a powerful game engine to ensure scalability, stability, performance, custom backend integration, and ease of iteration for the development team. Highly polished graphics and fancy editing tools are not as important as scalability and stability. A well-tested, moddable engine with a custom MMO-focused backend is the best option for most studios. Studios with massive resources may choose to build a completely custom engine, but doing so adds time, costs, and complexity to the project. Games like WoW and EVE Online opted to build custom game engines that were designed from day one with MMO gameplay and systems in mind. This gives developers tight control over networking, memory, and performance.
Unreal or Unity remain effective options for handling the rendering, animation, and physics of an MMO. Using these engines requires MMO developers to replace or heavily modify networking, server authority, scalability, and persistence to facilitate MMO systems and gameplay. Unreal’s built-in networking doesn’t facilitate MMO scale natively. Unity runs into trouble with larger MMO player teams and rendering expansive, open environments. These shortcomings must be overcome with custom solutions.
5. Integrate backend technology for servers, networking, and databases
Integrate backend technology for servers to run the world, networking to facilitate player communication, and databases to store the required information. Game servers host the game’s logic dictating movement, combat, physics, zones, and NPC behavior. The networking layer represents the way players interact with the game server and each other. The database serves as permanent, updatable storage of accounts, characters, items, friends, inventory, and more for each player.
The server is always right in multiplayer experiences. The client only asks and interprets the data it’s given by the server. This allows the server to spawn enemies, handle quests, prevent player cheating, and determine the results of combat. The network layer acts like the phone line, sending messages between the player and server. It sends data about location, abilities used, items consumed, chat messages, and changes to player status. The database for an MMORPG must store and update information about characters, levels, currencies, items, quests, and factions. Make sure your database system works for a small group of players before attempting to scale it.
6. Build a large and immersive open world
Build a large and immersive open world so that the players feel compelled to explore, level, craft, socialize, and interact with the game’s systems. The world isn’t just the inconsequential setting of the gameplay like in action games. For MMORPGs, the world is the core product. Players expect to live in that fiction, adventuring, socializing, leveling, crafting, and building homes. The size and immersive qualities directly support the kind of long-tail commitment that MMORPGs require for player characters to progress. A large, detailed, and interesting open world fosters emotional attachment and longevity.
Players spend thousands of hours in WoW-like games. The zones, locations, and landmarks of MMOs are explored and revisited across multiple expansions, ideally becoming socially meaningful to players. Large, open worlds work for MMORPGs for 2 reasons. Firstly, these types of games are typically set in epic fantasy or sci-fi worlds that are a natural fit for epic, open-ended adventuring. Secondly, developers want to avoid players colliding with each other in cramped locations and the world feeling more like a lobby than a real place. Scale is necessary to maintain the feeling of immersion in an epic game world.
7. Create characters, NPCs, creatures, and enemies
Create characters, NPCs, creatures, and enemies that embody the conflicts at the heart of the game to foster player interest. Stories in games like World of Warcraft depend on protagonists, antagonists, and a cast of supporting characters to push the tone, theme, and narrative. Fantastical games often depend on the same kind of archetypal character design and conflict writing that comic books, cartoons, and action movies do. There’s nothing wrong with depending on tropes, exaggerated features, and tried-and-test conventions of fantasy and/or sci-fi fiction. MMOs are fun escapism with friends.
Players come to an MMO to get immersed in a world populated by entertaining characters. Create characters that reflect and reinforce the central struggle of the game world and its factions. Memorable playable and non-playable characters show us who they are, where they come from, and why they’re involved through interaction. Think of how we understand a witcher’s place in Andrzej Sapkowski’s world through the way NPCs treat Geralt, for example. Creatures, too, must transmit their affiliations and enmities through visual design and naming convention. A spike-collared, demon-horned behemoth called Gorlak Von Gorlak is unlikely to be a paragon of virtue.
8. Develop core gameplay loops and progression systems
Develop core gameplay loops and progression systems to build an experience that players want to engage with over the long term. MMOs need to offer players repeatable, satisfying actions that scale to thousands of hours without encountering balance collapse. Starting simple, validating viable choices early, and then intentionally layering complexity are the best ways to make sure the gameplay loops and progression systems work. At the heart of each class is a gameplay archetype that represents a specific player fantasy. Fulfilling this fantasy is the role of the gameplay and systems designers.
Establishing player fantasies comes down to who, what, and why. Who is the player character, what do they do over and over, and why is it rewarding to repeat and progress? When I work on gameplay and systems, I visualize the individual mechanics as notes and the overall gameplay experience as the song. Each mechanic must be in harmony with those it connects with to deliver a cohesive experience. WoW’s combat, progression, exploration, social interaction, resource management, and exploration systems overlap and depend on each other. The goal is to allow the player to build a character that navigates the game’s challenges in a way that feels personal and curated. Then, build challenges that encourage players to depend on each others’ skill sets to defeat.
9. Implement social and multiplayer systems
Implementing social and multiplayer systems allows players to meaningfully interact, communicate, cooperate, and build networks of friends and guildmates. The order in which to implement these systems is typically to build multiplayer functionality, add communications systems, create reasons to play together (quests, raids, dungeons, events), and then add tools and systems for players to remember one another. Start with a server-authoritative world that syncs player positioning and action and facilitates a large, persistent character database. Then build visibility systems, such as player characters appearing and disappearing at a set distance, name tags over heads, animations, and emotes.
Chat is the most fundamental social function in an MMO. Start with text-only chat, offering only the essential channels of say, party, guild, and zone. Aim to implement functions like server routes to channel members, block, mute, and a system for filtering and searching messages. Small group play is the next focus. Parties are a core part of the RPG fantasy, so facilitating small groups in co-op is a must in an MMO. Invite/accept systems, shared loot and XP systems, party chat, and party UI markers are most crucial elements to focus on. With these systems in place, introduce challenges that are easier to overcome in groups. Once players start cooperating, they need a system to add effective party members to a friend list. Friends create guilds and guilds create long term engagement.
10. Run alpha and beta testing phases
Run alpha and beta testing phases to test the stability, mechanics, balance, and performance under load. Closed alpha testing works as an internal or small-scale external test. Fifty to two hundred and fifty players are enough to test systems, balance, and stability on a small scale. This test identifies major bugs and helps to refine systems before opening the game up to a wider audience. Focus on combat, questing, world design, player progression, and basic social features. These elements are the backbone of an MMORPG and must be established correctly early in development.
The beta testing phase focuses on how the game’s systems operate under the pressure of a larger group of players (often between one and five thousand, depending on scope). Full zones, dungeons, raids, and PvP are often ready to go during closed beta, allowing the developers to identify issues and polish these features. Open beta tests range from ten to fifty thousand players to stress test the game under realistic loads. Open beta focuses on stability during massive player concurrency and that sharding and server regions function as intended.
